"The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their..."
“The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.”
- Chuck Klosterman
« December 6, 2009 - December 12, 2009 | Main | December 20, 2009 - December 26, 2009 »
December 19, 2009
In the Beginning was the Command Line
In the Beginning was the Command Line: a short book by Neal Stephenson that's available for download. it considers the evolution of operating systems over the years and is a great read for anyone who wants to know why computers are so damn hard to use and why that's a good thing. or something. it's free. read it. via randomwalks.com Happy tenth anniversary, randomWalks!
First snow on the High Line, December 19.
First snow on the High Line, December 19.
My Life as a Religious Parable
Rick Brown, a preacher for ChristBridge Fellowship in Tomball, Texas, used me as the subject of a sermon printed in the local newspaper this week:
When Pope John Paul died Rogers Cadenhead quickly registered www.BenedictXVI.com thinking this might be the name chosen by the new pope. When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope he did choose the name Pope Benedict XVI, causing many to question what the Vatican would do to get the rights to that domain name.
Cadenhead didn't ask the Vatican for money. Instead, in a humorous manner on his blog he suggested a few things he would trade for:
1. Three days, two nights at the Vatican hotel.
2. One of those hats (referring to the bishop's hat).
3. Complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987.
Wonder what Rogers did the third week of March in 1987? Me too. Most of us have at least a week we'd like total forgiveness for.
Since my 15 minutes of fame as the popesquatter in 2005, I've become a religious parable. A couple times a year I'm mentioned in sermons. I've turned up in churches, a syndicated radio broadcast and the book Facing Your Giants: A David and Goliath Story for Everyday People. In English, German and Spanish.
A few years ago, my sister-in-law Trish and her family were looking for a new church to join in Purdue, Indiana, so they went to a house of worship they'd never been to before. As they listened to the sermon, the pastor mentioned my name.
Like the Tomball preacher, the pastor told the story of benedictxvi.com and my request for absolution, inviting the congregation to ponder what I did that week which required papal indulgence.
Afterwards, Trish met the pastor and she sheepishly told him exactly what I'd done:
Her younger sister.
Beautiful Information Graphics Prints
Quick Post
Happy Hannukah to me? [via H&FJ]
HP webcams are racist
“As soon as my blackness enters the frame…” Listen, HP, this is the 21st century. Obama is in the White House. This needs to be fixed STAT.
December 18, 2009
Set of 5 Postcards
Favianna Rodriguez Set of 5 Art Postcards $7 This is a set of postcards that contains some of my favorite pieces. Each set contains all five of these designs. From top to bottom, names of pieces are: - Make Out Not War - Rise Up - How Does the End of Me Become the Start of You - Paragan - Untitled (a self portrait of myself as a painter, filmmaker, artist, and organizer) All the backs of the postcards are white divided by a thin black line. 5 Full Color Postcards (full color front / bw back) Offset Each postcard measures 4 x 6 inches unsigned/unnumbered
Joy.
Well, I am certainly feeling very chipper today. I surely love the opportunity to blither at people about my research, indeed I do. Blither blither blee! It combines the things I love best, yammering and myself.
So cheerful am I that I am going to post a picture of myself in which you can see both my 30-week-pregnant torso and my shining face.
Am I not radiantly replete with beatific enthusiasm? Does not my entire person proclaim, "I am an avatar of the miracle of life"? Is it any wonder that no one dares to touch my bump?
(I really am feeling cheerful, though, I promise.)
Gladwell v. Simmons III
New idea for a biweekly sports magazine: Simmons & Gladwell. Two writers, off the cuff, no polish...the whole magazine is one big long rambling smartypants messy conversation. Or maybe it's an email list where subscribers are CC'd on their emails in real-time. Anyway, in the meantime here's the third conversation between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell (mostly) about sports. Here's Simmons on why the NBA is so good right now:
When you consider the influx of foreigners, the extended shelf lives of quality careers, the medicine/health strides, the positive impact of the rookie salary scale, the successful drug policy and the equally successful one-year waiting period for high schoolers, for the first time since the early '90s, you can make a case that the NBA finally has enough talent to stock every one of its teams. Recently, I watched my Celtics almost lose to Memphis and found myself thinking, "Wait a second ... is Memphis secretly good, or did my wife spike my drink?" And they're 10-14. Really, there are only two hopeless teams right now: Minnesota and New Jersey. Every other team has enough talent to beat any other team on any given night.
And Christ, Gladwell has never seen Boogie Nights? Maybe he's a hack after all.
Tags: Bill Simmons Malcolm Gladwell sports
"Mr. Jacobs? This is Gary from American Express. I'm calling about potentially fraudulent activity on your Credit Card ending in 6712. It appears someone has purchased 200 tickets for a Friday night screening of 2012." via hello.typepad.com It's reblog yourself day here on hello, typepad. Last month I made a joke about buying 200 tickets to 2012 with my American Express card. Today I bought 25 tickets to Avatar with my American Express card, for real. No call from Gary yet.
“It’s depressing when the clothes don’t fit and you are
“It’s depressing when the clothes don’t fit and you are always the odd one out I was on a shoot last week and the stylist took out this tight corset dress and said, ‘Here, put it on,’ and I was like, ‘Who are you kidding?’ There was no way, so that was very rude of her. It’s like, come on, she’s a woman; whether you’re buying jeans at the mall, or wearing couture, you know what it’s like for clothes not to fit. It’s not an easy kind of rejections, because it’s very personal. It’s you, you’re body. You take it to heart.” --Lara Stone to Vogue
Lara Stone - Clothing - Vogue - Corset - Fashion
Matt Haughey defends the use of Twitter during personal tragedy
I wonder how much of the criticism stems from perceptions of Twitter as frivolous
James Cameron Sold The Terminator Movie Rights For $1 [Terminator]
Shared by Jess
"I sort of like the idea that James Cameron sits around fantasizing about twittering backwards in time."
Joss Whedon may have thought he was low-balling when he offered to pay $10,000 for the Terminator movie rights. But it turns out that's an example of runaway inflation: James Cameron originally sold them for $1.
As Cameron does press for Avatar, he's been asked again and again what he thought of Terminator Salvation, which he apparently watched on his hotel-room TV late at night, over three consecutive nights. The first few times, Cameron was pretty nice, telling MTV back on Dec. 9:
It's better than I thought it was going to be... It's actually quite reverential to the mythos of the 'Terminator' world," he said. "I think McG and the writers tried hard to keep reacquainting you with some of those ideas in the story that they were weaving. So actually I thought it was pretty cool. I did feel that it sort of lacked Je ne sais quoi. Although I love Sam [Worthington] in it.
But today, talking to the Toronto Sun, he was a bit more damning:
I've moved on creatively from The Terminator, so I'm not really interested in that imagery and even those ideas anymore - and I'm not sure the world is that interested either. It's run its course, I feel... [Arnold Schwarzenegger's] persona was part of The Terminator and when you uncouple those, you get Terminator Salvation, which is actually a fine film from a pure filmmaking standpoint - it just doesn't gel up into anything mind-blowing... I wish I hadn't sold the rights for one dollar.
Apparently Cameron sold the movie rights for a dollar in exchange for the right to direct the first movie. He adds:
If I had a little time machine and I could only send back something the length of a tweet, it'd be - ‘Don't sell.'
I sort of like the idea that James Cameron sits around fantasizing about twittering backwards in time.
Python PostgreSQL Driver Authors Hate You
Dan McKinley on the abysmal database driver situation in Python. Why aren't these particular batteries included with Python? "DBAPI2 is all well and good. To a point. But if you have the usual website scaling problem, namely the one where you have a master database that worked fine when you were tiny and–dear god–not so well right now, the idea of interchangeable database libraries is basically a crock. Before I am inundated with hate mail let me dial back my rhetoric a little bit. The existence of an API that works with altogether different databases is a wonderful thing and without it, things like Django or SQLAlchemy would not be possible. So rest assured I am not a complete maniac. I am not even really here to talk about dbapi2. I am just saying that 1) no two libraries are the same, 2) given sufficient scale this will matter to you, 3) the devil is in the details, and 4) the devil likes screwing things with white hot pokers."
Raisins?!?
From The Sneeze.Last Christmas I wanted to see how excited my 3-year-old would be to receive a 14-cent box of raisins...The tradition continued this year to see how a now 4-year-old would react to receiving a 14-cent box of raisins.
Flicked Off, with Mary HK Choi: ‘Avatar’
This movie makes me emo. Thinking about it makes my nose do that chloriney thing you get right before you start crying. I am SO GAY for this movie that I can’t stand it. And you know what? Having finally seen it, I don’t even care what the haters have to say. I am a happy meniscus that your spite sauce slides off of. I’m lifted.
I waited three hours in July San Diego sun to watch 27 minutes of this movie. I had to cross the street from the convention center to where the line serpentined to the water by the Hilton to catch the Cameron panel at Comic Con. I sat ON GRASS next to a very nice but distinctly aromatic 19-year-old quasi Juggalo who worked in human resources at a tech firm and wanted to talk the whole time to get my ass into Hall H and my eyeballs behind some 3D specs and I’ll tell you what, it was worth it.
I have zero idea why they bothered with a trailer. It confounded me that they then rolled out the extended trailer, almost as if they’d anxiously detected the ire with which the first trailer was received. That fools had the gall to even BEGIN to form noisy opinions about the movie based on some analog shitstain smearing across their janky computer screens made me want to smash and kill. I was even mad at the movie for being a pussy as to appear to question its own awesome.
I can’t even tell you how insane I feel trying to rock up a buncha words to ya’ll in some sufficiently synergistic configuration that’ll convey what makes this movie so rad. I feel ridiculously ill-equipped. It’s a joke. The words don’t have one million motion-capture dots on its face with a squillion teeny cameras trained on just their eyeball areas with the whole thing plunged into a gigantic motion-capture volume set. The words won’t peel their skins off and spazz for you in waves and particles and alchemy and phosphoresent flowermagic and hypercolored superdinosaurs and I feel shameface about it because they’d need to ferry a petabyte of information to properly get my point across. I feel like I’m trying to tell you in mashed potato.
“Avatar” is staggering. It’s seismic. Evolutionarily speaking it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap. Punctuating the balls outta equilibrium. Think about it: You can’t bit torrent this shit. And even if some very industrious pillager cops the glasses and figures out how to do it in the way it was intended to be seen, that person is a hope rapist that should be shot in the face for dream treason because James Cameron and a gang of wizards made this beautiful, beautiful thing for us—in 2009 of all years. We should ALL hold hands about it.
Yes, the Na’vi look like giant Matthew Lillards (and circa “Hackers” too, since there is long hair involved). Sure, the dialog has the subtlety of dubbed German porn and granted, the narrative is basically a cave drawing of a mother and child since it better make sense in Kerala as well as Kansas but here’s why THIS DIRECTOR, your man who sat there in that pulsing convention hall at SDCC with his grown-out silvered skaterdude hair, was the one to make this movie: James Cameron is a fanboy.A fanboy’s heart is filled with love, enthusiasm, and insecurity. Duly, he flexes the SHIT out of the technology. Cameron waited 15 years to get it right and grabs you by the neck and takes you on an EPIC tour. He starts with the rinkydink usual chicanery—some “Final Destination” shit—making things fly towards you. He moves us through lucite. He shows us holographic computer interfaces where you can just grab something from your screen with your hand to slide-copy it onto a tablet. Whatevs, “Minority Report” OS 2.0 zzzzzzzzzzzz.
But then he shows us Pandora. This planet that he made for us. And it overshadows every suspension bridge, pyramid, and skyscraper all at the same time because I swear to God, THIS is what makes me want to have a kid. And I love bridges. I want to get to be the one who adds this to their source material. I want them to draw from it when figuring out what to love about life. And I want that love to determine their life’s work. THIS IS MOVIES KICKING VIDEO GAMES’ ASS.As a shit-ton critics have already described there is incandescent flora and a Pantone seizure of fauna. They’re pretty great. You should check them out. It’s an insanely tactile experience that makes me wish they could score it not just with music but a sequence of smells. There are sparkling waterfalls and because Cameron knew we’d love to, he lets us careen through, past, and underneath them on mythic FLYING creatures in this reality where everyone gets their own special one and there are these mountains that have been magically uprooted (though it’s a terrestrial and myopic failing to consider that they’d ever have to be grounded) that are breathtaking to almost crash into when you get to be the hula hoop to the supine floating magician’s assistant and poke around to see if there’s fishing wire.
The locals are awesome. They’re tall and have these spooky braids that have tentacles that curl out and do synaptic axon/dendrite neurotransmitty stuff but like in alien. They do it to animals and plants except they don’t do it to each other which is weird because I’d bet it would feel like sexdrugs. We don’t get to see them actually mate which sucks and we don’t get to see a pregnant one which also sucks because that would’ve been neat. But we do get to see some babies. They’re cute.
They have clear tears but it’s hard to tell and I don’t know what color their blood is. They have a language that the human dorks will adopt. Their eyes emote like ours. It would be hard to break up with one because you can totally tell what they’re feeling. You might have to text message it to them. They have this tree made of souls and light and God and it’s a big deal. There is a battle of dinosaurs vs. robots. I have nothing more to add to that sentence because you’re dead inside if you can’t get what’s cool about that.
Here’s the nut. You know the best part of the superhero narrative? The part where the hero discovers the power and learns to use it and you get to be along for the ride and it’s the funnest thing ever like when Spider-Man first goes flinging himself allover Queens? Well, that’s Queens. This is that, times a billion. It’s on another fucking planet, and the whole thing goes on for almost 3 hours and short circuits your brain because your mind’s eye has NO IDEA what’s happening because this is the glamour of its life. If there was a button that I could push that would agog my brain to the level that I felt first seeing “Avatar” in its entirety and another one for food pellets, I would die of starvation.
Lines that defined the decade
Jenni, I don't want to step on your toes here, but I'm hoping that Scott Lamb's excellent One-Liners of the Decade -- from "Wassap!" to "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" to "I drink your milkshake" -- ends up on the Noughtie List.
Tags: best of lists Scott Lamb The 2000s
Vice David Simon Interview
This VOLUMINOUS interview with “Wire” creator David Simon contains several spoilers, so if, like some people we know, you’re still working your way through the show, you might want to save it for later. The rest of you are all clear.
Silva for Bradley
The Cubs have spent most of the winter trying to extract some value from Milton Bradley. Today, they gave up on that pursuit, and traded him for Carlos Silva instead.
This isn’t to say that Silva is definitely going to be terrible. Moving to the National League can do wonders for a pitcher, especially one who pounds the strike zone with mediocre stuff. Silva is not that different from Jeff Weaver, who has found success with the Dodgers the last few years. There are scenarios in which Silva could help the Cubs, especially if they use him as a middle reliever and don’t let him face LH hitters very often.
But, he is not unique. There are a lot of reclamation projects who could offer limited upside if they prove healthy, and most of them will sign minor league contracts this winter. If the Mariners had cut Silva outright, he would not gotten more than the league minimum. He is a replacement level pitcher, even though there are scenarios where he could pitch better than that.
The motivation for this deal from the Cubs perspective was cash, plain and simple. The Mariners are sending $9 million to the Cubs along with Silva, which covers the difference in salary and an extra $6 million, which will almost certainly be split into $3 million per year over the life of Silva’s contract. So, for 2010 and 2011, the Cubs save a little bit of money versus just having to eat his contract and release him.
Unfortunately for Chicago, this was probably the best they could do. They can allocate that $3 million to Marlon Byrd to replace Bradley in the outfield and hope that Silva finds the NL to his liking. But, there’s no question, this brings a conclusion to the Bradley signing that makes it a total and utter disaster.
From the Mariners perspective – what else is there to say? Jack Zduriencik is a genius. If Seattle isn’t the favorite in the AL West yet, they’re really close, and they aren’t done. The Angels, Rangers, and A’s should be scared stiff.
A User's Guide to New York City pt. 2: Street Vendor Guide
[Image: Vendor Power! by Candy Chang].
This is the second of two posts about design projects by Candy Chang; here's the first. This one features a detailed poster and booklet about street vendor's rights in New York City.
In Chang's own words, "The guide also serves as an educational/advocacy tool and includes a poster full of fun facts on the history and challenges of NYC street vending, personal vendor stories, and policy reform recommendations."[Images: Two views of Vendor Power! by Candy Chang].
Called Vendor Power! A Guide to Street Vending in New York City, the impressively multi-lingual poster is intended to help street vendors know their legal and commercial rights in the city:As part of Making Policy Public, Candy collaborated with The Street Vendor Project and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) to research, compile, and design this guide to street vending in New York City. Many vendors are being fined $1000 for little things like parking their cart too far away from the curb, not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license, and other rules buried in the City's regulation book full of intimidating jargon that would make even the most patient person cry. This guide helps clarify the rules through diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish, so NYC’s diverse vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living.
Again, I just think this is great; using design skills to assemble legible, economically accessible, and legally useful guides to the urban environment is so much more exciting to me than making new boutique objects for the modern home.
Plus, this poster and its accompanying guidebook fall somewhere between grass-roots vendor-empowerment and straight-ahead small business advocacy; the fact that this applies specifically to mobile street businesses gives it an allure of the poetic, but it would be just as socially important if it outlined the legal dos and don'ts for family shops in the San Fernando Valley.[Image: From Vendor Power!].
In fact, realizing that these sorts of posters could be made—similar to Chang's flashcard deck, as mentioned in the previous post—for other legal situations is like downing a quadruple espresso; how awesome would it be to design posters like this for urban agriculture, roof gardens, community parks, and more? Even suburban lemonade stands, for that matter.[Images: Vendors reading Vendor Power!].
In any case, taken together, Chang's Vendor Power! and Tenant Flash Cards projects offer two fantastic examples of how graphic design can be put to use in clarifying everyday, seemingly uninteresting legal situations—and I would love to see similar such endeavors occur elsewhere. The rights of the homeless in Los Angeles! Flashcards for international border crossers; your legal rights in quarantine; how to use the city in an electrical blackout. Or, for that matter, your rural hunting rights. Or the Geneva Convention! The rights of walkers in the British countryside. The possibilities are bewilderingly wide-ranging.
The New York Times covered the project back in April, meanwhile, if you want to read their take.
Two views of the future of magazines - but should they be called magazines?
Two interesting views of tablet driven "magazines" of the future but are they really magazines? Other than being tablet driven is this new art? Meanwhile while I wait for a tablet that will enable me to read while in a car without getting ill as shown in the second video, back in the web and mobile based world there are obviously a huge number of interesting experiments in delivering "magazine" like hmm the kindle, panelfly, the NYT T magazine, and Orion's electronic edition, Make mag digital edition, Jonah Harris's WhaleHunt as an example of deep story telling, the Mcsweeney's iphone app It is really a silly exercise to even begin making a list as it gives credence to the idea that the idea of a future magazine doesn't exist now.
via MJ
The Twitter API is Finished. Now What?
Twitter's API has spawned over 50,000 applications that connect to it, taking the promise of fertile APIs we first saw with Flickr half a decade ago and bringing it to new heights. Now, the first meaningful efforts to support Twitter's API on other services mark the maturation of the API as a de facto industry standard and herald the end of its period of rapid fundamental iteration.
From here, we're going to see a flourishing of support for the Twitter API across the web, meaning that the Twitter API is finished. Not kaput, complete. If two companies with a significant number of users that share no investors or board members both support a common API, we can say that the API has reached Version 1.0 and is safe to base your work on. So now what?
How We Got Here
Like a lot of folks, I've been thinking out loud and pondering the future of Twitter and open web APIs pretty much all year. Some key ideas have bubbled up:
[A]ny site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook.
- Upgrades to the web are incremental.
- Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem.
- There has to be value before everybody has upgraded.
- You have to be able to understand and explain it.
Those posts from this summer show that the ideas behind the Twitter API's "overnight" ubiquity have been kicking around in developer circles for months, if not more than a year. Finally, though, we have shipping examples of broad adoption of an API that's lightweight and suitable for today's most interesting applications. It's not just that Twitter's realtime, though of course that is compelling, but also that these APIs are simple enough for weekend hackers to build interesting projects on, and that they're easy to implement even on mobile devices and in almost any programming language.
So, today, we have support for the Twitter API from Twitter (of course), WordPress and Tumblr. I know I saw folks working on this for TypePad's free service when I was at Six Apart, so I'd assume they just wanted to finish OAuth support before supporting it as well. (See below.)
Of course, I don't need to make any suggestions to developers about what to do with these APIs — I'm sure the gears in everybody's heads are turning about cool new applications to build. Instead, I'd like to make a series of suggestions for the entire Open Twitter API ecosystem, based on what we've learned from past successes and failures in APIs around blogging.
What Server Developers Should Do
- Please please please support OAuth: It's egregious that the newest implementations of the Twitter API are stil encouraging people to share their passwords with third-party sites. Five or ten years ago, this was common practice in APIs because we didn't have better options. Twitter started out using shared passwords, but mercifully has started to bring OAuth support online. But for new services to be encouraging the horrible practice of users entering their passwords into every application willy-nilly is just unacceptable. I think we have a two-week window or so within which the new services supporting the Twitter API could announce their intention to support OAuth and really catalyze client developers into doing the wrong thing, but I fear we may lose another generation of API evolution to this terrible practice. If just one or two services announce intent around OAuth by the end of the year, client developers will follow — if you use WordPress or Tumblr, encourage your service provider to do this. (This is usually where I'd insert a dozen examples of how sharing passwords screws users, services, and the ecosystem, but I know that developers often just use shared passwords because they're lazy. Do the right thing, guys. The client devs will follow along.)
- Support Really Simple Discovery: The RSD format isn't sexy by today's standards, but grew organically out of some smart thinking from when blogging APIs were at the same state of maturity as today's tweeting APIs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, developers should look at supporting RSD and looking for something like a "tweetsapi" endpoint for these new services. That way, any arbitrary site can advertise that it supports the Twitter API, or even future versions of an open MetaTweets API. Pay attention to which APIs are listed as "preferred".
- Think about overloading of
source: Thesourceelement of status updates in the Twitter API is very interestingly open-ended, and supports use of URLs. Instead of merely advertising your client app, smart use ofrelattributes and URLs here could help bootstrap some very interesting new potential.What Client Developers Should Do
- Support RSD: Same logic as above.
- Start sharing parsing libraries: Client devs going to be doing a lot of duplicate work to parse out URLs and usernames and hashtags and maybe even slashtags. But almost every scripting language supports some similar variation on regular expressions, and if you're using that method to tease out meaning from short messages, then lighten your burden by sharing the load. John Gruber's work to share his URL parsing rules should be a model for a dozen other GitHub projects — compete on features and execution, but not on these fundamental interpretations of text.
- Build in the big services, but support the little ones: You'll naturally want to offer menu options for users of the big, centralized hosted services. But (perhaps as part of supporting RSD), you should allow for all of us to have arbitrary Twitter API endpoints on our own domain names — this is good for the web!
What Every Developer Should Do
- Think about piping Twitter API endpoints together: I think it will be common for some kinds of applications that support the Twitter API to be both clients and servers, supporting piping content through, and perhaps applying transformations to the updates. This idea of daisy-chaining services together is likely only going to happen if a lot of parts of the infrastructure support OAuth well, but has the potential to be truly revolutionary if the ecosystem allows it to happen.
- Start looking at people's firehoses: Twitter's firehose of all status updates is about to be broadly available for developers, I know about the free TypePad firehose from my time at Six Apart, and I think WordPress will sell you access to theirs, but I haven't yet been able to find a reference for one for Tumblr. No matter — we should assume that free, open versions of these are coming, and start to figure out how to encourage similar collaboration around the reading side of things, now that the writing side of things is getting hashed out.
- Consider adopting a "+2 Rule": The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that shit, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship. Keep making new apps and see what you can do to stretch the limits of the existing methods and structures. I love the new geocoding and contributor aspects of the Twitter API, but as I said at the top of this post, I think the period of rapid iteration on the core Twitter API is ending, as new efforts going forward will have to reach consensus.
The good news is, consensus around evolution of the Twitter API can happen simply by saying to each other, "If two application developers who share no common investors or board members can reach agreement around an extension to the API, and between them they have a significant enough number of users to be relevant, then we should all just adopt their work."
This is important because it reframes the conversation from being about technical merits, and all the boys who like to play with APIs always think they know what's "better". I'm sure if I wanted to waste an afternoon, I could tell you a dozen ways in which the Twitter API could be "improved". But guess what? That shit does not matter. Adoption matters, and I'm heartened by the fact that people seem to be getting that.
So, get to work! Please give me feedback if I'm wrong or being stupid about one of my recommendations, but if not, then just start hacking. Stop encouraging people to share passwords, start encouraging services to share tweets, and let's all join in a hearty session of finger-pointing and mockery in Facebook's general direction for their sense of Not Invented Here having overshadowed their opportunity, because they could have really clearly done an "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" on the Twitter API if they hadn't wanted to make their own system a year ago, and now they've lost that power.
Finally, thanks a lot to Dave Winer for essentially inspiring a lot of players in blogging to move towards embracing the Twitter API. Sure, lots of us had the idea, and I've spent a lot of times in meetings arguing for this stuff across the industry, and Automattic and Tumblr and others were brave enough to embrace it. But I don't think anybody's done more to publicly advocate for an open Twitter API than Dave. I'm glad we've evolved as a community to the point where these kinds of breakthroughs aren't the contentious, immature shitfests they used to be.
DH Jobs Becoming Scarce
The signing of Nick Johnson by the Yankees is a good move for New York, for all the reasons Jack talked about this morning. But, for players like Russ Branyan, Jim Thome, and Vladimir Guerrero, it is bad news indeed.
As Brian Cashman noted earlier in the off-season, he ran into a designated hitter looking for a job no matter where he turned. The market is saturated with good hitters who can’t play the field, and unfortunately for them, the National League doesn’t use a DH. So, their options are limited to AL teams who don’t already have a designated hitter in the fold.
The Yankees were a potential landing spot for DH types, especially left-handed ones looking to exploit the right field wall in New Yankee Stadium. However, New York signed a first baseman to take that spot, decreasing the supply of available jobs for defensively challenged players without taking any DH types off the market.
Johnson’s signing, along with Matsui’s deal in LA, also sets something of a price ceiling for guys with limited defensive value. That Johnson and Matsui were not able to get more than $6 million as the best of the bunch in this player type limits the bargaining power that the lesser players have. Not only are the jobs diminishing quickly, but they’re going to have to take $2 to $4 million in order to land one.
There aren’t many DH jobs left available. If I was the agent for any of the aging sluggers with no defensive value, I’d be trying everything I could to land a job in Baltimore or Texas as quickly as possible. This game of musical chairs is going to leave several good hitters standing around, trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives after baseball.
Simmons & Gladwell on Concussions
Last Thanksgiving, I wrote that I was thankful for: Jason Kottke's Kottke - Malcolm Gladwell's article about concussions was not the first on the topic, and did not contain a cogent argument of any kind (in fact, it was almost aggressively lacking in sense), but Jason and other bloggers helped bring attention to the issue, and changes are being made. Spoiler alert! This is the Tipping Point's "three rules of epidemics" in action. The hospitals and doctors who made the research possible are mavens - the "information specialists", Gladwell himself is the salesmen - "[salesmen] tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them", and bloggers like Jason are the connectors: - "the people who 'link us up with the world ... people with a special gift for bringing the world together.' They are 'a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack [... for] making friends and acquaintances'. [Gladwell] characterizes these individuals as having social networks of over one hundred people." And in Part 2 of this morning's conversation with SImmons & Gladwell, we read: SIMMONS: Let's move to a more uplifting topic: concussions. In October, you published "What the Dog Saw," a collection of New Yorker essays from the past 10 years -- which I loved reading -- but I can't remember any of them having the impact that your October piece about football concussions had. To borrow your phrase, it seemed to become something of a tipping point. The mainstream media became sufficiently riled up. NFL teams started becoming more cautious with recovering players. It seems like we're headed in the right direction, finally, although nobody will ever be able to answer the question, "What the hell took so long?" But the underlying theme of your piece was guilt: These guys damage their bodies and brains to entertain us, and we ignore the collateral damage or look the other way. Your point was that as we learn more and more about the effects of concussions, it was becoming tougher to look the other way. At least for you. Do you still feel that way? GLADWELL: To be fair, my piece wasn't the tipping point on this issue. I was just piling on after the brilliant work of Alan Schwarz at The New York Times, who has owned and operated this story from the beginning. (If he doesn't win the Pulitzer, I give up.) But in answer to your question: Yes, football has kind of been ruined for me, I'm afraid. Understand that I live for the game. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that it is screwed up -- on a moral level -- in a way that no other professional sport is. Think about it. The league has a salary cap (which limits players' pay), minimal health insurance for retirees and no guaranteed contracts. In other words, the owners reserve the right to limit the pool of money available to players, to walk away from contracts whenever they please and then hold no long-term responsibility for the health of the players whose contracts they have limited and declined to honor. Coal miners aren't treated this badly. And now we strongly suspect a fourth fact: that some significant percentage of ex-players, as a direct result of playing professional football, will suffer from dementia in their 40s and 50s, in addition to all the known and significant other health risks of the game (severe arthritis, substantially elevated risk of heart disease, etc.). Over the last half of November, the "Gladwell - GOOD or EVIL?" argument was raging in my world. Did Gladwell rip off other people's research? Did he oversimplify the arguments? Was he intellectually dishonest? Angry emails were exchanged, and Adriana even yelled at me in front of my parents about it. I think he has a special knack for following trends, and simplifying complicated issues while still maintaining an intellectual style and publishing under TNY's venerably letterhead, and is excellent and bringing the spotlight of attention (bloggers and otherwise) to bear on important issues. Even my Mom grudgingly offered that he was responsible for moving the NFL & concussions issue from the health section to the front page.
Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell return for Gladwell-Simmons III
Kobe works harder off the court than anyone in the league; we have so many ways for him to improve in 2009 that he's like a kid in a candy store. We've all heard the story about how he worked out with Hakeem all summer to refine his post game, so here's one you might not have heard: When I visited Nike last month, we toured the development building (in which they customize sneakers for specific athletes), and the guy who ran it told us that Kobe was their favorite client. Why? Because he kept pushing them and pushing them to make the right shoes for him, even flying there for days at a time just to put himself through grueling workouts with sensors all over his body. This past summer, he pushed them to create a special low-top sneaker that also would prevent him from rolling his ankles -- which seems incongruous on paper -- yet they feel as if they pulled it off. And only because he kept pushing them. Forty years ago? He's wearing crummy Chuck Taylors like everyone else. via sports.espn.go.com The Book of Basketball is going through it's second revision, on-line, and it's only been out a month. It's basically the wikipedia of books, but with only one author (until Simmons' contract is up next year, and he founds the "Book of Basketball" company).
How Clean Is Your Tap Water?
Click here for bigger. [Image: GOOD Magazine]
GOOD Magazine reminds us that tap water may look clear and safe, but there could be a lot of nasty gunk hiding in there—and oftentimes it's legal. They've listed the top five cleanest and dirtiest U.S. water utilities. Among the cleanest: Arlington Water (Fort Worth, Texas) and Providence Water (Providence, Rhode Island) and, drum roll, the dirtiest: Emerald Coast Water Utility (Pensacola, Florida), City of Riverside Public Utilities (Riverside, California), and Las Vegas Valley Water District (Las Vegas). To check the safety of your faucet water, go here.
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Video: 'Look Around You - Water'
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Should Restaurants Charge for Filtered Water?
Why the Phantom Menace sucks
I confess that I only had time this morning to watch the first 10 minutes, but from that viewing I can safely conclude that this is the best 70-minute video critique of The Phantom Menace that exists in the world. If the first 20 seconds don't get you, stick around until "protagonist". Or don't take my word for it; here's Lost's Damon Lindelof's reaction:
Your life is about to change. This is astounding film making. Watch ALL of it.
Part the first:
After watching the last 3-4 minutes of this first segment, I wanted to give Lucas a hug because I feel so bad for the guy for failing in public in such a huge way. (thx, scott)
Tags: movies Star Wars video
By the Numbers: The McSweeney’s ‘San Francisco Panorama’ Experiment
Shared by Jackson West
The Huffington Post-ization of print!
Last week, McSweeney’s published their gorgeous, 320-page, one-shot newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama. We have not yet gotten our hands on one, here on the other coast, but the reports were all glowing, from the feature in the LA Times to the New York Times live-blogging its distribution. “The Panorama,” McSweeney’s honcho Dave Eggers emailed the Times, “is just a reminder that readers will be more likely to pay for the physical paper if they’re given something very different than what we get on the Internet.” The Panorama said its total editorial costs were $80,000, which is almost exactly one-third of the total production costs. It cost $111,000 just to print 23,000 issues; the total cost, of each issue, including editorial, was $7.98. The production time was about nine months. There were seven full-time staff members, and it was published by Oscar Villalon, the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle’s book section, who took that newspaper’s buyout last fall.
The income from the sale of the paper is hard to estimate. It was selling for $16 at bookstores and $5 on the street. Reports said that the original run of 20,000 was “sold out in 90 minutes.” Bookstores generally only had a stockpile of 200 or fewer; we presume the majority were sold on the street. The 3000 additional copies, intended for national distribution, were immediately sold. A second print run has been ordered, of an unknown amount, to arrive in January.
The paper’s advertising income was $61,000. That is $2.65 in income per issue from advertising. That means that, at a price of $5 for 23,000 issues, the newspaper would have taken a loss of 33 cents. Presumably, the people who purchased the newspaper at the $16 cost boosted it into profitability.
What was the intention? “The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive,” is what Eggers wrote in his mass email, way back in June, to all concerned about the fate of print.
But what’s curious about these numbers is that they are magical. The total editorial costs were $80,000. There were seven full-time staff members—although the publisher, Villalon, we understand, only began work there in September.
You can divide $80,000 pretty much any way you like and not find a way to make this make sense.
According to one contributor, the Panorama was offering a rate of 12 cents a word to writers. (That’s $240, in total, for a 2000-word piece—well below newspaper market rate. And even below some Internet rates, which is hard to do.)
There were 218 contributors. So say everyone—everyone, from William T. Vollman to Stephen King—got paid $250 (to use a nice round number) for their contributions, whether it was a drawing or a 10,000 word piece of reportage. (That may not be a terrible average—although that rate, for a 10,000-word piece, works out to be a payment of $1200.) That’s $54,500.
But some of those 218 contributors were artists. Another way to look at it: overall, the paper contains very roughly 350,000 words: that would be $42,000 at 12 cents a word.
At that average-per-piece, which is presumably pretty low, that leaves a bit more than $38,000 for the seven full-time staff members (and, as the paper notes, copy-editing, equipment and “one lamb”).
Except, there was for illustrations a total budget of $15,000. This leaves a maximum of $23,000 for the staff, who would have been paid $3200 each for their labors.
This means that, if the publisher worked on the paper for four months, and the remaining money were divided equitably, and none of the other dozens of people working part-time were paid at all, he would have been taking home $800 a month.
Photograph by Steve Rhodes, from his excellent set of images of the paper.
I’m Reading: about Swoboda, Reyes and Stairwells
In a podcast for On Baseball, Joe Janish talks with Ron Swoboda about ‘The Catch.’
Mat Pignataro of Seven Train to Shea tells Mets fans to be patient, they’re not doomed.
In a post to Amazin Avenue, James Kannengieser explains why Jose Reyes’s interview Wednesday with Mike Francesa was the third-best Mets moment of 2009; and the Big Lead essentially agrees.
Lastly, Shannon from Mets Police as pics of the new orange stairwells in Citi Field.
December 17, 2009
Justseeds Print Show and Paper Politics Book Release-NYC
In case you're not on Facebook(contributing to the demise of flyer and poster promotion) the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative is having an art show and book release party for Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today- featuring political prints by over 200 international artists, edited by artist/activist Josh MacPhee. The event will be today 8-11pm
at Book Thug Nation
100 N.3rd St.
Brooklyn, NYThere will be new work by the Justseeds artists on display and for sale, free snacks and drinks.
So come out, wish us a happy solstice, congratulate Josh on another book, meet Icky who's visiting from PDX, buy all your holiday gifts, and check out the Book Thug Nation space so you know where to sell/buy your used books!
Carbon offsets at Google
As leaders from around the world meet in Copenhagen to address global climate change this month, we thought it was a good time to reflect on our own carbon footprint. In 2007, we committed to become a carbon neutral company. We know that it isn't possible to write a check and eliminate the environmental impact of our operations. So what does “carbon neutrality” mean to us?
First, we aggressively pursue reductions in our energy consumption through energy efficiency, innovative infrastructure design and operations and on-site renewable energy. Our Google designed data centers use half the energy of typical facilities. We're also working to accelerate the development of economic, clean renewable energy at scale through research and development, investment and policy outreach. At this time, however, such efforts don't cover our entire carbon footprint. Therefore, since 2007 we've gone a step further and made a voluntary commitment to buy carbon offsets to cover the portion of our footprint that we cannot yet eliminate — which is what we mean by "carbon neutrality."
So what exactly is a carbon offset? The idea behind an offset is that we pay someone to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in a specific, measurable way, thus offseting an equal climate impact on our side. To determine our impact, we calculate our annual carbon footprint, which is then verified by an independent third party. We include direct energy consumption (like natural gas) and electricity use, employee commuting, company vehicle use, business travel and estimates of carbon emissions from building construction and from the manufacturing of servers used in our datacenters. We then buy an equivalent number of carbon offsets.
While carbon offsets seem simple in principle, in practice they are surprisingly complicated. In particular, it's often difficult to say whether or not the offset project results in emissions reductions that would have happened anyway. We find ourselves asking whether the project in fact goes beyond "business as usual." In the world of offsets, this concept is referred to as "additionality." Carbon offsets have a mixed reputation because some projects are not additional. Here at Google, we have set a very high bar to ensure that our investment makes an actual difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets that are real, verifiable, permanent and additional.
To date, we have selected high quality carbon offsets from around the world that reduce greenhouse gas emissions — ranging from landfill gas projects in Caldwell County, NC, and Steuben County, NY, to animal-waste management systems in Mexico and Brazil. Our funding helps make it possible for equipment to be installed that captures and destroys the methane gas produced as the waste decomposes. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, is a significant contributor to global warming. We chose to focus on landfill and agricultural methane reduction projects because methane's impact on warming is very well understood, it's easy to measure how much methane is captured and the capture wouldn't happen without our financing (for the projects we're investing in, they couldn't make enough money selling the gas).
We need fundamental changes to global energy and transportation infrastructure to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions over the long term. In the meantime, the projects to which we contribute offer measurable emissions reductions and allow us to take responsibility for our carbon footprint. To that end, we're always looking for good emissions-reduction projects to support. If you have a landfill gas or agricultural methane carbon offset project you think we should consider, please visit this page for more information about how to participate in our latest carbon-offset procurement round.
Posted by Alice Ryan, Green Energy Project Manager
Go thataway: Google Maps India learns to navigate like a local
Have you ever been lost? Perhaps you missed a turn because a street sign was poorly labeled, hard to see in the dark, or just not where it should have been? These are problems we've all faced, but they're especially complicated in India, where street names are not commonly known and the typical wayfinding strategy is to ask someone on the street. Without road names, it's difficult to produce a set of directions that makes sense. Just take a look at this screenshot of Google Maps directions in India in 2008 and you'll get the picture:
To solve this problem, this week we launched an improvement to Google Maps India that describes routes in terms of easy-to-follow landmarks and businesses that are visible along the way. We gathered feedback from users around the world to spark this improvement to our technology, and we thought we'd give you a glimpse at our thinking behind this launch.
We knew from previous studies in several countries that most people rely on landmarks — visual cues along the way — for successful navigation. But we needed to understand how people use those visual cues, and what makes a good landmark, in order to make our instructions more human and improve route descriptions. To get answers to these questions, we ran a user research study that focused specifically on how people give and get directions. We called businesses and asked how to get to their store; we recruited people to keep track of directions they gave or received and later interviewed them about their experiences; we asked people to draw us diagrams of routes to places unfamiliar to us; we even followed people around as they tried to find their way.We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names. Spotting a pink building on a corner or remembering to turn after a gas station is much easier than trying to recall an unfamiliar street name. Sometimes there are simply too many signs to look at, and the street sign drowns in the visual noise. A good landmark always stands out.
We also discovered that there are three situations in which people resort to landmarks.
The first is when people need to orient themselves — for instance, they just exited a subway station and are not sure which way to go. Google Maps would say: "Head southeast for 0.2 miles." A person would say: "Start walking away from the McDonald's."
The second situation is when people use a landmark to describe a turn: "Turn right after the Starbucks."
The third use, however, is the most interesting. We discovered that often people simply want to confirm that they are still on the right track and haven't missed their turn.
Giving people this sense of confidence while they explore an unfamiliar territory became one of the goals of our redesign. Over the course of several months, the team brainstormed various ways of presenting the information contained in Google Maps in a way that would be useful for people. We then settled on a design that added some landmarks to describe the turns and confirm the route.
The next step was to put this design to a test with drivers in Bangalore, India. The results were eye-opening. While we were on the right track with introducing landmarks, we still relied on street names too heavily. Drivers wanted more confirmation. They wanted to compare what they saw on Google Maps with what they saw from the driver's seat, every step of the way.
We added more landmarks along routes and reduced the visual prominence of street names, and the result was our final design:
Now Google Maps India gives you directions like a local would. Happy wayfinding!
Posted by Olga Khroustaleva, User Experience Researcher, Google Maps
Love It or Leave It, SF Weekly
The carpetbaggers over at Village Voice Media, aka, the SF Weekly, have launched an anti-SF hit piece that completely misses the point of San Francisco and why people choose to live here.
Now, like my old buddy, Mat, I hate things about SF - including much of what is covered in this piece. But I have nonetheless been roused to deliver a defense. So, defend I shall.
The article starts with the rather disingenuous suggestion that San Francisco sucks because it doesn't enact its biggest progressive ideals:
Despite its good intentions, San Francisco is not leading the country in gay marriage. Despite its good intentions, it is not stopping wars. Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, its homeless problem is worse than any comparable city's.
(Do the writers share these intentions, or are they just trying to fool the rare liberal reader into viewing more ads before they snort and put the paper back under the Muni seat where they found it? We'll get to the writers' conservatism later.)
First, let's bite into the article's central (and silly) premise, stated in the form of its headline: "The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S." So, the measure of a big city is in how it is "run," and since SF is a big city awash in political impotence and corruption, it's worthy of being trashed by one of its very own "newspapers."
San Francisco is in many ways not "big," and that's primary to its charm. In terms of population, it barely counts as a big city (it's the U.S.'s 12th largest, right above Jacksonville, FL), which is why it's such a common experience to randomly encounter not only folks you know, but folks you don't know but have just "seen around," as if on a university campus. I love this. It counteracts the anonymity created by one attribute of a big city SF does have - high population density.
It is also chaotic and impossible to "run," exhibiting a visceral form of libertarianism for those who can stomach it. It's getting worn, the conservative refrain of love for the "wildness" of the market, alongside the attitude this article gives off of longing for a daddy-figure to make powerful choices for us, so long as it's in the interest of the right instead of the left.
When it comes to mismanaging a city, San Francisco has pulled a 180 — in half a century, we've gone from "city fathers" (if you liked them) or "oligarchs" (if you didn't) operating with limited input from the people to a hyperdemocracy...
From 1932 until 1996, much of city government was handled by a powerful chief administrative officer (CAO), appointed to a 10-year term and tasked with overseeing the city's largest departments. The job was to take politics out of city management.
Curious. Would they be talking about notorious land speculator Chester MacPhee, appointed CAO in 1958 and who was forced to resign? They probably would, given that he was "in charge" during the administration of Mayor George Christopher, which itself fell in the middle of a corporatist Republican reign that stretched from 1912 to 1964 (it's been Democratic ever since). Ahh, the good old days when there was no democracy, and thus, no corruption!
The writers would have us believe that the middle class here is dying, the population graying, the young fleeing.They quote urbanist Joel Kotkin as saying, "San Francisco is like the really good-looking coed who can get away with being a jerk, while a less good-looking one couldn't."
As long as San Francisco is an alluring destination where residents will tolerate lunacy as a tradeoff for living the city lifestyle, and tourists flood the downtown, the city will lumber along, inefficiently and without accountability.
Well that kind of says it all, doesn't it? It also makes Kotkin's metaphor petty and superfluous. I could just as easily use a different metaphor: "SF is like a really great, caring friend who can get away with having bad habits, while a less-valuable one couldn't."
As I'm sure was intended, this article has lit up right-wing blogs with derision and sanctimony by uptight wankers who, despite macho posturing, fear that which they cannot control.
But in the end, those blogs aren't a big deal, and neither is the SF Weekly. In part, that's because there is a thriving local and nano-local blogging press in SF which the Weekly certainly has an interest in ignoring, but which reflects on a daily basis the infinite ways - many completely unrelated to anything political - by which residents love and discover this little place.
Related Posts:
Game design as government
(Apologies to Aldous Huxley)
For many years, I've been thinking about game design as a form of governance.Each of these topics provides years of future discussion. However, for the sake of brevity, I'll limit this essay to some thoughts on how a game government differs from a traditional government. Game governments have the following unique attributes:
- Game mechanics, rules and systems are comparable to laws
- Players are comparable to citizens
- The code and moderators that enforce game mechanics are comparable to executive activities.
- The act of game design is the equivalent of drafting new laws, legislative activities.
- Issue escalation and customer service are comparable to judicial activities.
Games are voluntary
- Games are voluntary
- Games allow for rapid iteration
- Games excel at targeting individuals
The current crop of games are voluntary activities. In a traditional government, you are a citizen of the geographic region or nation in which you live. Membership for those who are born there is automatic. Renouncing or acquiring citizenship is a difficult activity with numerous costs. In most games players choose to operate within the magic circle defined by the rules of the game. Playing a game is seen as an explicitly voluntary activity.
There are several prerequisites for the voluntary nature of game to be realized.Neither participating in a game nor leaving a game is without cost. All games create a self contained system of value where players are taught that algorithmic constructs are meaningful to their lives. There is always an opportunity cost involved in forming these values. There is also a cost to leaving the whirling blinking, pinging systems behind. The sword you worked for so hard in WoW has little meaning outside the game.
- Freedom to leave: Player should be able to stop playing the game when they wish. At the very least, they can step outside the magic circle and return to the rules of the real world. However, they might also leave one game and switch to another. The voluntary nature of games is threatened when the player can no longer leave. If you are part of a school program in which Wii Fit is a required activity, it rapidly becomes something other than a game.
- Freedom to participate: Equally important, players should feel that their actions within the game are voluntary. Free will, or at least the illusion of free will, is necessary for there to be meaningful choices, deep experiential learning and mastery. Remove the players ability to explore the space defined by the rules of the game and at best you have rote mechanical work. At worst, you've created a crushing regime that teaches and enforces mindless obedience to a machine made of code.
Games enable rapid iteration
Most modern networked electronic games involve code executing on servers. The code can be updated and pushed out to millions of players in minutes. Unhappy with the current laws? A few keystrokes later and your populace is now bound by a fresh, crisply defined reality. Traditional governments lack this speed. Laws are deliberated for months and years. They are slowly rolled out piecemeal by people and enforced piecemeal by people. People are fallible and each interpets the laws according to their biases. Some laws don't work. Some laws have inexplicable consequences that play out over many years.
There are several consequencesGame excel at targeting individuals
- Metrics: First, metrics concerning large swatches of player behavior are readily available. In many cases, developers can set up tests that let them know if the rules they've created are generated the behavioral result they desire.
- Scientific iteration: The player population is easily segmented. We witness this currently with A/B testing or with the rollout of Facebook changes according to geographic regions. It is possible to launch rules in a population subset, measure the results and then either kill the experiment or spread the rules more broadly if they are a success. At one point Valve had a saying that went something like "If this is a design decision that is a matter of opinion, don't waste time arguing about it. Instead play test it." What are the ramifications of using the scientific method on the generation of laws for humans?
- Democracy of behavior: This leads to a fascinating reinterpretation of the 2500 year old formulation of democracy. You no longer vote by taking time out of your schedule and filling out a piece of paper. Instead, you vote by doing. The player's actions determine the tale the metrics tell. There is always 100% voter turnout because by choosing to play, you automatically participate in the legislative process.
Games are laser focused on the individual's activities. They deal with individual choice and individual rewards. A game knows exactly what a single person has done and adapts accordingly. Traditional governments create broad swathes of rules that affect entities or populations. Their hold on any one individual is powerful, but is very much a blunt instrument. Specifically, traditional governments lack the detailed knowledge of individual behavior, the frequency of feedback and precision of the reward structure. Wherein taxes are a feedback loop that occurs once a year, Pacman adapts to your actions 30 times a second.
- Game designs are laws targeted at the mundane activities of free will. With Bejeweled we influence how your spend your free time. With Wii Fit, we reward or punish how you exercise. With Nike Plus we reward and punish how you move your feet. With Facebook games, we mediate how you socialize. In time, each of these will improve. In time games will target more and more activities. Travel, sleep, energy usage, medicine, love, sex, eating. If we can measure it, we can make a game out of it.
- Pervasive law: These quotidian activities are the meat of life. As games spread throughout our everyday moments, we are suddenly in the hitherto unheard of situation where law affects 80% of our lives.
If you designed the rules that governed even a small portion of the lives of millions of people, what sort of world would you create? What are your moral obligations as a game designer? Are we still just talking about money? Are we still only talking about fun?
take care
Danc.
A Day in the Life of NYTimes.com: Visualizing Website Traffic Data
"A Day in the Life of NYTimes.com" [bits.blogs.nytimes.com] includes two videos (also shown below) that show the traffic to NYTimes.com on June 25, 2009, the day Michael Jackson died. While on video focuses on US-only traffic, the other has a worldwide view. The animated maps also include a subtle visual hint of night time by revealing the city illumination at night.The 24-hour period of web log data is compressed into a little over a minute and a half.The data used to create these maps come from roughly 15 Web servers. Some of the mobile bursts on the maps are a result of compressing the data.
Thnkx Owen!
Critic-Turned-Cook Gives Top Marks To Fall Quarter Fare
Since September, I've been prepping in Darlene's cozy kitchen at the University of Washington, playing a minor role in getting meals out for the 70 perpetually hungry guys at Alpha Sigma Phi.
Matt Hansen serving pot roast with au gratin potatoes. [Photograph: Leslie Kelly]
Finals are over. Fall quarter's finished. And frat house cook Darlene Barnes has earned straight A's for her from-scratch fare made with sustainable, mostly organic ingredients.
Each week, Darlene posts menus on her blog and on the fridge in the dining hall. I don't think she repeated a dinner the entire quarter. The Alpha Sigs experienced a season of first tastes. Grits, collards, braised Lacinato kale, beautiful oven-braised short ribs, brie baked in puff pastry and cheese-stuffed figs were just a few of the incredible dishes introduced in the dining hall.
While the feedback was mostly positive, the few who had beefs were vocal about it. One kid wanted the return of frozen, processed chicken cordon bleu—basically something like a tarted-up version of a Chicken McNugget. Instead, Darlene made Tyler Florence's Chicken Cordon Bleu (the secret's in buttering the panko breadcrumbs) and that flipping bird got rave reviews. It was just one of a long lineup of A+ meals.
Here's a list of what I thought were the best dishes from fall quarter, all of them worthy of being served at upscale venues anywhere:
- Syrah-braised leg of lamb
- Chicken biryani with housemade harissa paste
- Cajun pork with cheese grits and collard greens
- Dungeness crab dip
- Pho with all the fixings
- Pot roast with potatoes au gratin
- Moose Sloppy Joes
- Peanut butter cookies with bacon bits
- Pesto-encrusted wild salmon
- Chicken Cordon Bleu
- Muffulettas with housemade olive salad
- Cream of tomato soup with tasso
- Jambalaya with Gulf shrimp
- Bourbon-marinated pork loin and sweet potatoes
- Bacon-wrapped green beans
See what I mean? Doesn't this luscious lineup just blow up the whole stereotyped image of what you'd expect to be served at a frat house? But what do I know—I turned in my critic's credentials long ago.
Let's hear it from the brothers of Alpha Sigma Phi about some of their favorite meals:
About the author: Former Seattle Post-Intelligencer restaurant critic Leslie Kelly has been working in professional kitchens since the newspaper folded in March and chronicling her culinary journey from pen to pan for Serious Eats. She also blogs at LeslieKellyWhiningandDining.blogspot.com and recently launched a story-telling project for Northstar Winery following one wine from the vine to the table.
Come on in 'The Kitchn'
Each week we round up our favorite posts and recipes from our friends at The Kitchn.
This week, the Kitchn creates a bundt cake pan by setting a ramekin in the middle of a cake pan, a trick they picked up from Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio.
Also on the Kitchn, ten toast appetizers, making breakfast rolls the night before, and two great recipes for holiday sweets: pistachio brittle and peppermint molten chocolate cakes.
- Crusty Bites: 10 Appetizers Served on Toast: Two-bite finger foods are perfect for holiday parties, and there are endless options for spreads: goat cheese, marmalade, smoked salmon, creamed mushrooms.
- Sleep In! How to Make Breakfast Rolls Ahead of Time: Since nobody wants to knead dough at dawn, try doing it the night before then popping them in pans (covered with a lid or plastic wrap) and then into the fridge. The next morning, let them sit out for about an hour, then into the oven they go.
- Salted Pistachio Brittle (Better Than Christmas Cookies!): This brittle has that addictive salty-sweet thing happening and is especially nice when you feel cookied-out.
- Merry & Modern Chocolate Peppermint Molten Cakes: Somehow adding peppermint to super rich chocolate seems to lighten it up. (Right?)
transitioning to all knowing digital
Ben Hammersley, who knows a thing or two about online and magazines, shifts the perspective a bit on the design challenge for e-books. Yes, it's about the form factor of the device...but it's also about the editorial and production workflow.
So a real design challenge for e-books isn’t to design the user experience (which is dependent at the end of the day on the device capabilities anyway, which are pretty much unknown) but rather on designing a system that would allow existing publishers to transition their operations from ramshackle print to All Knowing Digital. We already know much of this: you can take the lessons from blogging CMSs, add in photography handling from places like Photoshelter, combine metadata collection from sources like Google Maps and OpenCalais, and version control from Git, and you’re halfway there. Combine it with process changes, where you require writers to file direct to a system that forces them to add in metadata for example, and you’re closer still. Of course, in two sentences I’ve described a process that really encompasses the whole old-media crisis, but I do think it’s a challenge that can be met.
This post is part one of three; looking forward to the sequels.
Job Opening on the Yahoo! Sports team
Yahoo! Sports has reached 36 million unique visitors per month and dominates the Online Sports and Fantasy Sports industry worldwide. The site’s recipe for success: high quality content presented via rich and standard-compliant interfaces.
The Y! Sports experience is so engaging, users view over 2 billion pages per month — more than Fox, SI, and CBS Sports combined! To meet such high demands, Y! Sports stays at the forefront of Internet technologies by leveraging platforms such as YUI.
If you consider yourself an avid YUI user, the kind that can look under a component’s hood and start adding quality features, you’re well on your way to joining their team.
Email your resume, including portfolio URLs, to mediatech-hiring /at/ yahoo /dash/ inc /dot/ com (Principals only; no recruiters, please.) or find out more about the position.
Audio Interview on Venture Hacks
I recently sat down with Nivi from Venture Hacks and discussed what it takes to build a successful startup. The full conversation is available here. There have also been some great thought provoking questions that I’ve answered in the comments section following the Venture Hacks post. Please jump in and join the conversation over at Venture Hacks.
It's not really news, but I haven't talked about it yet: mod_perlite is now usable! via www.cattlegrid.info This is serious!
For our sins
This is a picture that a Vice person took of part of the inside of the art installation in which I am doing a reading this Sunday at 4:30. In the email I sent out about this event I cautioned people against dosing themselves with psychedelics before entering this place (”The Temple of the Dying King”); I hadn’t yet seen these photos when I sent that email but it feels good to be right about a thing.
Also reading: John Wray (”Lowboy“), Sam Goldsmith, Michael Levitan and John Mathias.
We are supposed to be reading “Christmas” or “holiday” or “Christ”-themed work. I was originally planning to write a new story for this event. It was going to be about a time in my very early 20s when a friend of mine, whose Bushwick apartment I often stayed in, adopted a tiny black-and-white feral kitten and named him Jesus. (At the vet my friend lied and said that his name was “Winston.”)
I loved Jesus but he was not, it was clear from day one, exactly cut out for domestication. All kittens and puppies are crazy but Jesus was out of control. He could be sweet and docile at rare sleepy moments but at all other times he was locked in a furious attack mode. He attacked any and all moving objects, constantly. This fatwa included limbs; he clawed my forearms so viciously that a supervisor at my internship took me aside and asked me if I was a cutter. He would try to climb up your naked leg with his claws fully extended, as if your leg was a piece of furniture and not a hunk of flesh covered by a thin, easily puncturable layer of dermis.
We tried to calm Jesus down with catnip. We may or may not have blown pot smoke in his ear. But depressants, so effective at gluing us to the tattered plaid couch, only seemed to made Jesus crazier. We tried to ignore the intractable nature of his craziness and, for a while, we succeeded.
Perhaps we were experiencing a lifetime peak in our aptitude for ignoring glaringly obvious things. Almost the entire floorspace of the kitchen that Bushwick apartment was covered with empty 40 oz bottles that had once contained malt liquor. In the middle of dinner with my parents, my friend had to leave suddenly because his pager went off — a delivery order had been placed — and I didn’t feel shocked or angry, really. This was just how things were; it seemed like this was how things had always been (even though of course it was the furthest thing from how things had always been.) But we got used to all of it so easily. When you’re that young it’s possible to acclimate yourself to just about anything, I guess.
Eventually, though, we gave up and sent Jesus to the country to live with my friend’s parents. There, Jesus’s cooped-up energy could unspool over many acres, and this allowed him to become a decently nonviolent housecat. My friend’s mother opted to use the Spanish pronunciation of his given name, and she said it, mostly, in a tone of fond exasperation. But you could tell that she loved him.
Jesus prowled the woods and made friends with a dog and killed birds and small animals and generally thrived until, about a year later, he was hit by a car.
My friend delivered this news between the 6th Ave and 14th Street stops of the Brooklyn-bound L train. We were on our way back to the Greenpoint apartment where we were living by then, in slightly less squalor, together. He’d tried to wait til we got home to tell me, but hadn’t been able to. “Jesus is dead,” I said, as tears poured down my face. “I loved him!” “I know,” said my friend. “I loved him too.” And we sat there, weeping.
The people on the train thought we were real religious zealots, is the punchline.
Anyway, I didn’t write a new story; I decided that story was more of an anecdote. So I am reading something else about pets and loss and filthy apartments that I wrote for my book; I’ll find a way to tie it into Christmas, I hope.
News: Mets sent Rep to Watch Aroldis Chapman
Jorge Arangure of ESPN.com says 21–year-old Cuban free-agent RHP Aroldis Chapman threw roughly 50 pitches in front of 15 teams in Houston earlier this week and, concludes:
- Chapman is healthy and in good shape.
- He reached 97 mph, though he was mostly in the 92-93 mph range.
- He stands at about 6-foot-4, 200-210 pounds.
- More teams are interested than anyone had originally thought.
- He’s not a bad guy. But, “One team executive suggested that whichever team signs Chapman might need to hire a chaperone to make sure he doesn’t fall into bad habits.”
Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus quotes an MLB insider who feels Chapman could earn as much as a $30 million contract, up from previous reports that suggested his value had been dropping over the last few weeks.
According to Buster Olney, of ESPN.com, “Some evaluators view Chapman as a left-handed Strasburg,” who was the No. 1 pick in the MLB draft last year.
…yes, the Mets sent a representative to watch chapman, according to people in the organization… but, i have no idea what they think of him, or whether there is an interest in signing… but, there should be… i mean, if ever there was a time to spend this much money on an unknown talent, this is it… i mean, had they drafted Steve Strabsurg last year, they’d have been paying it… so, in this situation, while trying to rebuild a farm system, when a young talent is for the taking, who will essentially cost what an elite draft pick would cost, they should do it… it reads like he would instantly become their top pitching prospect…
Senate Climate Bill Invests Big in Transit, Reaps Big Deficit Reduction
As the Copenhagen climate talks reach a turning point, congressional negotiations over emissions cuts are taking a back seat to global debate. But some undeniably good news on the domestic front came late yesterday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The CBO found that the Senate environment committee's climate bill, which would nearly triple the House's investment in clean transportation, would decrease the federal deficit by "about $21 billion" during its first 10 years and result in net spending decreases even after that point.John Kerry described the Copenhagen talks this week as a motivator for Senate climate action. Photo: Getty
Environment panel chairman Barbara Boxer was elated by the CBO's report [PDF], which also attached a $16 billion estimate to the bill's 10-year funding for transit, land use, bike-ped infrastructure and other green transport.
Boxer said in a statement:
The CBO score shows that there is a way to design a clean energy and climate bill that is fiscally responsible and gets the job done – while protecting the health of our families and the planet.But unfortunately, the money-saving news may not be enough to save the environment committee's framework, which sparked a GOP boycott and fears that moderate Democrats from coal-dominant states would ultimately withhold their votes.
Boxer's co-sponsor on the climate bill, Sen. John Kerry, is separately working with Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman on a compromise climate proposal aimed at winning 60 votes in the upper chamber of Congress.
That bill is expected to include new subsidies for nuclear power as well as an emissions cap lower than the environment panel's version. Whether it maintains a respectable level of support for clean transportation remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Boxer's GOP counterpart on the committee, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, stopped in Copenhagen for just two hours today to crow that a U.S. climate bill has "zero" chance of winning congressional passage.
The future of magazines, maybe, pt 2
Magazine publishers Bonnier and BERG, a London design consultancy, have collaborated on a digital magazine prototype called Mag+. The conceptual device is impressive in its restraint and its truth to form and function.
We find that the graphical page-turning metaphors that you see quite frequently in web-based e-magazine readers are not terribly believable, and they don't feel very honest to the form of the screen. [...] Scrolling systems are more appropriate to what we're dealing with.
Sing it, brother! Also of note is the way that the video takes the conventional "let me talk over some graphics" screencast and presents it in a much more compelling way.
Tags: BERG design magazines video
By the Numbers: The McSweeney’s ‘San Francisco Panorama’ Experiment
The income from the sale of the paper is hard to estimate. It was selling for $16 at bookstores and $5 on the street. Reports said that the original run of 20,000 was “sold out in 90 minutes.” Bookstores generally only had a stockpile of 200 or fewer; we presume the majority were sold on the street. The 3000 additional copies, intended for national distribution, were immediately sold. A second print run has been ordered, of an unknown amount, to arrive in January.
The paper’s advertising income was $61,000. That is $2.65 in income per issue from advertising. That means that, at a price of $5 for 23,000 issues, the newspaper would have taken a loss of 33 cents. Presumably, the people who purchased the newspaper at the $16 cost boosted it into profitability.
What was the intention? “The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive,” is what Eggers wrote in his mass email, way back in June, to all concerned about the fate of print.
But what’s curious about these numbers is that they are magical. The total editorial costs were $80,000. There were seven full-time staff members—although the publisher, Villalon, we understand, only began work there in September.
You can divide $80,000 pretty much any way you like and not find a way to make this make sense.
According to one contributor, the Panorama was offering a rate of 12 cents a word to writers. (That’s $240, in total, for a 2000-word piece—well below newspaper market rate. And even below some Internet rates, which is hard to do.)
There were 218 contributors. So say everyone—everyone, from William T. Vollman to Stephen King—got paid $250 (to use a nice round number) for their contributions, whether it was a drawing or a 10,000 word piece of reportage. (That may not be a terrible average—although that rate, for a 10,000-word piece, works out to be a payment of $1200.) That’s $54,500.
But some of those 218 contributors were artists. Another way to look at it: overall, the paper contains very roughly 350,000 words: that would be $42,000 at 12 cents a word.
At that average-per-piece, which is presumably pretty low, that leaves a bit more than $38,000 for the seven full-time staff members (and, as the paper notes, copy-editing, equipment and “one lamb”).
Except, there was for illustrations a total budget of $15,000. This leaves a maximum of $23,000 for the staff, who would have been paid $3200 each for their labors.
This means that, if the publisher worked on the paper for four months, and the remaining money were divided equitably, and none of the other dozens of people working part-time were paid at all, he would have been taking home $800 a month.
Photograph by Steve Rhodes, from his excellent set of images of the paper.
The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade
With only a few weeks left until we close out the 'naughts and move into the teens, it's almost obligatory to take a look back at the best and not-so-best of the last decade. With that in mind, I polled the O'Reilly editors, authors, Friends, and a number of industry movers and shakers to gather nominations. I then
tossed them in the trash and made up my owncompiled them together and looked for trends and common threads. So here then, in no particular order, are the best and the worst that the decade had to offer.The Best
AJAX - It's hard to remember what life was like before Asynchronous JavaScript and XML came along, so I'll prod your memory. It was boring. Web 1.0 consisted of a lot of static web pages, where every mouse click was a round trip to the web server. If you wanted rich content, you had to embed a Java applet in the page, and pray that the client browser supported it.
Without the advent of AJAX, we wouldn't have Web 2.0, GMail, or most of the other cloud-based web applications. Flash is still popular, but especially with HTML 5 on the way, even functionality that formerly required a RIA like Flash or Silverlight can now be accomplished with AJAX.
Twitter - When they first started, blogs were just what they said, web logs. In other words, a journal of interesting web sites that the author had encountered. These days, blogs are more like platforms for rants, opinions, essays, and anything else on the writer's mind. Then along came Twitter. Sure, people like to find out what J-Lo had for dinner, but the real power of the 140 character dynamo is that it has brought about a resurgence of real web logging. The most useful tweets consist of a Tiny URL and a little bit of context. Combine that with the use of Twitter to send out real time notices about everything from breaking news to the current specials at the corner restaurant, and it's easy to see why Twitter has become a dominant player.
Ubiquitous WiFi: I want you to imagine you're on the road in the mid-90s. You get to your hotel room, and plop your laptop on the table. Then you get out your handy RJ-11 cord, and check to see if the hotel phone has a data jack (most didn't), or if you'll have to unplug the phone entirely. Then you'd look up the local number for your ISP, and have your laptop dial it, so you could suck down your e-mail at an anemic 56K.
Now, of course, WiFi is everywhere. You may end up having to pay for it, but fast Internet connectivity is available everywhere from your local McDonalds to your hotel room to an airport terminal. Of course, this is not without its downsides, since unsecured WiFi access points have led to all sorts of security headaches, and using an open access point is a risky proposition unless your antivirus software is up to date, but on the whole, ubiquitous WiFi has made the world a much more connected place.
Phones Get Smarter: In the late 90s, we started to see the first personal digital assistants emerge, but this has been the decade when the PDA and the cell phone got married and had a baby called the smartphone. Palm got the ball rolling with the Treos about the same time that Windows Mobile started appearing on phones, and RIM's Blackberry put functional phones in the hands of business, but it was Apple that took the ball and ran for the touchdown with the iPhone. You can argue if the droid is better than the 3GS or the Pre, but the original iPhone was the game-changer that showed what a smartphone really could do, including the business model of the App Store,
The next convergence is likely to be with Netbooks, as more and more of the mini-laptops come with 3G service integrated in them, and VoIP services such as Skype continue to eat into both landline and cellular business.
The Maker Culture: There's always been a DIY underground, covering everything from Ham radio to photography to model railroading. But the level of cool has taken a noticeable uptick this decade, as cheap digital technology has given DIY a kick in the pants. The Arduino lets anyone embed control capabilities into just about anything you can imagine, amateur PCB board fabrication has gone from a messy kitchen sink operation to a click-and-upload-your-design purchase, and the 3D printer is turning the Star Trek replicator into a reality.
Manufacturers cringe in fear as enterprising geeks dig out their screwdrivers. The conventional wisdom was that as electronics got more complex, the "no user serviceable parts" mentality would spell the end of consumer experimentation. But instead, the fact that everything is turning into a computer meant that you could take a device meant for one thing, and reprogram it to do something else. Don't like your digital camera's software? Install your own! Turn your DVR into a Linux server.
Meanwhile, shows like Mythbusters and events like Maker Faire have shown that hacking hardware can grab the public's interest, especially if there are explosions involved.
Open Source Goes Mainstream: Quick! Name 5 open source pieces of software you might have had on your computer in 1999. Don't worry I'll wait...
How about today? Firefox is an easy candidate, as are Open Office, Chrome, Audacity, Eclipse (if you're a developer), Blender, VLC, and many others. Many netbooks now ship with Linux as the underlying OS. Open Source has gone from a rebel movement to part of the establishment, and when you combine increasing end user adoption with the massive amounts of FLOSS you find on the server side, it can be argued that it is the 800 pound Gorilla now.
As Gandhi said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." When even Microsoft is releasing Open Source code, you know that you're somewhere between the fight and win stages.
Bountiful Resources: 56K modems, 20MB hard drives, 640K of RAM, 2 MHz processors. You don't have to go far back in time for all of these to represent the state of the art. Now, of course, you would have more than that in a good toaster...
Moore's Law continues to drive technology innovation at a breakneck pace, and it seems that related technologies like storage capacity and bandwidth are trying to follow the same curve. Consider that AT&T users gripe about the iPhone's 5GB/month bandwidth cap, a limit that would have taken 10 solid days of transferring to achieve with a dialup connection.
My iPhone has 3,200 times the storage of the first hard drive I ever owned, and the graphics card on my Mac Pro has 16,000 times the memory of my first computer. We can now do amazing things in the palm of our hands, things that would have seemed like science fiction in 1999.
The Worst
SOAP: The software industry has been trying to solve the problem of making different pieces of software talk to each other since the first time there were two programs on a network, and they still haven't gotten it right. RPC, CORBA, EJB, and now SOAP now litter the graveyard of failed protocol stacks.
SOAP was a particularly egregious failure, because it was sold so heavily as the final solution to the interoperatibility problem. The catch, of course, was that no two vendors implemented the stack quite the same way, with the result that getting a .NET SOAP client to talk to a Java server could be a nightmare. Add in poorly spec'd out components such as web service security, and SOAP became useless in many cases. And the WSDL files that define SOAP endpoints are unreadable and impossible to generate by hand (well, not impossible, but unpleasant in the extreme.)
Is it any wonder that SOAP drove many developers into the waiting arms of more useable data exchange formats such as JSON?
Intellectual Property Wars: How much wasted energy has been spent this decade by one group of people trying to keep another group from doing something with their intellectual property, or property they claim was theirs? DMCA takedowns, Sony's Rootkit debacle, the RIAA suing grandmothers, SCO, patent trolls, 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0, Kindles erasing books, deep packet inspection, Three Strikes laws, the list goes on and on and on...
At the end of the day, the movie industry just had their best year ever, Lady Gaga seems to be doing just fine and Miley Cyrus isn't going hungry, and even the big players in the industry are getting fed up sufficiently with the Trolls to want patent reform. The iTunes store is selling a boatload of music, in spite of abandoning DRM, so clearly people will continue to pay for music, even if they can copy it from a friend.
Unfortunately, neither the RIAA nor the MPAA is going gently into that good night. If anything, the pressure to create onerous legislation has increased in the past year. Whether this is a last gasp or a retrenchment will only be answered in time.
The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that blindly follows a checklist of "best practices" that some consultant convinced the management to follow.
Endless retrospectives and sprint planning sessions don't mean squat if the stakeholders never attend them, and too many allegedly Agile projects end up looking a lot like Waterfall projects in the end. If companies won't really buy into the idea that you can't control all three variables at once, calling your process Agile won't do anything but drive your engineers nuts.
The Workplace Becomes Ubiquitous: What's the first thing you do when you get home at night? Check your work email? Or maybe you got a call before you even got home. The dark side of all that bandwidth and mobile technology we enjoy today is that you can never truly escape being available, at least until the last bar drops off your phone (or you shut the darn thing off!)
The line between the workplace and the rest of your life is rapidly disappearing. When you add in overseas outsourcing, you may find yourself responding to an email at 11 at night from your team in Bangalore. Work and leisure is blurring together into a gray mélange of existence. "Do you live to work, or work to live," is becoming a meaningless question, because there's no difference.
So what do you think? Anything we missed? Hate our choices? With us 100 percent? Let us know in the comments section below.
top 10 movie posters of the decade
the cinema website the auteurs recently selected their picks for the top movie posters of the decade.
as the decade comes to a close this month, many critics and fans a like are looking back on the past
ten years. while cinema poster design was once a true art form, the auteurs suggests this art form has
almost completely disappeared. instead we often see marketing gimmicks or headshots of the film’s
stars on most movie posters. here is a view of some of the auteurs picks for the best poster design,
but we would love to see your favourites.
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1327
as part of the design aerobics series, designboom is currently running online courses
entitled 'self promotion' and 'graphic design in 2010'.
more info here
How Open Standards are Created
Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those sometimes gain traction, but this is how it usually happens. Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it's inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.
It's also inevitable that Twitter tools vendors will start testing their products with WordPress and Tumblr, and hopefully report bugs and have them fixed
Sneak some advanced logic into a Django template
I was adding on an app to a Django project at work where I was overriding an existing template but did not have access to the view that called that template. I was left in a scenario where I had the variables that the view was originally set up with, but non of the new models that I had added.
In a filter you can do whatever logic you want, and then pass information back to the view. Please keep in mind, this is probably a horrible practice, but it does have its uses. In this specific scenario I needed to query the new models without modifying the existing view, solution: add a filter and do the querying there.
This is the filter that I used to do the querying:
from django import template
from stager.jira.models import JiraProject, ProjectLink
from stager.staging.models import *register = template.Library()
def has_jira(value, arg):
client = Client.objects.get(path=value)
project = client.projects.get(path=arg)
try:
jiras = ProjectLink.objects.get(ClientProject=project).JiraProject.exclude(filter_id='')
return True
except:
return False
register.filter('has_jira', has_jira)
Then, in my template:
{% load has_jira %}
{% if client.path|has_jira:project.path %}
Jira
{% endif %}
A more general example if this would be to work around the annoyance of not being able to have multiple tests in an if statement in a template: You can't do {% if this and that %}A solution would be:
def if_and(value, arg):
if value and arg:
return True
else:
return False
def if_or(value, arg):
if value or arg:
return True
else:
return False
{% if True|if_and:False %}
show
{% else %}
don't show
{% endif %}
Let me know your thoughts, pros/cons of this method.Ai's stager project is open source and can be found at github
Nine (Is How Many Hours It Will Take You To Read This)
When you have a conversation with Mary Choi you pretty much just try to stay out of the way and let her do her thing.
Flicked Off, with Mary HK Choi and Alex Balk: ‘Nine’
Nine, directed by Rob Marshall, opens in limited release tomorrow. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Sophia Loren, and Stacy Ferguson.Mary: So you saw “Nine.”
Balk: I did indeed.
Mary: Are you a Fellini fan?
Balk: I am. I am also a “Nine” fan. I saw the musical as a kid, and pretty much know the score by heart.
Mary: Oh wow, that’s WEIRD. I do not care for musicals. In fact I hate them. I was wholly prepared to hate this fucking movie. Sometimes I like to get angry, and that’s fun in and of itself, BUT I kinda LOVED this movie, and was shocked. Were you horribly disappointed since you had benchmarks and love and stuff?
Balk: I sort of understood why they cut what they cut and added what they added. And I have a couple of issues with it, I guess, but I generally really enjoyed it. The fact that it is a valentine to the female ass did not hurt either.
Mary: And boobs. So many great boobs.
Balk: I was too busy focusing on the asses.
Mary: Beeeeeeeeeee ITALIAN!
Balk: Ha! Let me ask you a question: I take it you were totally unfamiliar with plot and score? Or had you seen “8 1/2?”
Mary: I have seen “8 1/2 “ but in the background of parties. Not like sitting down and watching it all the way through and then thinking hard about it.
Balk: How Felliniesque.
Mary: With sunglasses.
Balk: So I’m wondering what you loved about it? A couple of people I talked to who did not have the same prior knowledge I brought to it were unimpressed; they thought the songs were too samey. How did it work for you?
Mary: Well here’s the thing: I didn’t even really know that it was a musical. Because I filed that tidbit of information somewhere and lost it. So to me it was just this movie with an all-star cast and then I read the press notes and wanted to kill myself or leave but was in midtown and it was very cold outside. SO. The opening was GAHROSS.
Balk: That’s actually not dissimilar to how the show opened. Was it too stagy for you?
Mary: And the DDL’s accent was ridiculous and I didn’t understand it and was immediately worried that we’d have to see Dame Dench and Sophia Loren do sexymenopausy stuff and want to puke. And I hated how the opener was this highlight reel of what to expect next etc/intro of the cast and characters. BUT. Here’s where it works for me: I hate musicals because I hate when people explode into song. It’s like unexpected slam poetry. It’s so aggressive. The fact that all of this was SUPPOSED to be onstage and stuff made it easier for me to digest as a hater of musicals. I knew it was coming and that made it better.
Balk: Yeah, they did a good job of keeping the songs discrete from the action.
Mary: AND the fact that at the end of the day these actresses are so fucking talented and sucking all the juju from a room and puking it back at you. They’re SO good at that energy suck and snowball, and I love that. And the action wasn’t just some hackneyed stitching the musicals bits together; I was interested in the story. AND it was BEAUTIFUL. The styling was AMAZING.
Balk: That was another question, did the story work for you? I mean, I am a man of a certain age, but I could really FEEL Day-Lewis’ agony, etc. Did that come through?
Mary: Well. I’m not sitting there thinking I have anything in common with DDL other than wanting to fuck Penelope Cruz and wifing Cotillard. BUT. I definitely understand having to be around a creative who’s being a big old baby about the significance of the work they do. Also, I live in New York and date in New York so the hypochondriac thing was very well done and recognizable. I see myself as the Dench character most of all, I guess.
Balk: The chick who does the clothes.
Mary: No, the chick who coddles the dude because he’s SOOOOO special for being a dude. He was being a very convincing man of a certain age.
Balk: Agree. And the women! I thought they were all great. Biggest surprise (outside of Cotillard, who I regret to admit I have never seen in anything before) was that Fergie was actually pretty good.
Mary: YES. Because she was fat. Well, not like an actual fat person. But I like that she LOOKED like a whore.
Balk: She totally nailed the Italian beach hooker look.
Mary: Absolutely. It reminded me of the Chris Isaak/Helena Christensen vid, in part, which is STILL CLASSIC. Also she reeeeeeeeked of sex. Stank. And that was great. But she really turned it out in a highly complex HELLA choreographed number. Was the choreography the same as the OG musical? I was partly blown away by that, how emotive it was.
Balk: I think this was a lot more stylized and over the top. Which I expect has something to do with Rob Marshall? (I never saw “Chicago” either.)
Mary: “Chicago” was crap. It was boring and shitty and completely devoid of sexuality. It was Svedka robots in comparison.
Balk: Ha. Well this movie was for sure all sex all the time.
Mary: YES. That Penelope Cruz number where she’s essentially fully clothed but oh my god SO NOT CLOTHED. It was insane. The curvature of her ass was obscene.
Balk: Yeah, that was the ass that should get the Best Ass Oscar, if they’ve added that category.Mary: They should add that and just make a really elaborate reel. What did you think of Hudson? Easily could’ve been the weakest link, maybe other than Fergs.
Balk: Pleasantly surprised. It’s a new song, so I wasn’t in love with it, but I felt like she worked it.
Mary: I was NOT MAD at her and I hate her pointy head! It’s the first time she gave me a little Goldie.
Balk: Yes.
Mary: Can you imagine how tense that girl must’ve been? That was terror dancing and I loved it. That set must’ve been psychologically rough.
Balk: There was that kind of off-kilter vibrancy that you get from her mom but rarely see in her.
Mary: YES. Also balls out, where she’s not wondering what she looks like because she trusts the process.
Balk: Yeah, she totally gave into it.
Mary: Which is what made this movie for me. Everyone decided to go in. I would’ve hated it if the casting had been in anyway different, because I just wouldn’t have suspended the disbelief/animosity. I just wouldn’t have gone with. But I went. It was kinda a succubus orgy
Balk: Nicole Kidman: I think she may be the only part of the movie that was not 100%?
Mary: I did not like her. She was beautiful. Her costumes were flawless. Her lighting was incredibly generous. BUT. Bitch can’t sing. It’s like “Moulin Rouge” where I’m wondering the whole time why the fuck these assholes are yelling at me. It was the whispery version of that.
Balk: Yeah, she seemed a little, I dunno, flat? It didn’t feel like she brought the same energy. And yeah, part of that is the character, but Cotillard has this one down-tempo ballad that she totally rocked.
Mary: Cotillard can make her retinae quiver in a gonzo way, but, yeah, with Kidman, it’s not character: It was her larynx. I thought about Randy Jackson, and how he’d call her performance pitchy. It was HELLA pitchy. Girl didn’t know where she was going. Honestly, and I know this sounds assy, I just don’t think she practiced as much as the others. Boom.
Balk: Oooh, you went there.
Mary: And she looks like a retard in a fedora, as many people do.
Balk: Do you think they were all intimidated by Sophia Loren being there?
Mary: Intimidated as in concerned she might have a thrombosis? Man, Sophia is OLD and kinda nuts looking. But her sternum is youthful, I noticed.
Balk: I am glad you are the one who said that.Mary: Dude, she looked wild. And not like, yum, feral Italian.
Balk: Because I cannot. It would be like insulting God’s girlfriend.
Mary: God’s goomar.
Balk: She _is_ 75.
Mary: Yeah. I can’t even tell if she LOOKS GREAT FOR HER AGE, because the superolds are like the babies.
Balk: Okay, I think we hit all the chicks. What about Day-Lewis? I agree with you about the accent, which sounded Russian in some parts. But then again, this is Daniel Day-Lewis. He spent TWO years researching or something? Maybe that’s exactly what an Italian born in some 1920s Marchese city would sound like speaking English?
Mary: BUT. The thing that I thought was interesting about DDL is that it’s the first time I heard his real life speaking voice accent in an accent. Like, if you think about “There Will Be Blood,” that was a viscous dark NOT HIS REAL VOICE accent, and he stayed with it throughout. This Italian accent was this weird Russian thing but then, every third voice, there it was—his real life talking/giving interviews voice. And that shocked me, since he’s so good at accents.
Balk: Maybe he was too worried about the singing. Which I thought he handled fine, btw.
Mary: His singing was GREAT. He also went for it. And it wasn’t fancy: It was solid, with a confident delivery.
Balk: Here is the thing that really worked for me about the movie, and what works for me about the musical in general:
Mary: It’s all you. Go.
Balk: There’s a line in Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened” that is one of my favorite things ever. The main character says, “I know at last what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up I want to be a little boy.” And what this story is about is someone who is still basically a little boy in appetites and selfishness and the rest of it, being forced to actually grow up. And it works. You believe it.
Mary: This is true.
Balk: The final shot of the movie, which I don’t want to spoil, is so perfect. I don’t know if you saw “Life Aquatic,” but that ends with Bill Murray lifting the little boy on his shoulders and walking out triumphantly. It’s a beautiful shot, but it feels cheap, because I don’t think that movie EARNED it. This one, however, oh my God, it works so well.
Mary: YES. I agree with the final shot of the movie.
Balk: I love the whole end, the curtain call type thing.
Mary: Yes. There needs to be a German word for this bromantic nostalgia dudes feel for the purest form of themselves which is them as a wee kid. It’s so “Transformers” Optimus Prime dying. I don’t think it belongs to me.
Balk: Haha. Weirdly, it ties into this longstanding theory I have about why men take breakups harder than women do.
Mary: That is a different post.
Balk: Fair enough. Finally, my big takeaway from the movie was that I want to grow out my hair like Daniel Day-Lewis’ if I still can.Mary: OH MY GOD YOU TOTALLY SHOULD! I think long hair is coming back in, or at least, or that length hair. It goes with smoking for sure.
Balk: So much smoking in the movie. Loved it.
Mary: You know what it is? It’s irresponsible sex hair.
Balk: Yes.
Mary: That’s good hair.
Balk: That is what I want to convey, irresponsible sex.
Mary: If you got it, smoke it.
The 9 Most Provocative Sex Science Stories of 2009
The pursuit of pleasure. Men who are very sexually active in their 20s and 30s — especially those who masturbate frequently — are at higher risk for prostate cancer, said researchers at the University of Nottingham. But that risk decreases as a man ages, and once he's in his 50s, even small levels of sexual activity can help protect him from the disease. via www.livescience.com Masturbation causes cancer! Also, "Pulling out works." (She said that, really!)
The sun never sets on Shake Shack
The Shake Shack is turning into Danny Meyer's accidental fast food empire.
Tags: Danny Meyer food NYC restaurants Shake Shack"A hamburger stand is a very democratizing amenity," he said. "We hope that each new Shake Shack can become both a citizen of, and mirror of, their communities."
There You Are, Rene Russo!
We had to ask, back in September: where the heck are you, Rene Russo? Great news! Or at least: news! “Rene Russo joins cast of ‘Thor’: Actress set to play Frigga, mother of Norse hero.” Yes. Opposite Anthony Hopkins. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. I don’t know either! But we’ll take it.
CNN: Scientists spot nearby 'super-Earth'
CNN: Scientists spot nearby 'super-Earth':
So, wait a minute… an Earth-like planet 2.7 times bigger than ours (2.7 times our gravity), orbiting a red sun, 40 light years away? Sounds like Krypton to me. Super-Earth indeed!
The secrets behind menu design
In “Menu Mind Games,” William Poundstone dissects this Balthazar menu and tells you the logic behind its design.
Can you guess the tricks being used here? Click image to find out.
The piece offers a revealing look at how restaurants use typography and layout to drive customers toward high priced items. Also interesting is the strange jargon used by industry insiders, like puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses.
A star is a popular, high-profit item—in other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make. A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.Related:
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone [Amazon]
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill [Amazon]
Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton Film Trailer
A new trailer for Alice in Wonderland has hit the net, featuring even more scenes from the highly anticipated film by prolific director Tim Burton. The film is due to theaters in March of 2010 and stars a cast of top tier actors, including Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, and Crispin Glover. Check it out!
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Post tags: Films, Tim Burton, Videos
The Best Potatoes for Latkes
Po-tate-oh, po-tot-oh? Or do you believe certain types of potatoes make better latkes than others? According to kitchenhacker.net, between Russet and Yukon Gold, it all came down to nostalgia via www.seriouseats.com Erin Zimmer was momentarily struck from my blogger pantheon with her pronouncement that "Montreal > NYC". She was talking about bagels, but still. Anyway, she's back with the best potatoes for latkes, great post. By the way, here's the New York Times, rehashing the same points Erin & Serious Eats had just three weeks later. How do they get away with that kind of thing?
Lost Art
Here you will find a collection of underground art inspired by the television program “Lost.” Do with that what you will.
Surprise Industries
Rocketboom’s Ella Morton meets up with Surprise Industries in NYC to learn about the business of crafting surprises.
The Known Universe
The Known Universe zooms out from Tibet to the limits of the observable universe. Dim the lights, full-screen it in HD, and you're in for a treat.
Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It's not a dramatization, it's a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium's Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.
Tags: long zoom maps space videoSince 1998, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium have engaged in the three-dimensional mapping of the Universe. This cosmic cartography brings a new perspective to our place in the Universe and will redefine your sense of home. The Digital Universe Atlas is distributed to you via packages that contain our data products, like the Milky Way Atlas and the Extragalactic Atlas, and requires free software allowing you to explore the atlas by flying through it on your computer.
LED traffic lights don't melt snow, do cause accidents
A number of cold weather American states are reporting their dismay at finding out that LED traffic lights are so energy efficient that they do not produce enough excess heat to dissipate any snow that covers them. It turns out, perhaps in an homage to bad engineering everywhere, that the inefficiency of incandescent light bulbs was previously relied upon to keep traffic signals unimpeded. The new LEDs do not achieve the same effect, which has resulted in a few accidents and even a death being blamed on obstructed traffic lights. Feel free to apply palm to face now. It's not all gloomy, though, as the majority of people are said to treat a dysfunctional traffic light as a stop sign (how clever of them), and a tech fix is being worked on as we speak.
LED traffic lights don't melt snow, do cause accidents originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Going to Vermont for a White Christmas? Relax - you'll have 3G service
Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone
So, you and your song-and-dance partner have decided that you're going to follow a few classy dames that you met at a nightclub in Florida up to Pine Tree, Vermont, where they're going to be spending the Christmas holidays performing their sister act at a lodge. The only problem is, you have AT&T service and you've heard that 3G service is nonexistent anywhere in the Green Mountain State. How are you going to be able to stream a live video from your iPhone 3GS to the Ed Harrison show so you can get your old Army buddies together for a tribute to the lodge owner, who is the General you served under in WW2?
There will be no problems this White Christmas, since AT&T is in the process of lighting up their 3G network in Vermont starting today. This week, service will roll out in Bennington, Brattleboro, Brownsville, Killington, Vernon, Warren, West Dover, and White River Junction. By New Year's Eve, service will be extended to Burlington, Colchester, Essex Junction, Fayston, Hartford, Jamaica, Jeffersonville, Middlebury, Rutland, South Burlington, St. Albans, Stowe, Waitsfield, West Rutland, West Townshend, West Wardsboro, Williston, and Winooski. In the first quarter of 2010, Barre, Montpelier, and Northfield will finally see the light of 3G goodness glowing in their iPhones.
Wait a second... I didn't see Pine Tree in that list. Maybe it's not going to be a Merry Christmas after all!
[A tip of the TUAW Santa hat to Vermont resident Bradly for sending us the news]TUAWGoing to Vermont for a White Christmas? Relax - you'll have 3G service originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 17 Dec 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Wrenching on the Moon
Astronauts take a lot of shit for basically having the same job as a Russian dog, but before you punch your next astronaut, consider this tale from Wikipedia:
The fender extension on the Apollo 17 Lunar Rover broke when accidentally bumped by Eugene Cernan with a hammer handle. The crew taped the extension back in place, but due to the dusty surfaces, the tape did not adhere and the extension was lost after about one hour of driving, causing the astronauts to be covered with dust. For the second EVA, a replacement “fender” was made with some EVA maps, duct tape, and a pair of clamps from inside the Lunar Module - nominally intended for the moveable overhead light. This repair was later undone so that the clamps could be brought back inside for launch.That is insane. Astronauts all loading Capri Sun-shaped Miller Lites into their spacesuits’ Personal Drink Systems before heading back out to the Rover. One astronaut doing all the work while the other one stands over him saying, “Oh? You’re using a #6 space wrench on that? I’d’ve probably gone with a #4.” The fact that the astronauts brought duct tape to the moon. Mad Men has painted a pretty bleak picture of American men of the 60s, but those Camel Filter-smoking buzzcuts had enough practical sense to put a couple rolls of duct tape in the spaceship they were building, just in case.
The Wikipedia article about the LRV goes on to mention that NASA built a spare rover that they ended up using as a parts car. Presumably stashed under a tarp in the back lot of NASA, NASA’s wife complaining every few months about how long its been sitting there. I never realized it before but NASA is basically a middle-aged baby boomer dad. Born in the 1950s, raised on comic book dreams of exploring deep space in a rocket ship, NASA showed a lot of promise as youngster. As NASA grew up, everyone told it to be realistic, focus on practical things closer to home: Velcro, Tang, pens that work upside down. Sure, it was taking care of its responsibilities, but its dreams faded away. Where did the last three decades go? One day it shows up out of nowhere with a sporty little car that can drive on Mars, it says the van is too old and besides it doesn’t need it anymore. Jeez, mid-life crisis much, NASA? Now, it spends all its time doing fix-up work on an expensive second home it can’t really afford, and never gets to spend any time at anyway.
Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 17
I wonder what sort of psychological profile one could draw from my favorite childhood possessions. I neither played nor followed football, but clung to my NFL lunchbox that showed all the team helmets with their different insignia. I had no special interest in English History, but was fascinated by the chart in our living room that traced the succession of British monarchs from William the Conqueror to Queen Elizabeth II. A kindergarten teacher gave me a chart of rocks and minerals found in the northeast; a kindly docent at the South Street Seaport Museum gave me a diagram showing how to communicate the alphabet using morse code, semaphore, and maritime signal flags. The list goes on and on, and only a graphic designer will understand the common thread: I had a thing for data visualization.
Whether these objects provoked my interest in design or simply resonated with it, they were marvelous things to have around as a kid. I’m therefore delighted to see that a company called HistoryShots is offering for sale a similar collection of visually engaging prints, not merely suitable for framing but actually framed. Clockwise from top left: The History of the Union Army and Confederate Army, The Conquest of Mount Everest, Visualizing The Bible, Death and Taxes, The History of Political Parties (Part II), and the Race to the Moon. —JH
Information Graphics Posters from HistoryShots
December 16, 2009
the secret of the book
David Jacobs has been telling me that I absolutely have to read Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball; it's 700 pages long and Simmons post on ESPN.com about the bits that didn't make it into the book are what's convincing me.
That, and grafs like this:
A big theme of my book is The Secret of winning basketball, something Isiah Thomas explains to me at a topless pool in Las Vegas. (The Secret, in a nutshell: Teams only win titles when their best players forget about statistics, sublimate their own games for the greater good and put their egos on hold.)
I like this Secret, and who wouldn't want to hear stories about Isiah Thomas in Vegas? There goes my holiday break...
Here's a lot of money, now shut up
The New York Times has a piece on a recent Goldman Sachs partner reunion and discussion about how the firm has changed since the late 90's when it went public. All sorts of sniping and nostalgising about how things used to be. Interesting article if you're into the inside baseball of investment banking.
But the best line was buried deep into page one.
None of these people were willing to speak out publicly about Goldman, which, for most of them, has been the source of sizable fortunes.
And the second best was buried deep into page two.
But even people close to Goldman acknowledge that as long as the bank is making a lot of money, public opinion does not matter all that much.
Life is so simple in banking. Very clear priorities.
The Scouting NY Guide To The Big Apple
Dear Scout – Love your site! I’ll be visiting Manhattan for the first time in a few weeks, but I’ll only be in town for a few days. Can you offer any advice on what to see/do in my short time there? Thanks! – A Frequent Reader
Every week, I receive a number of emails asking what I’d recommend covering on a visit to NYC – not the obscure, quirky, and out of the way stuff that I tend to write about, but rather, my favorite major attractions and sights. Well, here it is, for tourists and locals alike, I present you with the long overdue…
First off: DO NOT FEAR THE SUBWAY. The subway is not the gritty, dangerous underground hovel you remember from such movies as The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. The system is now safe, cheap, extremely easy to use, and at times, a work of art. Don’t believe me? Check out this great entrance near Fifth Avenue:
Don’t want to confuse you though – Most subway entrances look like this:
Common mistake: just because a subway line is a certain color doesn’t mean its trains make identical stops. For example, while both the W and D “yellow line” trains stop at 18th Street, one is express and the other is local. Ask for a free subway map at the teller booths located at every station. Also, be sure the subway entrance actually leads somewhere.
Another great way to travel through the city and see it at the same time: take a bus! Far cheaper than a cab and with much bigger windows for taking in the view, you can catch a bus within a block of anywhere (so nice of the MTA to spring for holiday decorations for this kiosk, what with the Doomsday budget cuts and all):
No brainer: Central Park. Find an entrance and just go exploring. I could write up a walking tour, but that’d take away the excitement of all the treasures there are to stumble upon on your own. Beware of numerous souvenir stands lining the walks selling every sort of cheap knick-knack imaginable, from key chains to cigarette lighters.
And sure, everyone knows Central Park, but Manhattan actually has a number of other wonderful “green spaces” worth visiting: Riverside Park, Washington Square Park, and Gramercy Park, pictured below:
Make sure to try one of the park’s funnel cakes, known among locals as the authentic New York treat!
Next up: no visit to New York would be complete without a trip to the world famous Plaza Hotel, home to the lovable storybook character Eloise and the backdrop for such movies as North by Northwest and Home Alone 2: Lost in NY.
As you may have read in the news, the Plaza has gone through some hard times financially in recent years, resulting in an ownership change and major renovation work that unfortunately included the removal of most of the upper floors. Still, the lobby remains largely intact, and is unparalleled in beauty. Have a drink in the Oak Room bar – just watch out for any pages for George Kaplan!
Grand Central Station is a must-see – I guarantee the cathedral-like interior will leave you breathless. The exterior has been decorated for the holidays, as seen below.
Next up: the Flatiron building, located at 23rd Street and Broadway (note the Christmas decorations spanning Fifth Avenue):
The Flatiron Building, or Fuller Building, designed by Daniel Burnham to fill an unusual triangular lot, was completed in 1902 and at the time was city’s tallest building. The front angle measures a minuscule 25 degrees!
Another archetypal symbol of the city, the New York Public Library’s main branch building is an incredible example of Beaux-Arts design. Two lions flank the exterior; they were given the names “Patience” and “Fortitude” in the 1930’s by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the two qualities he felt New Yorkers needed to survive the Great Depression.
Recently, a controversial track has been erected in front of the library as part of a new state-of-the-art mass transit system being built throughout the city. While historians and conservationists have denounced it as an utter desecration to the magnificent landmark, the MTA maintains that it is worth the “115+ mph speeds New Yorkers will come to rely on in their daily commutes.”
Though often thought to be over 40 blocks away, the Guggenheim Museum is actually located just next to the Library (visible in the above picture) and features a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art pieces. If the admission price is too steep for you, at least take a moment to admire the “coffee-cup”-like exterior, a work of art in itself.
In the mood for shopping? Be sure to swing by the enormous two-story Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street, which shares an entire city block with just one other building! Bringing the kids? Take them by to Santa’s Workshop for a Christmas they won’t soon forget.
This gorgeous archetypal Tribeca firehouse is another unfortunate victim of the city’s new mass transit project. Sold off by the FDNY in the mid-80’s, a thriving paranormal investigations/eliminations company was forced to vacate the premises under questionable eminent domain laws to make way for a portion of the track.
Be sure to take a trip through Little Italy. Though significantly diminished in size over the years, it stills retains much of its authentic character, as evidenced by this strip of restaurants: Louie’s Bar & Grill, Louie’s Restaurant, and Louie’s Italian Restaurant.
Another NY Public Library branch, proving that all are worth a visit.
Last but not least: I know it’s a trek, but if you’re driving in from JFK via the Long Island Expressway, you should think strongly about visiting Flushing Meadows in Queens, home to the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs (I wrote an extensive post about the park here). Below, two of the observation decks from the fair, both in excellent condition.
And that concludes the first edition of the Scouting NY Guide to the Big Apple! Hopefully, this helps you out-of-towners plan your next city vacation itinerary. And who knows? Maybe some of you local readers have learned that the city is a bit different than you ever knew.
-SCOUT
PS – As always, if you’ve made it this far, think about subscribing to our RSS feed, Facebook page or Twitter account for future updates!
The Twelve Days of Cardmas - Day 4
On the third day of Cardmas, my true love gave to me.....Four Mayo InsertsThree World on Wheels,Two Baby Bullsand The Most Awesome Card in All of History.RAWWR!!!! HISS!!! RAAAR!!! HIIISSSS!!!! GAAACK!
Buzz: Mets have Agreement with Igarashi
Patrick Newman fom NPB Tracker believes the Mets have a basic agreement to sign 30–year-old free-agent RHP Ryota Igarashi; the New York Post has a source who says the have reached agreement with Igarashi, as well.
…this is good news… he’s far from a guarentee, not even close… but, any one i talked with about him was impressed, and felt he has a lot of potential…
…earlier this week, the New York Times said the Mets were close to signing him to a two-year deal, which i believe will end up being for around $1 or $2 million per season…
The 30–year-old Igarashi was 3-2 with a 3.19 ERA in 56 games with the Yakult Swallows last year.
…i am told he has a serious, mid-90s fastball, and a hard splitter, which sits in the upper 80s… he can throw a curve ball, but rarely uses it in short relief… the concern is how he will adjust to the smaller, major-league strike zone, as he tends to struggle with control from time to time…
Mets GM Omar Minaya had been in contact with Bobby Valentine, in an effort to learn more about Igarashi, according to a report in November from Hochi Sports.
…from what i can gather, he was being pursued most heavily by the Yankees, Red Sox, Indians, Pirates, Orioles and Padres, all of whom saw him as a major-league reliever…
The Best Potatoes for Latkes
Russet vs. Yukon Gold: Does it really matter?
Russet potato. [Flickr: sea turtle]
Po-tate-oh, po-tot-oh? Or do you believe certain types of potatoes make better latkes than others? According to kitchenhacker.net, between Russet and Yukon Gold, it all came down to nostalgia:
The Yukon Gold had a bit more of a yellow color to them, but other than that I couldn't really tell them apart by sight. I am generally a fan of Yukon Gold potatoes, but I was worried that they wouldn't fry up as nicely as the Russets (of which I am less of a fan). The consistency of the two latkes, though, was remarkably similar. They each had a crispy browned outside and a creamy inside that tasted strongly of potato.
The Russet potato had nostalgia going for it. These were the latkes that I grew up eating...The Yukon Gold made a good, solid latke that I can't find any fault with...but holiday foods in general are tremendously caught up in nostalgia, and I found myself unable to judge what latke was best on its own merits. I kept coming back to the fact that the Russet tasted more like a latke to me.
Do you consider one potato as being more of the latke potato?
Related
Mixed Review: Manischewitz and Gefen Potato Latkes
Serious Sandwiches: Junior's Latke Sandwich
Celeriac Potato Pancakes with Apple Crème Fraîche
Browser Size: a tool to see how others view your website
In a newspaper, the most important story is featured on the front page. If it's a really important piece, then it's placed "above the fold," which means you can find it on the top half of the first page — the bottom half is folded behind and isn't readily seen when you first look at the newspaper.
The same concept applies to browsers as well. There's no clear line for "above the fold" on a browser — there are many different sizes of monitors, browsers are not always full screen and other things like toolbars can take up space. Consider a "Donate" button on a non-profit site. If it's far down the page, you may not see it when you first view the page. You can of course scroll downwards, but many people don't scroll and will miss it entirely. For example, on the download page for Google Earth, the install rate increased by 10% when we moved the "Download" button 100 pixels upward. We can attribute that increase to users who wanted to try out Google Earth, but didn't see the button before.
To help you understand how everyone sees your website, we created a tool called Browser Size in our 20% time. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience. We hope people will use this tool to make their websites better, in turn making the web better for everyone.
If you're interested in learning more about Browser Size, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.
Posted by Bruno Bowden, Senior Software Engineer
Code Talking
I asked him if this framework could grant my wish of an article-specific corrections feed or sign-up feature, and he said yes. Django-correx took him a few hours to develop and a few more to improve. Now anyone can download the code to use and improve it. Django-correx was never implemented by the Times (“I came up with technology to solve a problem, and then we decided we didn’t want to solve it anymore”), but Welsh has a very basic implementation of it on his personal Web site, Palewire. Just click on the red loop icon that’s positioned sixth from the left on the top menu bar and you’ll be brought to an automatically generated online corrections page. Click on the post listed there and you’ll see the highlighted correction appear at the top. via www.cjr.org SSSSShaw calls this a "news blob."
The Brevity of Enthusiasms, or, OMFG ‘Avatar’ FTW!
“‘Get ready to get sick of hearing about this band’: it would be difficult to think of a more apt motto for indie rock—or any niche culture, for that matter—in the age of the Internet.” —Bill Wasik, And Then There’s This.
I have a confession to make. Voting closed in the LA Weekly/Village Voice Film Poll on December 9th, and so, because the screenings of Avatar took place in the few days that followed, there followed The Avatar Amendment. An email went out that said that revised ballots would be accepted on the 11th. I read this email immediately upon my return from the Avatar screening. And so: “Um, yeah…,” I wrote back. “Can you just bump all my ten ranked movies down one and put Avatar at number one? *Hangs head in shame*”
A couple of things.
1. Why, I wonder now, did I feel shame about my enthusiasm? (I reject the “guilty pleasure” and all the bullshit that such a bad idea carries with it. You like it? Own it. You enjoy it? ROLL AROUND IN IT.)
Of course I didn’t want to like Avatar. I don’t love this year’s crop of blow-’em-up movies, or really, even this year’s crop of movies. (When Kurt Andersen reported that there were “12 superb new American movies this year,” I had to sit down for half an hour and still I’d only came up with three.)
And as far as James Cameron goes, I hated Titanic, loved Aliens, will watch True Lies or any Terminator any time it crops up on cable and am resolutely neutral on the highly-controversial issue of The Abyss. And so I think that I felt bad, a little bit, even as I knew I shouldn’t, for loving a film that intends to be (AND WILL BE, OH BOY, AND HOW) a huge-money, super-pop blockbuster. Even though, really, Avatar has just a bit more in common with GI Joe: The Rise of Crap than it does with, hmm, I dunno, a nice Evelyn Waugh book.
Still, clearly I was concerned about myself, if I look at what I wrote in that email as if I were my own therapist. (The man who has himself as a therapist has a fool for a patient, obvs, etc.) What if, with my enthusiasm, I was being a very small part of something larger, and something bad? What if I was rewarding a movie that was not as good as I thought it was?
What if my sense of shame actually indicated that I didn’t trust myself? What if I had just been enthralled?
2. So, why did I just pop it in as apparently my #1 favorite movie of the year? There are a couple reasons. One is that the voting took place on some crazy online form so I have no idea how I actually voted. What did I have as the number one film before I saw Avatar? I cannot remember. Was it the spectacular Broken Embraces? All I know is that Drag Me To Hell was in the top five somewhere, which makes me giggle. And so, instead of saying “Put Avatar in at #4, and move x movie to y spot,” I lazily popped it up top.
But there was more to it than that.
The fresh take, unfortunately for these times, is actually not the most trustworthy. For one thing, there is the mammalian brain to consider (memory just isn’t as sexily-colored as the present. Memory is warm and sort of yellow-brown and comfortable; it’s not usually sharp and exciting and certainly its 3D isn’t very good). And, when confronted with spectacle—MASSIVE, RAGING SPECTACLE, in the case of Avatar—one is forced to go all in or not at all.
Leaving Avatar is like leaving a crazy relationship or one of the lesser cults—it’s pretty much all you can think about, or all you want to talk about, if you can handle talking about it at all. But then, so is being at almost anything that is considered “big” now, as you know if you have ever been on Twitter or Tumblr during a Giants game or an episode of that awful new MTV reality show. (Even Roger Ebert hops on his blog ASAP after a screening these days.) It’s all the best, or the most outrageous, or the craziest—but only for 30 minutes. Like you really care, the morning after, what that stranger said on the TV last night?
Five days later, do I really have a firm sense of how much, or how little, I liked Avatar?
Now we really do have a heaving world of mass culture analysis, long-predicted, that takes place so soon after, or even during, the fact, so that everything is always the most. And the most-defining as well. “Choice in respect to trivial matters… assumed an importance that no one could have thought to predict.” For a while now, the things—theproducts—that you love are the things you are. And you will tell us (and I will tell you) all about them, as soon as humanly possible. I also wonder, though, do we find that our thoughts from last week are holding up so well this week?
N.B. The Awl’s Chief Film Critic, Mary HK Choi, will be reviewing Avatar on Friday. Like, maybe all day on Friday.
Bill Simmons: The lost pages from my book
Finally, I visited the Nike compound in Oregon recently and soon realized the company's approach is about 200 times more complex than I'd imagined. I'd always thought it signed someone, designed a cool-looking shoe for the guy, then mailed it to him. Nope. Nike brings many of its athletes to its campus, runs them through elaborate tests, breaks down their mechanics (not just the structure of their feet, but the way each body part relates to all the others) and everything else. The company takes pride in its guys not suffering major foot or ankle injuries.The trip made me think of Grant Hill. In 1997, Fila blew him away with a massive $80 million deal meant to splash the company into the basketball market. With Nike and Reebok heatedly bidding for NBA stars, Fila went a different route: It threw the bulk of its basketball marketing budget behind Hill. But after staying healthy for six seasons, Hill injured his ankle and missed much of the next decade. Could his shoes have contributed to his woes? In any case, Fila doesn't sponsor NBA players or compete in that market anymore.Yes, it could be coincidence, and yes, Fila surely was careful in customizing its shoe for Hill. But if a publishing company that printed only a couple of books a year tried to sign me, would I think, Do they have enough experience to publish mine? Damned right I would. The whole thing is weird. Keep in mind, it's usually bigs who battle chronic foot and ankle issues, not athletic swing guys. After my visit, I realized "What if Grant Hill had signed with Nike?" was a natural for my "Greatest What-Ifs?" chapter. Hill was headed for Level 3 or 4 of my Hall of Fame Pyramid, but he didn't make it. What if his career detour wasn't just bad luck? It's a great hypothetical, you have to admit. via sports.espn.go.com There are 14 other "lost pages," but this is the best one.
What's the deal with fish oil?
So says the first line of Paul Greenberg's story on fish oil. Which is weird for me because I had been wondering this very thing in my bathroom the other day while staring at my wife's bottle of omega-3 pills.
Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.
Menhaden are also top-notch algae eaters and, no surprise, overfished. (via djacobs)
Tags: fish food Paul Greenberg
Not Just a Pop Star
We know, we know, some of you are moving to a point of Gaga saturation. Some of us, however, are not--especially when she keeps doing cool projects in the world of fashion.
The Lady is the latest guest to curate a collection for Not Just A Label. You can now buy some of the one of kind pieces she's worn--from the "Paparazzi" eye patch by AND_i to an Ascione cape that Gaga first spotted when she was in the Dazed & Confused offices.
Obviously most of Gaga's are not for the mild-mannered fashion fan. Not to worry there are still pieces for sale from Lara Stone's picks. And I have no shame in admitting that personally I'm much more likely to go with Taylor Swift's Sia Dimitriadi dress choice for the site.
If you go for the eye patch, though, please do send us a snapshot of how you style it.
Obey Rapha
From Twitter:
Heard others wonder if Rapha actually sold anything or if it was a sophisticated social marketing campaign not unlike Andre has a Posse
or Obey Giant …
Are Classics Classy? The Roman View
Mary Beard
Aulus Gellius writing in his study, from a 1706 edition of his Attic NightsWhat is a “classic”? Is it simply (as Frank Kermode, I think, once put it) an old book that we still read? Or is there something a bit more sinister to the whole idea? An old book you feel you ought to have read? Or is it more casually serendipitous: An old book you have rediscovered and want to share with the world? And what does a “classicist” (in the Greek-and-Latin sense of the word) have to contribute to the debate?
I have just taken part in a couple of events sponsored by The New York Review in England, hosted to celebrate the tenth anniversary of NYRB Classics (whose definition of classic is, I think, closest to the last that I have just mentioned…the “serendipitous rediscovery” version). In these two bookshop discussions on “what is a classic?,” I was there to speak for the ancient world, where the word classicus in Latin was first used.
The truth is that I wasn’t hugely looking forward to this. For the Latin word classicus was closely related to the hierarchy of Roman wealth. All citizens were divided into wealth classes, which—by an ingenious and extremely complicated system—managed to give much greater voting power to the rich than to the poor. The usual idea is that classicus means “of the first class”—and, when applied metaphorically to literature, it equates “the classic” with political, social and economic power. (Pretty much all Roman writers were wealthy—even those who complained how poor they were.)
My job in these discussions, in other words, would be to explain how and why the Romans saw literature in these hierarchical and ultimately conservative terms—before the other discussants went on to have fun taking that idea to pieces.
Happily, when I looked at what the Romans actually wrote about literary “classics,” I found it a good deal less obvious than I had always thought. In fact, you could argue that Roman writers were as puzzled as we are about the definition of “the classic.”
As it turns out, the Latin adjective is very rarely used. In our sense of the “classic,” the crucial author is the second-century AD academic, Aulus Gellius, who wrote a compendium of miscellaneous information and rhetorical learning, entitled the Attic Nights (the title, he claims, comes from the fact that he started to gather the information together during long winter nights he spent in Attica, the region of Greece around Athens).
Two passages of this long book are particularly relevant to the idea of the “classic” and tend to upset an idea of Roman conservative literary hierarchy. In the first (Book 6, 13), Gellius is worrying about what Marcus Cato meant, three centuries earlier by the word classicus. He was referring only to the men of the first class, Gellius insists—but, reassuringly, he observes that people do often wonder what classicus actually means. (First piece of good news: even the Romans were in a dilemma over this.)
The second passage is the famous occasion on which Aulus Gellius (for the first time, so far as we know) used the word classicus metaphorically to refer to literature (Book 19, 8). In the section of this discussion that is always quoted, Gellius defers to a “classicus or assiduus writer” (translated as “authoritative,” assiduus is another word that comes from Roman political hierarchy)—that is, he explains, “one who is not proletarius.” It looks at first sight like a fairly conclusive proof of the link between “classic” and “classy” writers.
But it is not so simple. For a start, this is the only time in “classical Latin” that the word classicus is used to refer to writing. But even more to the point, the topic at issue, for which the view of a classicus writer is sought, is a real surprise. The debate at this part of the Attic Nights is all about whether some Latin words can only be used in the plural, others only in the singular. Harena (sand), it is said, can only be used in the singular, quadrigae (chariot) only in the plural.
So far so good. But the joke is that if this (as is implied) is the view of the classicus and not proletarius writer, then the classicus is wrong—both words are reliably found in both singular and plural.
Our conclusion must be (as it so often is with these problematic terms) that the term classicus was born problematic. The Romans, just as puzzled as we are, would have joined in our debates.
The Noughtie List highlights, pt 2
Hi there again, it's Jenni. You may have noticed some slight changes to the list. We've made it easier to tell whether something has been recently added to the list; there is a red asterisk next to links less than three days old. Also, if you are curious, there is a counter that says how many links are listed. Nice.
Last week I highlighted defining the decade. This week I'm going to jump around the list a bit and highlight some of the cool finds that have come in through the inbox and my research.
One of the things to have come out of this decade is great TV shows. The quality of these shows were often better than movies. This decade is when TV became art.
But as this decade began, it had already begun to dawn on viewers that television was something that you could not just merely enjoy and then discard but brood over and analyze, that could challenge and elevate, not just entertain.
It feels like there was more music than ever produced and which albums, groups, and songs made the biggest impact is hard to choose. The lists vary dramatically about the number one album of the decade. Simon Reynolds dissects this musically fragmented decade.
More and more good-to-excellent music is getting produced but that very fact is thwarting the emergence of the great, smothering it. The bigger the spread, the more "we" are spread. And the less impact any given record can have.
I was told by readers (thanks Matt & Eric) that Greg Wyshynski aka Puck Daddy has a great collection of hockey Top 10, including the 10 best hockey games. But my favorite is the 10 best hockey fights, which includes video. Enjoy.
Tags: The 2000s
Things Could Always Be Worse (Also: “SUSPECT”?)
“A Brazilian toddler has up to 50 sewing needles inside him, which doctors suspect were deliberately inserted.”
Would You Wear Pink Eyeshadow?
Jennifer Lopez is on the January cover of Allure. And while we could really care less about her workout regime or that silly "Louboutins" song, we were struck by this beauty shot from inside the magazine.
It kind of reminded us of this Anja shoot mixed with bathing beauties from a 1940s movie. But what really stood out was the opaque pink makeup on her lids, in a good way.
I love that her longtime makeup artist, Scott Barnes, used what looks to be a cream shadow all the way from crease to corner. The effect is soft but it's definitely not subtle, like so many popular shimmery pink shades.
My question is, can this work on fair skin that doesn't have that bronze glow like J. Lo's so known for? I actually think it might work if you found the right shade. But then again I might just end up looking like I have some sort of eye infection.
Would you try it?
Best. Motion to Continue. Ever.
Some on this board have doubted my commitment to college football. Even though I didn't go to a school with a major FCS team, I adopted Michigan long, long ago (Elvis Grbac era), and I know how important the sport is.
So believe me when I say that this motion to continue is one of the most rational arguments you are likely to hear today. The motion comes from defense counsel in Alabama. It's so wonderful that even the plaintiffs attorneys found it amusing, as this email from Marsh, Rickard & Bryan shows:
Check out this Motion to Continue that was filed by the defendants in one of our cases today. LOL, it's awesome.Roll Tide!
Indeed, it is awesome. And, by now, I'm sure you know why defense counsel is asking for the continuance.
But it's not just the thought. After all, sports-related continuance motions have been filed before.
It's the execution that makes it great. Check it out, after the jump.
This motion was filed yesterday in Jefferson County, Alabama. Enjoy. And, obviously, Roll Tide!
MOTION TO CONTINUEComes now Jon B. Terry, as one of the attorneys for the Defendants and would move to
continue the current trial setting of January 4, 2010 and as grounds therefore would aver as
follows:1. This case was set for trial several months ago before certain monumental events occurred
that were beyond the anticipation of the attorneys and the clients.2. Since the setting of this case, one of the two great college football teams in this State has
reached levels on a national scale that have not been enjoyed by any team in this State in 17 years next preceding the date hereof.3. Currently, one of the two great teams in this State are playing for a national championship
and has enjoyed an undefeated season and clinched the SEC Title Game.4. Most of the attorneys representing all of the named Defendants have tickets and reservations to be in Pasadena on the 6th day of January, 2010, which date would conflict with the trial date as travel times and schedules for the game overlap the trial as currently set.
5. In fact, the Honorable Jim Lloyd has children that live in the area and is scheduled to be
with them in California to celebrate the game and the Tide s success.6. Attempts to resolve this conflict directly with the Plaintiffs has been unfruitful as the
reply has been that they are for the other great team in this State who did not make the playoffs.
Unfortunately, that response remains short-sighted as they may one day find themselves in the
same position that the Defendant attorneys are in and, unfortunately, the BSC Title Game is no
longer scheduled on January 1st, but has been moved to January 7th.7. In checking with your Honor s Office, it was determined that there are potential quick
dates available during March, the only known conflict being that Jim Lloyd has recently been
elected President of the Birmingham Bar and must attend a conference on March 10-12. Other
than that, the Defendants can be ready to be first out during any available week for trial during the month of February, March, or April and believe that there would be no harm, considering the
magnitude of this event and its impact on this State, and the fact such an event only comes
infrequently during a person s lifetime and is an achievement of such a magnitude that all
involved in this litigation should want everyone to fully participate in this achievement.8. It is also understood that many of the witness involved are trying to acquire tickets to the
game and/or scheduled to be at the game in Pasadena on January 7th and certainly any juror
selected to participate will likely be preoccupied and not able to devote their full attention to the
case before them during the week of January 4, 2010, and therefore, the parties would be
prejudiced by the distraction caused by such a major event of such significant importance to so
many people in this State.9. ROLL TIDE!! ( although my secretary is for the other great team of this State, she feels
that I need to attend this championship game!); and may the Longhorns be defeated.______/s/ Jon B. Terry________________
JON B. TERRY
OF COUNSEL:
BAINS & TERRYEarlier: This Is the Kind of Motion That Gets Filed in State Court. In Louisiana.
Motion to Continue Trial Due to Conflict with the LSU Tigers National Championship Game
TUAW gift guide: Griffin eXport In-Flight Video Cable
Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, iPhone, Holidays, iPod touch
You've loaded a movie and a few episodes of "The Office" on your iPhone or iPod touch to keep you company as you fly this holiday. The only problem is that, while quite lovely, the iPhone's screen is not meant for watching The Bourne Identity in earnest. If only you could connect it to the monitor on the back of the seat in front of you.
As if they've heard your pleas, the folks at Griffin have produced the eXport In-Flight Video Cable. It connects with the in-flight entertainment system that a growing number of airlines have begun using. Once connected, you can watch video and listen to music while charging your iPhone or iPod. The cable is 3 feet long and connects with a 30-pin Dock Connector to 9-pin IFES (9-pin Mini-DIN). Just remember to enable Airplane Mode, lest an Air Marshall wrestle you to the ground.
No more suffering through 6 episodes of 30 Minute Meals! The Griffin eXport In-Flight Video Cable for iPod and iPhone costs $39.95US and makes a great gift for the frequent flyer on your list. Look here for compatible devices.TUAWTUAW gift guide: Griffin eXport In-Flight Video Cable originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Lee’s Trade Value
In the last four months, I’ve written two posts with a similar point – a team traded Cliff Lee and got a mediocre return at best in terms of prospects. First, Cleveland’s Mark Shapiro made the decision to trade Lee to Philadelphia at the deadline for an uninspiring package of players, a decision that looked even more questionable given how well Lee pitched for the Phillies. But now, Ruben Amaro has followed in his footsteps, trading Lee away for a trio of okay-but-not-great prospects.
So, I have to wonder what is going on here? It’s impossible to believe that both Shapiro and Amaro failed to do their homework, trading Lee away without surveying the market and weighing available offers. They obviously are both interested in making the best deals they can, and with a player of Lee’s stature, I have to believe they did significant due diligence before pulling the trigger.
So, our options here are believe that two General Managers are lazy/incompetent and failed to extract the best return possible for their team when trading him, or that the market for Cliff Lee is just not very good. Let’s just agree to reject option A out of hand, as neither Shapiro or Amaro are lazy or stupid. That leaves the second option – that this really was the best both teams could do.
What, then, is wrong with Cliff Lee in the eyes of major league GMs? Over the last two years, he’s third in baseball in innings pitched, sixith in ERA, third in complete games, has issued the third fewest walks, and allowed the sixth fewest home runs. His 2.96 FIP is third best in baseball since the beginning of 2008, better than Roy Halladay’s 3.02. Even his 3.62 xFIP, which adjusts for his low HR/FB rate, is 3.62 – the equal of Felix Hernandez.
He’s spent most of the last two years pitching in the American League, so there’s not a worry about the adjustment coming over to tougher competition. He destroyed the post-season, pitching one of the best games in World Series history against a great Yankee line-up. He’s left-handed and has three good pitches, including a devastating change-up that is among the best in the game.
I don’t get it. The Brewers gave up more for two months of CC Sabathia than the Phillies gave up for 1 1/2 years of Lee or that the Mariners gave up for 1 year of Lee. Lee is Sabathia’s equal, or really close to it. Yet twice, he’s been put up for trade and the response has been fairly blah.
You can’t argue that this is what pitchers of this quality go for. The difference in prospects that it required to acquire Lee and Halladay is staggering, and is not all explained by the $6 million in cash Toronto sent to Philly or the extension that Halladay agreed to. The Angels were reportedly willing to give up the moon for Halladay, but apparently had no interest in making a similar offer for Lee, letting him go to a division competitor while surrendering nothing that would help them in 2010.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that teams are still a bit skeptical of Lee’s rapid rise to greatness. And while we’re the first ones to point out that you want to make decisions on large samples, Lee’s thrown 450 innings over the last two years and racked up +13.8 wins in that time. You can’t fluke your way into that kind of performance.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Lee hits free agency next year. He is clearly expecting to get paid like a top tier starting pitcher, but major league GMs apparently do not see him as one. They should. He is.
Introducing the Noughtie List
As several of you guessed, the December project I mentioned the other day is a collection of lists and articles that summarize the past ten years, i.e. the decade, i.e. the 2000s, i.e. TEN YEARS, MAN, TEN!! We call it the Noughtie List. via kottke.org I missed this noughtie link the first time around.
Gentleman of Leisure: Goods 4 Good 4 the Holidays.
Gentleman of Leisure is writer, erstwhile lecturer and notionally overeducated Martin Marks's PAPERMAG column on the things he likes and why.
With the holiday season upon us, I am reminded that by familial disposition I am both a really lousy gift-giver and in a perpetual state of geographic dislocation. During the rest of the year, I suffer from an inordinate amount of seemingly good ideas that, through their implementation, tend to spiral out of control. And so, what follows is a tale, rambling in nature (if pressed for time, I would skip down to the third paragraph from the bottom), about the Goods 4 Good holiday e-card, why they are incredible, and why you should be sending them this December.
The New Yorker recently published a story about a South African runner, mentioning that the other young runners in her hometown trained barefoot because they couldn't afford shoes. In the holiday spirit, I thought, what better home for the row of New Balances that previously sat under my bed than the junior running team at the Rametlwana Lower Primary School? Thus, I had a mission: to get these shoes to Africa, preferably in time for Christmas.
The only problem being that many parts of Africa tend to have mailing addresses broadly defined as mere suggestions of their actual location. Because South Africa held national elections this past year, through sheer luck and perseverance (read: several Google searches), I was able to track down a spreadsheet of the Limpopo Region's permanent voting stations, and eventually found the official street address of Rametlwana Lower Primary School: "No Street Address."
After an hour spent e-mailing a friend in the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins, I was told to send the package to whatever post office happened to be in the nearest town. And so, I switched over from Google Proper to Google Maps, where, after another hour, I discovered my next problem: there were two towns nearby, one significantly larger than the other, both of which had changed their names in the past five years. I e-mailed my anthropologist friend again. He told me that he knew an athlete in Johannesburg who might be able to help, save that she had just adopted a child and may take several weeks to respond. Through some complicated reasoning, and a few more e-mails, and a few more Google searches, I guesstimated which town to send the package to.
Then, it was off to my local post office, where I spent more time standing in line, and then even more time trying to convince the clerk that I wasn't nuts. (To draw a postal parallel, it would be like addressing a letter to the Midtown Post Office, Isle of Manhattan [formerly New Amsterdam], Northeastern Region, the United States of America.) Upon getting back into my car, I wondered if there might be some easier way. As it turns out, there is.
(You can start reading again, now.)
For those of you who don't have a half day's worth of free time, there's Goods 4 Good, a foundation that takes excess goods from American companies and distributes them to vulnerable children in Africa. And, right in time for the holiday season, the founder of Goods 4 Good, Melissa Kushner, has sought the talents of five New York and London based artists to design Goods 4 Good e-cards, with the proceeds providing much needed supplies to the neediest.
The Goods 4 Good e-cards come replete with reindeers and eggnog and kittens-in-sweaters -- a perennial holiday favorite -- and a $10 donation will provide soap to 450 nursery school students, while a $25 donation gives the gift of new shoes to over 30 children. And, as if these weren't good reasons enough, Goods 4 Good has teamed up with Merck in a mission to bring 20,000 new school uniforms to children in need, with all donations up to $10,000 being matched until December 31st. No matter where in the world you may be, or how bad a gift-giver you are, sending a Goods 4 Good e-card for the holidays will truly keep you in the spirit of the season. It's paperless, postage-less, and instantaneous, meaning that you won't have to spend several hours of your valuable internet time on Google Maps.
To send a Goods 4 Good holiday e-card, visit http://www.goods4good.org/ecard/sendcard/
Recap: Jeff Francoeur on WFAN
Earlier today, Mets OF Jeff Francoeur talked in studio with WFAN, and said he enjoys the high energy of New York City, where he can feed off the fans.
To listen to the entire interview, go to WFAN.com.
Francoeur had off-season surgery to repair a torn ligament in his left thumb. He said he is doing well; he expects to begin swinging a bat in January and should be be 100 percent by Spring Training.
He believes the Mets are three or four players away from being a playoff team, and two of those players are Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes. According to Francoeur, Reyes, Beltran, and one or two other acquisitions can get the Mets to where they want to go.
In his opinion, “Giving $100 million to just John Lackey would not have helped in the way we need help.”
Franoeur said it was not fun watching the Yankees and Phillies in the World Series.
He said he rooted for the Yankees, because he could never root for the Phillies.
Francoeur said, when he was with the Braves, he heard rumors that there was a divide in the Mets clubhouse between Hispanic players and American-born players; but, once he was traded to the Mets, he didn’t see that.
That said, he is trying to learn more Spanish; but, as of now, he only knows the ‘bad words.’
He said, “Citi Field was a graveyard in April,” in terms of hitting, when he played there on the Braves. However, he said it is signficantly better to hit their during the summer. He aknowledged, ‘It gets in your head a bit.’ This might factor in to a free-agent’s decision if it’s a one-year deal, he explained, but not if that player is singing a long-term contract. Francoeur feels the ballpark got in David Wright’s head, as well, but Wright was equally influenced by a lack of protection in the lineup.
Lastly, Francoeur said he feels Jason Bay would do well in Citi Field, because he is a pull hitter.
Again, to listen to the entire interview, go to WFAN.com.
He will also be a guest in studio on SNY’s Daily News Live at 5 pm.
A Fish Oil Story
The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain. via www.nytimes.com I recommend this thoughtful op-ed by friend of hello, typepad Paul Greenberg. I wish the New York Times' had come up with an equally thoughtful image (perhaps a map or infographic?) to accompany this article than the Earth with a fish hook through it, but I guess subtlety is dead.
Changeblind
I wonder if this affects as many people in baseball as I think it does. (h/t Daring Fireball)
Quote: Reyes on Triples, Love of the Game and Winning
Mets SS Jose Reyes talked one-on-one with Kevin Burkhardt for last night’s GEICO SportsNite on SNY, and said he never saw a team in sports suffer so many injuries at one time like the Mets did in 2009, and so he tried hard to get back on field last season to help his team, ‘but it didn’t work out the way he wanted.’
…the best part of the interview, and the moment that got me most excited, was seeing jose’s eyes and smile light up when burkhardt asked him about the possibility of playing a full season in Citi Field… he said he believes he could probably hit 20 triples there in a full season… i agree… and i can’t wait to see if he’s right…
“I don’t think fans know how much I love this game,” Reyes told SNY. “They have to know that when I’m on the field, I give it everything I’ve got to put this team in the position to win every night.”
…i never questioned jose’s desire to play and be on the team… i was told that people connected to him and the team were worried he was a bit gun-shy, because of doing more damage to his leg… that is totally understandable, and a lot different than a lack of will… that said, i’m glad he is getting out there in media and trying to correct any misconceptions people might have…
…this is a HUGE season for jose, not just as the leadoff hitter for the Mets, but from a personal point of view, as the team holds an $11 million option on his contract for 2011… so, if he’s a bust in 2010, he could find himself as a free agent, looking for a new deal coming off back-to-back poor seasons… which is something, a few years ago, i bet he never thought would be the case… on the other hand, the Mets desperately need him to have a stellar year, because he is the key to so much of what they want to accomplish… and for him, a strong year will likely mean he gets to renegotiate a long-term extension with the Mets, including his option… to me, he’s the storyline this spring, and i am pumped to see him back on the field, because i think a lot of this team’s style and swagger flows from jose… the game is less fun to watch, and it just doesn’t feel like the Mets without him…
To watch Burkhardt’s interview with Reyes, go to SNY.TV.
To see clips from the team’s holiday party, including Jeff Francoeur as Santa, go here.
By the way, Reyes will a guest of Mike Francesa today, in studio, on WFAN, at 3 pm.
To listen to WFAN online, all day, live, go to WFAN.com.
vince frost : one hundred alphabet
how do you make a library sexy?
the mitchell library opened its doors on 9 march, 1910. in 2010 it celebrates one hundred years
of collecting, and service to the people of NSW and australia. vince frost, realizing that many people
knew very little about the mitchell library's collections, launched an idea to adopt an everyday language.
in honor of this centenary year design agency frost* created a visually rich alphabet. each letter is
a composite of mitchell library's objects including maps, books, paintings and relics.
'one hundred alphabet' by design agency frost*
for instance, the O is made up of:
- the holey dollar, australia’s first distinctive coinage, c1813;
- a picture of cecil healey, 100 yards freestyle champion, c1904;
- a picture by sarah stone of a perspective view of sir ashton lever’s museum london 1785;
- a watercolour of sydney by joseph fowles, 1840;
- jean garling, a dancer, arts critic, passionate family historian, and a great benefactor to the state library;
- and a watercolour by irishman kenelm digby.
twice a week, until the launch of ONE hundred exhibition on 9 march 2010,
the mitchell library will release a new letter.
a clever campaign
beautifully designed, the alphabet celebrates mitchell library's collection in a new way,
revealing pieces from below stairs. this creative process began with O, U and T, ...
the centenary celebration not only honors the library’s past but asserts its relevance to the future.
the tone, message, personality and approach – is to take the library OUT into the community...
take out, out back, out post, out loud, find out, inside out, shout out, outstanding, out of this world...
catalogue
merchandising
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'I think we have to practice what we preach -
as part of the design aerobics series, designboom currently runs online courses
we designers help our clients to create a presence,
to strategically position themselves,
to do well and to achieve great things.
I know quite a few designers and design companies don't think the
same way, they don't have a website or they don't have a 'brand'.
they get on with what they are doing, but they're not always really
good at promoting their own business.
a lot of design companies don't advertise.
advertising companies don't advertise.
it is like an unsaid thing within the industry,
not to shout about what you do,
but then how do people find you?
how do potential clients know you exist?'
vince frost to designboom
entitled 'self promotion' and 'graphic design in 2010'.
more info here
Poll: How many slices is 'lunch'?
Maybe you, dear reader, can help settle this matter. How many slices in a typical, everyday pizza lunch: One or two?
The question came up at a Serious Eats lunch recently, and the result was evenly divided.
We're talking a typical, New York–style slice,either plain or minimally topped.
Let's not get into "If it's topped with A, then X many" or "I can eat a whole Neapolitan-style pie by myself." Just answer quickly based on the last time you grabbed a fast in-and-out lunch. Thanks.
Digital Folklore
Internet experts DRX and OLIA, have released a new book(!!!!), The Digital Folklore Reader.
The book features works and texts by me, Julia Boger, Manuel Buerger, Helene Dams, Dragan Espenschied, Jorg Frohnmayer, Mark Grimm, Christopher Heller, Yunchul Kim, Dennis Knopf, Stefan Krappitz, Florian Kroner, Tobias Leingruber, Olia Lialina, Leo Merz, Bernadette Neuroth, o+ro, johannes p osterhoff, Isabel Pettinato, Michael Rub, Theo Seemann, Alexander Schlegel, Bert Schutzbach, and Siegfried Zielinsky.
Here is a bit of text from the book:
Users' endeavors, like glittering star backgrounds, photos of cute kittens and rainbow gradients, are mostly derided as kitsch or in the most extreme cases, postulated as the end of culture itself. In fact this evolving vernacular, created by users for users, is the most important, beautiful and misunderstood language of new media.
Basically, if you r a geocities, or ASCII art, or BLINK, or marquee freak, this book is 4 u. The Internet is a wonderful place, and DRX and OLIA have tried to articulate this in the most archival form known to man .....the book. So in 2000 years people will still be able to read about the things that were once in the land called Anglefire. Christmas tree's all across the world need this!!!!!.
December 15, 2009
doggy slumber party
doggy slumber party
REVS’ Paper Trail
Shared by Mike
the street art of my youth -- these were EVERYWHERE. especially glued to backs of walk/dontwalk signs.
Even if you’re not a graffiti aficionado or never walked around the East Village before Tompkins Square Park had perimeter fences, chances are you’ve heard of REVS. He is, by far, one of NYC’s most talented, storied, and legendary graffiti writers to ever walk the streets. Between his tags, tunnel pages, massive rollers, sculptures, and of course his notoriously effective wheatpaste campaign in the early 90s with fellow anti-artist Adam COST, dude has ups!
The dynamic duo were responsible for plastering the city with a varied assemblage of missives and mysterious messages that had the public miffed and the underground buzzing. Yesterday, while manning the BNE gallery, a gentleman by the named of Jordy dropped off a stack of these Xeroxed artifacts which I promptly scanned. Although the collection is hugely incomplete—they had hundreds of different posters—and is exclusively REVS-centric, it is quite notable in its own right.
Microsoft Acknowledges MSN China Copies Code and Features From Plurk
Microsoft:
We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.
The Yes Men Strike Again
The Yes Men in Copenhagen = a corporation and/or government is going to get humiliated for good reason. This time it's Canada.
More here: http://theyesmen.org/canada
The Annotated White House Flickr Feed, with Ana Marie Cox and Jason Linkins: A Message To You, Salahi
Our President: so busy! So photographed! And here are Air America’s Ana Marie Cox and the Huffington Post’s Eat the Press editor Jason Linkins to trawl the documentary evidence of our White House in action.
Like much of daily life there, [the Salahi's] visit was recorded and uploaded on the White House Flickr feed, the always-on streaming window into “the people’s house,” a nickname that has never been more apt than under the current residents. Considering the White House’s hulking, media-rich Web site, its Facebook page, photo galleries and podcasts on iTunes, the presidency seems less threatened by the incursion of a reality show than running an administration that is in danger of becoming one. —David Carr in the New York Times.
Um, hey… we think that this notion that the pictures of Pete Souza and friends create some form of transparency, for “the people” is a little mangled. These are staged shots, taken by photographers who hump around the White House grounds, hiding in trees and shooting fruit bowls. This is arty, nature photography—just focused on the White House. Reality is a made thing, and Pete Souza will frame it in a doorway, or the window of an automobile.
Also, we sort of think maybe Carr doesn’t know what “streaming” means.
The evil genius of the Obama family is that they look SO NORMAL.
Fuck! Los Lobos? LOU DOBBS WARNED US THIS WOULD HAPPEN!
There’s your economic recovery, people! The bridge to… well, it’s hard say.
Go ahead, admit it, America: You’re thinking about his cock.
Lovemaking was much better in the days before the Stupak amendment.
“You throw me the whip, I give you the idol!”
Ana Marie: Stalking AND framing? This has got to be Pete Souza.
Jason: I feel sorry for Pete Souza.
Ana Marie: Why? Because we make fun of him? Who else knows he EXISTS?
Jason: Because to get this shot, he had to run ahead of them on the lawn, and hide in the trees. Maybe he wore adult diapers in case he needed to pee BUT COULD NOT LEAVE HIS POST? He’s like the serial killer in Manhunter. There is no dignity in that.
Ana Marie: Oh, I don’t think there’s intended to be.
It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are framed (in an aesthetic sense!) Pete Souza will find you. And photograph you!
Is that the White House man cave? A refrigerator filled with “Steel Reserve”?
In the event of an earthquake, everyone please assemble quietly at Treasury, and, by all means, STAND UNDER LARGE CHANDELIERS. Especially you, Tim.
Wow, the first draft of the House health care bill WAS really long.
Ana Marie: People tell you there’s a photograph out there of Michelle hula-hooping, and you think, no, that’s not possible.
Jason: But there is.
Ana Marie: That is the age in which we live.
“Mine. All mine.”
Jason: Wait. THAT’S how they display the previous winners of the Nobel Prize? Seriously?
Ana Marie: It sort of looks like the wall of fame at a Rotary Club.
Jason: Totally.
Ana Marie: Right down to the lack of black people.
Ana: GEEKGASM.
Jason: That photo is like a trip inside Jonah Goldberg’s brain!!
Ana: Except in that vision, Obama is on the side of the Empire. Fascist.
CODE RED! OBAMA IS ADJACENT TO AN IMAGE OF LINCOLN.
Pete Souza, framing a giant spider. You only get so many chances.
One of the Salahi’s earlier, less successful attempts.
Jason: One of Politico’s Mike Allen’s earlier, less successful attempts.
Ana: Also a very literal interpretation of what it’s like to be a Congressional Republican.
Ana Marie: Now that is fucking HEARTWARMING. Just try to make fun of that shit.
Jason: If you say so. The American Enterprise Institute had a whole conference on Obama ceding cultural hegemony to Maeve Beliveau, daughter of Director of Advance Emmett Beliveau.
Ana Marie: I just want to note that someone in that picture is drinking Diet Pepsi. HERETIC.
Also that someone is either Peter Orszag or Jim Jones. I’m guessing Jones. Fucking Republican.
It’s weird they decided to do the “Thriller” dance.
Ana Marie: ROBOTS! ROBOTS IN THE WHITE HOUSE!
Jason: Calm down, Matthew Yglesias. Maybe they are just prepping for a debate, Rove-style! That’s how they beat John Kerry, you know.
Ana Marie: I think it’s funny when a picture of people laughing is captioned as them “sharing a laugh.” Because otherwise…?
Jason: It would read: “President Obama awkwardly pretends to get the joke”?
Ana Marie: “Biden pretends not to notice the joke is about him”?
Jason: Oh, I think he knows the joke is about him. He has all those long train trips to figure that out.And now, this week, in “I FRAMED THIS” by Pete Souza:
DOOR FRAME!
OVAL WINDOW FRAME!
OBAMA: “OH HAI, are you my new call center staff?”
DOODZ: “Not since Tim Geithner’s been in charge of the economy!”
Just want to point out that only Katie Johnson is actually working.
I just want to point out that Pete Souza and his fellow photographers have been slaving at this Official White House Photographer beat every day. And it’s sad that this is the image they’ll be best known for shooting. I mean. What makes a man start fires? THIS KIND OF SHIT.
Seriously. When this idea was conceived, I bet everyone involved thought, “Man! We’ll be getting all these iconic shots of Barack Obama, pensive at the Great Wall of China, and it will be awesome. Every day: a little more awesome.” And instead, this little Flickr Feed will achieve immortality because it snapped a picture of these fucking gatecrashing wannabe celebutard dipshits. And, Salahis, we live in the same town, so hopefully I’ll one day get to say this to your faces. But this Christmastime, you two can just go and eat a massive bag of envenomed dicks. Really. That’s from the heart.
The Noodle making demonstration. It’s why Nixon went to China in the first place.
“Baby… delicious, delicious Japanese baby.”
“Obama wonders if the West Point superintendents’ office might look better with a LINCOLN portrait… A Lincoln portrait… yeah….”
“Jeez, Japan…. I haven’t felt this awkward since I appointed Hillary.”
This looks like a deleted scene from COUPLES RETREAT.
That’s what Pete Souza looks like in the anime version of the White House.
And, Mr. President, we thought the one you call “Pete Souza” would enjoy our nation’s famous Tiny Corridor of Odd-Shaped Windows.
Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper ratify the North American “Bros Before Hos” treaty at Singapore’s most famous disco.
Merry Christmas from your Awl White House Flickr Annotators!
Previously: Obama’s Top Secret Message To Fox News
Clinton Portis discusses Tiger Woods
I'm not sure why it took the world this long to find out what Clinton Portis thinks about the Tiger Woods situation, but I'm sure glad that we know now. After yet more concussion questions during Portis's weekly appearance on ESPN 980's John Thompson Show, the host finally said he was sick of football and wanted to ask Portis about something else. Brilliant, brilliant move, sir. Now remember, you can't necessarily take everything CP says at face value, and he also tends to have poor cell phone connections during these interviews. Some of his words were garbled, and I've listened to this a bunch of times. This, to the best of my transcribing ability, is what he said. "Well, I think he's being treated unfair," Portis said of Woods. "Honestly, I always felt like everybody in that position--whether you're a reporter, whether you run a grocery store, whether you're the
Gmail Has “Mark unread from here” But…
It kind of amazes me that Gmail has an advanced feature like “mark unread from here” but still lacks basic things like sorting your messages by date or searching/sorting by attachment size. Wacky.
hidden nuggets
I love how folks are using foursquare tips to place little nuggets of content like this around the world; they're mini blog posts for your friends, delivered to you based on where rather than when.
Found best @foursquare tip of all time tonight posted by Lock at Flickr
Listicle Without Commentary: The 30 Best Punk Songs Since 1979 Available on YouTube, In Order
30. Increase The Pressure, Conflict
29. Umbrella, All Time Low
28. Suck My Left One, Bikini Kill
27. Do What You Want, Bad Religion
26. Bad Penny, Big Black
25. Frustration Rock, Tyvek
24. The Scratch, 7 Year Bitch
23. Flame!, Heatmiser
22. All Gone Dead, Subhumans
21. Ashtray Dirt, Subhumans
20. Shove, L7
19. Boys In The Brigade, Youth Brigade
18. Sleeper Hold, No Age
17. The World Looks Red, Sonic Youth
16. McCarthy, Avail
15. State Violence, State Control, Discharge
14. No Survivors, Charged G.B.H.
13. Holiday In Cambodia, Dead Kennedys
12. Riot City, Total Chaos
11. Super Are, Boredoms
10. Fagetarian and Dyke, Team Dresch
9. Where Next Columbus?, CRASS
8. Rise Above, Black Flag
7. Betray, Minor Threat
6. Boilermaker, The Jesus Lizard
5. Pink Turns to Blue, Husker Du
4. Modern Kicks, The Exploding Hearts
3. Radio, Rancid
2. Pay To Cum, Bad Brains
1. Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney
Previously:The 94 Best Philip Larkin Poems, In Order
The 85 Best Morrissey Solo Songs, In Order
Seth Colter Walls is a culture reporter at Newsweek. Previously, he wrote about U.S. and Middle East politics for a variety of outlets.
Step by step
If you're Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the spreadsheet, how do you go about learning a new programming environment? Just like everyone else:
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.
Personally, I find this really inspiring.
Tags: Dan Bricklin programming
Gamer
[This started out as an ordinary blog posting, but it grew to monstrous length (nearly 10,000 words), even as took much more time to write than I had originally anticipated. I apologize for the length, but I still think it is best to post it in full. I am groping here towards something that I have been trying to work out, and articulate, for a while. I don't think I have found it all yet, but I am getting closer, whatever the awkwardness of expression here].
I finally caught up with Gamer, by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. I came to this movie with admittedly high expectations, based on my love for Neveldine and Taylor’s previous two Crankfilms. But Gamer far exceeded anything I anticipated. It is brilliant, in the way that only a sleazy exploitation film, made by directors who describe themselves as “pretty A.D.D.” could ever be. Indeed, Gamer is absolutely contemporary; no film since at least Southland Tales has said anywhere near as much about the world we actually live in today. Gamer is one of those rare films that truly dares to be (in the Lenin phrase I like to quote) “as radical as reality itself.” It remains a few steps ahead of any possible critical reflection that one might try to apply to it — including, of course, my own. And yet it seems as if almost nobody noticed the film’s brilliance. Gamer got mostly unfavorable reviews, and it didn’t do as well as hoped at the box office. Indeed, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s brilliant review, Annalee Newitz’ quick recommendation, and Kim Dot Dammit’s blog posting on the movie, are the only commentaries I have found that do justice to what is more commonly described (as The New York Times put it) as “a futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets.” As I will try to show, such a description is not in itself inaccurate — but it needs to be read as praise rather than opprobrium.
Gamer is science fiction. This means, not just that the movie is set in the near future, in a world whose technology is extrapolated from our own, but also that it explores the futurity that is very much a part of our actual present — the potential for change that is inherent within our presentness. Literally speaking, the movie takes place “some years from this exact moment” (as an opening title tells us). The world of the film is one in which the media — and especially the computer gaming environment — that we know today are taken to the next level. In the movie’s near-future extrapolation, spectacle, virtualization, and “entertainment” in general have been pushed to their logical extremes. Everyone in the world, it seems, is addicted to MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games). But these games are themselves viscerally “real,” in a way that is not yet the case today. The basic science-fictional ploy of the movie is to envision a form of gaming in which gamers control the actions, not of virtual avatars on a screen, but of real, physical, flesh-and-blood bodies: human “actors.” In this way, Gamer combines, and updates, the two most prominent popular entertainment forms of the current decade: massively multiplayer online gaming, and reality television. Conceptually, Gamer explores these forms of entertainment in order to think about freedom and enslavement in what Deleuze called the control society, or in a world that — as McKenzie Wark describes it — has become indistinguishable from gamespace.
There are two games that dominate the world of Gamer: Society and Slayer. In both of these games, the human actors who actually perform the physical actions of the game have no free will. Thanks to nano-implants, they no longer control their own bodies and motor actions. Rather, they are forced to take orders from the gamers “playing” them. Artificial nanocells are introduced into their brains; these cells reproduce, replacing the original, organic nerve cells with synthetic ones. Once you have undergone this procedure, you have an IP address in your head, and your body obeys whatever commands are transmitted to that address by the player who controls you. You say what they say, and move the way that they want you to move. Of course, this only works one way: actors can’t see or hear their controllers, but the controllers are able to live vicariously through them.
Society is a hilariously sleazy live version of Second Life or The Sims, with gamers guiding their actors through scenarios of drug consumption, partying and clubbing, and (most of all) down ‘n’ dirty sex. Actors rollerskate through crowded plazas, crashing into one another; or they grope one another in crowded dance clubs; or they accost one another with corny pickup lines in bars. The gamespace of Society is visually garish, with hypersaturated colors, and with raunchy costumes and lurid, tacky interior decorations that egregiously shriek out their own “bad taste.” Our first view of Society’s gamespace is hilariously set to the satirical song “The Bad Touch” by Bloodhound Gang (“You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals/ So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel”). Gamer illustrates the relation between player and actor directly, by cutting back and forth between the “actor” Angie (Amber Valletta) and her controller (Ramsey Moore). Angie is ridiculously dressed in a white fur wrap, blue hot pants, pink platform boots, and an orange wig; she is reduced, basically, to being a sexbot in the world of Society. Her controller is a morbidly obese, wheelchair-bound man; we usually see him in extreme facial closeup, sweating profusely, consuming munchies, and licking his slobbering lips as he moves her into one degrading situation after another.
Society is all about sex as spectacle; but in reality, sex is subordinated to economics. The financial structure of Society is simple, and brilliantly capitalist: you can either be a consumer by paying to play, or be a worker by being paid to be played. As Vishnevetsky observes, Gamer is “the sort of movie that imagines what the working class would have to do in its fantasy scenario” — something that is left out of most transhumanist and “exodus-to-the-virtual-world” visions. On the one hand, consumers get a pornographic experience that is still vicarious (and therefore safe) for them, but more “real” than any mere simulation could be. On the other hand, the “actors” receive wages for what is the ne plus ultra of affective labor: the production, not of physical objects, but directly of moods, feelings, and experiences. The sim-actor is not just selling the use of his or her “labor-power” for a certain number of hours (as is the case in classical capitalism as described by Marx); more than this, he or she is actually selling his or her “life” itself as a commodity. Of course, such a “biopolitical” mode of exploitation (which would seem to combine the worst aspects of slavery and of wage labor) is increasingly the norm — as Hardt and Negri argue — in our contemporary world of post-Fordism, “real subsumption,” and immaterial or affective production. Today, profits are extracted from the whole texture of our lives, not just from the labor we perform during specific hours in a factory or an office. Behind both the consumer/player and the actor/slave, there is the billionaire software genius who created, and who owns, Society (more about him below). He not only makes immense profits from user fees, but also acquires massive amounts of economically-valuable data through the technology’s surveillance of everything that streams over the network, or that happens in the minds of the nano-implanted actors.
[Just in passing: it is precisely because Gamer is an action-oriented exploitation flick, rather than one that expresses the psychological interiority of its characters, that it is able to provide us with something like a cognitive mapping of the contemporary world system. The movie is somewhere between an allegory, and a concrete exemplification, of the way that, today, value is extracted from circulation (especially media circulation) as well as from direct production. Indeed, we might say that value is even extracted, as well, from the moment of consumption itself. In classical capitalism, consumption is the moment when value is destroyed, or when the object is extracted from the commodity chain because it is no longer being exchanged, but is instead actually put into use, and used up. But in the world according to Gamer, this is no longer the case. Even the player's most private and solitary jouissance -- as he gets off on his living avatar's being penetrated, or as he is turned on as a result of witnessing a bloody murder right in front of her -- is equivalent to a capture of energy, and of attention, that is monetizable by the company running the game. When Hardt and Negri speak of "immaterial labor," they mean that the commodity produced is immaterial, because it is a process, or an attribute of existence, a quality or an atmosphere, rather than a thing or a physical object. But this is not to deny the materiality of the production process itself; which is to say, the physical and mental labor (the expense of time and energy) that produces this immaterial result. The material labor expended in immaterial production is aptly figured by that labor (sexual and otherwise) of the actors or bodies that are physically present in the world of the game, and compelled to perform the actions from which their players derive enjoyment.]
For its part, Slayer is a real-time combat game. Players decide where to move and when to shoot; but the actors whom they control are physically present in the gamespace. These actors use live weapons; they really kill and get killed. The gamespace of Slayer is rarely presented to us directly. We see it, most often, as a video feed, in grimy, desaturated colors, shot with handheld cameras, with lots of vertiginous motion, odd, canted angles, swish pans, and jump cuts, often overlaid iwth a heads-up display. From time to time, glitches disrupt the image, or interference patterns run across the screen. This kind of camerawork emulates the overall look and feel of combat computer games, although the visual field is much more fragmented than is the case in such games, and there is no literal use of the first-person POV that one finds in many shooter games.
[I am thinking here of Alexander Galloway's discussion of first-person shooters, which I commented upon here. Galloway says that the first-person subjective shot works to increase involvement in games, whereas it is generally alienating in the cinema, because (my paraphrase, repeating my blog entry on Galloway) computer games involve active movement through space, whereas films are more about the passive contemplation of space. According to Galloway, gamespace must be "fully rendered, actionable space" (63); the operator/player must be able to roam through this space at will (as is never the case in film, where the camera angles and shots are all determined in advance). This gamic sense of active space makes montage superfluous (64), and instead demands full freedom of movement. Now, it seems to me that Neveldine and Taylor complicate this opposition between games and movies, in the course of making a movie that directly emulates the experience of gaming. The movie spectator has no first-person control of the action, so it wouldn't work to emulate the first-person-POV computer graphics of a shooter game literally on the movie screen. Games feel visceral because the player is directly involved in the action; that is why games have to offer something like an organized Cartesian space for the player to move around in, and this space needs to be presented as continuous, rather than being cut up by montage. But it is precisely by means of hyperbolic, hyperactive A.D.D-style montage that a film like Gamer avoids being contemplative, and instead communicate a sense of visceral involvement that is analogous to what games provide simply by virtue of the player's involvement. That being said, it still seems to me (though this would have to be verified by a more careful analysis) that Neveldine/Taylor's combat sequences are far more coherent spatially than are, say, the action sequences in the films of Michael "Fuck Continuity" Bay. But see my further comments on the cinematography and editing of Gamer, below].
Slayer is even more advanced than Society, as an exemplification of neoliberal logic. The “actors” in Slayer are convicts on death row; they are given the “free choice” of entering into combat as meat puppets controlled by gamers, instead of being immediately executed for their crimes. If a Slayer character survives thirty rounds of combat, then he (it is usually a “he”) will be pardoned and freed. Those convicted of lesser crimes may similarly “choose” to enter the combat zone as, in effect, NPCs (non-player characters). They are controlled, not by a gamer, but by simple computer routines; they only need to survive one round of combat in order to be pardoned and freed. Of course, no one ever actually manages to get their freedom this way. NPCs are always picked off pretty quickly in the course of a round: John Leguizamo’s character for instance, is programmed to be a janitor, so he keeps on sweeping the floor regardless of all the mayhem around him, until he is hit by a stray bullet. But even the most skillful players/actors cannot really expect to survive a full thirty rounds. The game is rigged. (Its logic is somewhat reminiscent of that in Peter Watkins’ prescient and chilling 1971 movie Punishment Park, where people convicted of political crimes are offered the opportunity to engage in a survivalist game in the desert, instead of doing hard time. The difference is that, in Gamer, the convict’s “choice” to take his/her chances in a game, instead of being punished directly, is revised in the direction of neoliberal management of life via privatized “incentives”, whereas it is linked directly to the repressive state apparatus in the earlier film. The victims in Punishment Park don‘t get to appear on TV).
The economic logic of Slayer also brilliantly exemplifies neoliberal governance. Money is generated not just from the gamers who pay to control the killers, but also from the millions of pay-per-view subscribers who watch the combat live on TV or on the Web. The film revels in its reaction shots of enormous crowds of yuppies, in cities around the world, watching Slayer unfold on enormous screens. They cheer each spectacular display of violence, and react with baffled anger whenever something goes wrong with the feed. (They feel entitled. How dare mess with my enjoyment?). The money stream from Slayer not only leads to enormous profits for the billionaire software genius, but also subsidizes the entire, spiraling-out-of-control cost of the American prison system. In an age of increasing prison privatization, this is more than satire. America spends more on prisons than it does on universities; the cost is financed by using prisoners as an “industrial reserve army” of virtual slave labor. In the world of Gamer, incarceration with enforced labor and a high mortality rate seems to be the one alternative, for the working class, to selling their bodies on Society. It makes perfect sense, ideologically as well as economically. Punishment is submitted to the “invisible hand” of the market, just as neoliberal dogma demands, by combining harsh punishment with media spectacle. Convicted criminals are deprived of all volition, and turned into meat puppets, precisely because they are held to be personally accountable for their crimes.
Society and Slayer are surrounded and reinforced by other forms of media; in the world of Gamer, nothing is direct or “unmediated,” and nothing exists outside of the mediasphere. For one thing, advertisements for the two games are everywhere in the “real environment” of the movie. The movie begins — after the opening company credits, some video signal-zapping and the title text “some years from this exact moment…” – with computer-simulated images of urban scenes. There are postmodern downtowns with skyscrapers, but also favelas and even ancient ruins. Vehicular and foot traffic whizzes by in accelerated motion. Quite wittily, these scenes are apparently cribbed from the movie Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992), which drew contrasts between the peaceful rhythms of indigenous peoples at ostensibly home with the natural world, with the violent accelerations of life in the overdeveloped world. [Baraka is a film, according to its director, about "humanity's relationship to the eternal"; it's a brilliant move by Neveldine and Taylor to hijack Fricke's hippie-new-age footage in order to depict a social order in which any supposed "balance of life" has been obliterated by consumerism, and nothing remains stable for more than a second]. The only constants in these opening shots are the things added to the source material by Neveldine and Taylor: enormous billboards and electronic signs advertising Society and Slayer (or containing the names of Castle, the creator of the games, or Kable, their biggest star — I discuss both of these figures below). The signage first appears, dreamily, reflected in a puddle of water; then, hard-edged, aggressively pasted over every possible urban surface. All the while, Marilyn Manson’s cover of the Eurythmics song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” plays on the soundtrack (“Some of them want to abuse you/ Some of them want to be abused…”), reminding us of our status as either predators or prey in this updated-for-the-new-millennium version of Social Darwinism. We have been warned.
In the world of Gamer, Society and Slayer are also the primary focus of television news broadcasts, which are ubiquitous in the film and which seem to have no other subject of interest. In this way, the film’s exposition is handled largely by infographics flashing across media screens. The talkshow host Gina Parker Smith (Kyra Sedgwick), who will apparently do anything in order to get a story, scores by arranging an exclusive interview with the billionaire software genius Ken Castle, inventor of the brain nanotechnology that makes the games work. Castle, despite (or rather because of) his teasing reclusiveness, is a pure creature of media: the world’s greatest celebrity as well as its richest man (Society and Slayer have made him wealthier than Bill Gates). Castle is played by Michael C. Hall, best known as the star of the Showtime TV series Dexter. But whereas Hall is introverted and tormented in Dexter, here he is extroverted and slimy. A condescending, self-congratulatory smirk never leaves his face, not even when he is sucking on his trademark lollipop. Castle clearly thinks that he is smarter than everybody else — and he revels in this fact. He is slickly mediagenic and “charming” (in a way that can only be described as if “in quotation marks”), like a sleazy lounge lizard who has suddenly realized all his most extravagant, megalomaniacal dreams, and can make anybody do whatever he wants (both because of his money; and literally, because of his technology). His insinuating voice, with a slight, just-folks “hillbilly” twang, is a pure media manipulation effect — a performance with nothing whatsoever present behind it. Castle’s “just-folks” populism, and his steely contempt for his inferiors (which pretty much means everybody apart from himself) are two sides of the same coin. In embodying the character of Castle, Hall pretty much steals every scene he’s in — as the actors playing bad guys in genre pictures tend to do.
Castle is an extrapolation, if not directly of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, then certainly of the nerd-turned-entrepreneur, control-freak billionaire type that they exemplify. Indeed, Castle might well be described as the living personification of “the new spirit of capitalism”, with its emphasis upon flexibility, innovation, and entrepreneurial initiative, and upon networking rather than vertical command. This new spirit places a hipster veneer upon what still ultimately remains a form of authoritarian management, in which networked manipulation works more effectively than a hierarchical chain of command ever did. In other words, Castle is the “human face” of software-based capital, or of affective capital, in the society of control. For this is precisely a form of governance, a regime of accumulation, that requires a “human face,” in order to exemplify its new managerial style. In the 1960s, IBM was seen as the ultimate soulless corporation; its bureaucratic computers were the negation of everything human. Today, to the contrary, it’s impossible to imagine Apple without Steve Jobs — his minimalist, perfectionist aesthetic, and his showmanship, are essential components of the personal computing, communicating, and entertainment devices that Apple sells. Castle plays a similar role, as the face behind Society and Slayer.
Castle is the human face of the new capitalism, therefore. Except for one thing: Castle himself is not quite human any longer. We learn near the end of the film that he has turned himself into a cyborg, replacing 98% of his own brain with his synthetic nanocells. The difference between Castle and the “actors” in Society and Slayer, however, is that Castle’s artificial nerve cells are able to transmit orders and exert control, whereas everyone else’s nanocells are engineered only to receive orders and to compel obedience. “I think it, you do it,” Castle says. With his nanotech, he is able to make people “buy what I want them to buy, vote how I tell them to vote, do pretty much damn well anything I figure they ought to do” — without their even being aware of it. The control of other peoples’ minds and bodies in gamespace is only a prelude to, or a test run fo,r the control of other peoples’ minds and bodies in all other areas of life as well. Gaming — like other media forms and aesthetic forms before it — is a kind of cutting-edge space in which to experimentally implement, and to explore in advance, the social arrangements (of power and resistance, or of capital accumulation and of the friction that interferes with that accumulation) that are subsequently deployed throughout all of society. [Today we can say of gaming what Jacques Attali said of music: "its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things."]
Gamer has been criticized by some reviewers and bloggers because — in quintessential genre fashion — it shifts attention away from the system and to just one evil individual; thus implying that taking that individual down is enough to liberate everyone. I this way, the movie would be guilty of leaving the system itself intact. But I think that such a reading is itself too simple: it ignores the way that the figure of Castle precisely embodies and condenses the “system itself”, that is to say, the whole regime of flexible accumulation (or of what I might prefer to call expropriation with a smirk, or a smile). One way that today’s media “personalities” differ from nineteenth-century fictional characters, or from twentieth-century selves with interiority, is that media personalities today function so directly as personifications, or embodiments, of impersonal, impalpable, and unrepresentable forces. Indeed, this is not anything really new. It is what Marx already said about capitalists in his own time: that they were not real individuals, but personifications of capital. But such a situation of possessionand personificationis far more widespread today than it was in Marx’s own time. Where the nineteenth century, in both its fictions and its social life, generally presented characters with Lukacsian typicality (and this is the form of fictional character that most Marxist cultural critics, trapped in their own nostalgia, still tend to prefer), and the twentieth century emphasized depth psychology and interiority, the twenty-first century rather presents “personalities” as shells within which social forces are (temporarily) contained, or as screens and interfaces through which these forces exert themselves upon, and affect, the world. Castle’s brain interface is a way of embedding commodity relations directly in the flesh; and he himself isthe cybernetic, neoliberal regime of control and accumulation, embedded directly in the flesh. Just as, according to Deleuze and Guattari, philosophers must develop “conceptual personae” in order to dramatize, and thereby fully work out, their ideas, so capital today must generate entrepreneurial personae in order to fully realize the accumulation of capital at which it aims. In this sense, the genre tendency to personify social forces in individual figures is a necessary procedure; and a genre film like Gamer is accurate to condense its social commentary into such figures.]
In terms of its narrative, Gamer is entirely a genre film: everything that happens in the course of the plot is something that we have seen before, and that we have come to expect from other movies. Specifically, Gamer could be described as a combination of Running Man, Escape From New York, and The Matrix. The movie presents an oppressive virtual reality, within which an ultra-macho protagonist has to fight his way out of a situation in which everything has been rigged against him. The working-out of this plot is entirely formulaic and as-expected, up to and including the requisite happy ending and triumph of the macho figure. However, the movie’s adherence to these genre norms is so perfunctory as almost to be sarcastic. The macho action protagonist, Kable, is played by action star Gerard Butler (best known for his starring role as Leonidas in 300). But in Gamer, Kable is sketched out so minimally that Butler can barely be bothered to go through the motions required for the part; he is so inexpressive as to make Clint Eastwood look like a wild overactor in comparison. (Or perhaps I should say, to make Jean-Claude Van Damme look like a miracle of thespian subtlety in comparison; except that we now know that Van Damme really is such a miracle). Gamer’s adherence to genre norms, both in terms of the plot and in terms of the requisite displays of jiggling breasts, loud explosions, and hyped up macho insults (such as those that one crazed killer — who of course is black — addresses to the white Kable at one point), seem to be little more than a framework upon which Neveldine and Taylor are able to hang their delirious inventions. Or better, it is as if the film’s genre normativity (in terms of plot, character, gender, etc.) expresses and exposes the way that neoliberal ideology explicitly forecloses any possibility of social change. As the neoliberal mantra puts it, “There Is No Alternative”; any alteration of social arrangements is literally unthinkable. Gamer’s strict adherence to genre norms is its way of deliberately figuring (and thereby calling our attention to) this foreclosure.
[This is the reason why "science fiction" has today come to be pretty much the equivalent of social realism. In one sense, the most intense aspect of our lives today is our sense of futurity, of continual innovation and continual product turnover; and yet this futurity has no other content than "more of the same" (or of what Ernst Bloch called "sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability... a merely endless, contentless zigzag"). Thus, we are always being urged to upgrade our computers, which fall quickly into obsolescence through the force of Moore's Law; we are always looking for the next fad, the next cool thing, to such an extent that all fads and fashions seem to exist simultaneously. This urgency without change, or novelty without difference, is an expression of the commercial product cycle that dominates all aspects of our lives; it is the equivalent, on the level of content, of genre-conformity, as an expression of the claim that "There Is No Alternative", on the level of form. As with every other aspect of its production, the strategy of Gamer in this regard is not to offer a critique, but to embody the situation so enthusiastically, and absolutely, as to push it to the point of absurdity.]
Kable has been framed for murder — actually, he was forced by Castle to kill his best friend, in an early test of the nano-powered mind control — and now he is imprisoned, and a player in Slayer. He isn’t aware of this in his confinement, but he has become an international media star — almost as famous as Castle himself — because he has survived so many battles, coming closer than anybody else to “winning” the game and getting his pardon and release. And so, of course, in traditional genre movie fashion, we the audience of the movie find ourselves rooting for him, and we even “identify” with him. But this attitude is itself figured within the movie, since it is the very condition of celebrity that the movie dramatizes. If we are rooting for Kable, we are doing this together with just about everyone (aside from Castle and his flunkies) within the world of the movie.
However, what it means to “identify” with the protagonist of a movie is definitely in need of redefinition here. After all, within the diegesis of Gamer, Kable is not an autonomous agent –- just as characters in fictional movies are not autonomous agents. When Kable is fighting in Slayer, he is in fact being “run” by 17-year-old Simon (Logan Lerman), a narcissistically self-involved player whose every gesture expresses his affluent, privileged background. Simon can pretty much do whatever he wants; but evidently, this is only the case because his (unseen) father has paid for his high-tech gaming room, as well as for his Slayer account. (So much for Oedipus; the world of Gamer is one in which Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal vision has become the norm). Simon himself has gotten a certain degree of Web celebrity, thanks to his skillful and successful “playing” of Kable; even though it’s Kable whose body is placed at risk, and whose charisma during videocasts of “Slayer” is what really appeals to the viewers.
In between Slayer sessions, Simon munches on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, as he lies around in his 360-degree media room. He casually enters into video-chat conversations with girls who flash their tits at him, or otherwise proposition him over the Web; and he buys heavy-duty assault weaponry online (rejecting anything that strikes him as too “gay”). The film’s portrait of Simon is counterpointed with its portrait of the unnamed gamer who plays Amber in Society. But where that player is linked with Amber by means of cutting from one to the other, Simon’s relation to Kable is expressed by shots in which Simon appears within the combat action right alongside Kable; we see Kable’s moves miming Simon’s own gaming gestures. This synchronization creates a sort of dance effect (which is picked up later in the movie, as I discuss below). In addition, as the film goes on, the relation between Kable and Simon is changed. Rebel hackers make it possible for the conversation between Kable and Simon to work both ways, so that Kable can talk to Simon, and hear back from him, rather than just taking implicit orders from him. Eventually, Simon is reluctantly persuaded to set Kable free from control, so that he can act in the game for himself; at this point, Simon is reduced to the role of a passive spectator, somebody who (like us) is simply along for the ride. All in all, the play of identification and distance in the film is immensely complicated. We need to triangulate between our own attitude towards Kable, our own attitude towards Simon, the attitudes of audiences in the diegesis towards both Kable and Simon, and the changing relationship between Kable and Simon themselves. In this way, Gamer negotiates between the cinematic media regime, and the post-cinematic one centered on computer games.
I have already mentioned that Gamer is set “some years from this exact moment.” This phrase is apt, and indeed precise, because of the way it envisions futurity as a heightened present. The movie’s ever-so-slight extrapolation from the real world of 2009 is to posit the future as involving an even greater heightening of real-time immediacy, of the “here and now”, than we in fact experience today. That is to say, Gamer is hyperbolically actualist, or presentist. It takes place, not so much over a span of time, as in a series of “exact moments,” of hypermediated, heightened and intensified Nows. Each sequence of the film is a thin sliver of pure present, without any thickness of duration. Retentions and protensions are reduced to the bare minimum; memories and desires only exist in an extremely compressed and foreshortened way. Bergson would say that here the past subsists only in its most “contracted” form. In the world of Gamer, memory is so flattened and reduced as to be drained of all emotional resonance. It only exists as so much computer data, accessible more easily by security forces and large corporations than it is by ourselves. This condition is literalized at one point in the film, when the rebel hackers hook up Kable to a computer, so that his blocked traumatic memories — of the murder Castle forced him to commit, and about which he explicitly affirms that he doesn’t have anything to say — can be played back to onlookers in the form of a surveillance video. Is there any better figuration for the ways in which the obsessive storing and cataloging of personal memories — through computer archives of photos and videos, lifeblogs, and other such prosthetic devices — is inseparable from a certain commodification (or “alienation,” in the strict Marxist sense rather than the looser existential one) of the past, and of our “mental privacy” itself?
As for desire — or even simple anticipation of the future — it is entirely instrumentalized in Gamer, and reduced to a question of mere technique. Kable’s actual name is Tillman: but his name has been changed, against his will, to a flashy tag for media-publicity purposes. Shut up in solitary most of the time, he is entirely unaware of being a worldwide media celebrity. In the real-time combat game setting of Slayer, as he struggles to make it through a round of play, all he can afford to feel (let alone think about) is how to avoid the dangers of the next thirty seconds or so. Where can I hide? In which direction should I shoot? Can I get my controller to turn me around when I need to? The only desire at work here is the one to survive; the only anticipations are those required for immediate short-term planning. Any further temporal horizon is unthinkable. Tillman tries to remember his wife (Angie, whom we have met in Society), and their daughter, from whom he has been separated as a result of his arrest. We are reminded, again and again, that his hope of rejoining them is the only thing that keeps him going. “I am always there for you” is even tattooed on his arm. And yet he can barely call his wife’s and daughter’s images to mind. He doesn’t even have a picture of them, until one is surreptitiously passed to him. Memory and anticipation are both exceedingly weak, when compared to his real-time situation of confinement and battle. Either we see Kable fighting for his life; or else he is sitting blankly adrift in the white-out of the dazzlingly sun-lit desert, or trapped in the confines of his dark and narrow cell. In none of these situations is there any opportunity for wide-ranging reflection, or for expansion beyond the confines of the immediate present.
The “presentism” or “actualism” recorded and embodied by Gamer – together with its consequent instrumentalism — of course results from the media glut that we already experience on a daily basis. Our social life is so overpacked and overstimulated and hypermediated, that we can only feel it in the immediate instant. (Indeed – as Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter argue — the spacetime parameters of our contemporary social life are defined by the play between hypermediation and immediacy). The affective tone of the movie (and indeed, of the “real world”) is that of a society-wide attention deficit disorder (the “A.D.D.” that Neveldine/Taylor attribute to themselves). The past and future are hazy, because they seem utterly out of reach. Futurity, no less than pastness, is brutally compressed and foreshortened. As it is for Tillman, so it is for all of us. Too much is going on Right Here, Right Now, for us to be able to focus on anything from Before or After.
However, it is important to notice that the system of “communicative capitalism”, which confines us today, is not totalizing or seamless. There are always glitches, loopholes, and exceptions. And Gamer takes particular account of these moments of incompletion and interruption. Indeed, its genre plot would be impossible without them (since then Tillman would not be capable of confronting Castle and overthrowing him). Within the world of Gamer, people are always concerned about the “ping” – the delay of several hundred milliseconds, even under the best of circumstances, between the moment that a command is given by a player, and the moment that the command is actually executed by the actor. Kable remarks that it is still his own hand which pulls the trigger, even if he has no say in the decision as to when to shoot, and in which direction. In the context of real-time combat, such as occurs in Slayer, half a second might well make the difference between surviving and getting killed. Indeed, Castle plans to eliminate Kable by introducing a player into the game who is faster than Kable because he is not controlled, but acts on his own initiative (and who is sufficiently psychopathic that he will like nothing better than to kill Kable).
In addition to the ping, there is always also the possibility of network failure or interference. This is what allows the Humanz, an underground hacker group (whose leader is played by the rapper Ludacris), to intervene in network transmissions. At various points throughout the movie, they interrupt news broadcasts, commandeer the screens on which Slayer is playing, or cause Society to crash and go offline for a while. The Humanz try to spread the message that Castle’s system is oppressive and a threat to freedom. They also negotiate Kable’s freedom from his controller Simon, and eventually engineer his escape from prison and from the world of Slayer. But the most important thing about the Humanz is the way that their own technology is incomplete and ad hoc. They cannot destroy Castle’s control system, but only circumvent it temporarily by in effect parasitizing it, using its own techniques against it. They have little influence upon Kable/Tillman’s final encounter with Castle; all they can do is broadcast this confrontation to a worldwide public, which still values Kable’s media stardom. That is to say, there is no going back on the network and its circuits of celebrity and control, and reverting to a supposedly clearer and more honest state of affairs. The only way out is the way through. The only possible oppositional strategy is one of embracing these control technologies, generalizing them, and opening them up. This is the very strategy that Neveldine and Taylor adopt in Gamer, by fully embracing the very logic of entertainment and involvement that they are satirizing, and making an “exploitation” film whose hope is to draw audiences in, rather than “alienating” them. In the twenty-first century, cognitive estrangement doesn’t work any more as a subversive strategy (if it ever did); what’s needed is rather a strategy that ups the ante on our very complicity with the technologies and social arrangements that oppress us.
In all of this, I still haven’t mentioned what really makes Gamer work: which is how the “look and feel” of the movie resonates with its generic and technological content. Gamer comes from a place where art film meets pornography-of-violence sleaze, and pretty much everything in between these extremes just drops out. As an “exploitation” film, Gamer embraces the logic of control and of gamespace, which is also the dominant logic of entertainment programming today (as Sebastian Franklin puts it, “a composite of film editing and computer programming is the emblematic cultural mode of the present day”). Gamer embodies and instantiates this composite logic, and turns it against the audience. The film is crass and satirical, and it disclaims any sort of high-minded critique; in this way, Neveldine and Taylor are beyond cynicism. Their exploitation strategy disables in advance any critical scrutiny — but by that very fact it also disables any sort of ideological appropriation.
That is to say, Gamer doesn’t just describe the situation of neoliberalism’s “world of entertainment”; rather (or in addition) it fully embodies this situation, with a sort of gleeful reveling in its crass excesses. There is something at work here, which all our theoretical language of critique, and negativity, and ideology, and so on, is utterly unable to describe. I want to say that in some very deep sense, Gamer exposes what Adorno might call the “truth” of neoliberal society, or what Zizek might call the “obscene underside” of consumerist enjoyment; and indeed, it also exposes the basic exploitation of labor, driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation, that orthodox Marxists would (rightly) say lies behind these ideological and affective processes. But it does all this without “estranging” us from the spectacle it offers us in any way, and without establishing any sort of critique or moral condemnation. Gamer, like many important works of recent years, is doing something that does not fit into the languages of critique and negativity that we have inherited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. No recourse to Brecht, or the Dadaists and the Surrealists, or the Situationists, etc., etc., is of any use to us in understanding what’s going on here. And yet the gesture of a film like Gamer needs to be distinguished, in some sort of way, from the gestures of (say) Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. This has something to do with the way that Gamer takes the premises animating Transformers (which are the dominant premises of the society we live in) more seriously and more literally than Transformers itself does — and thereby it “unmasks” the hypocrisy and stupidity of Transformers. But my language here (or my recourse to Zizek’s notion of “overidentification”) is still too crude and imprecise. It is inadequate to account for what is actually going on.
Let me try to put this another way. Gamer certainly has all the explosions and gratuitous sex and gratuitous violence that any viewer might want — the “bosoms and bullets” that the reviewer for The New York Times so deplored. Neveldine/Taylor’s film is the bastard child of first-person shooters and Grand Theft Auto, as well as of the movies of Jerry Bruckheimer, Tony Scott, and Michael Bay. It exists in the same moral universe that these games and films do (which is to say, the moral universe that we are condemned to live in, like it or not). Not only is there lots of violence and sex, but often the violence and sex are played for cheap laughs and sight gags. For instance, at one point in a Slayer session, Kable rescues a woman in a hijab from certain death, by pushing her away from a spot where a bomb is about to land and detonate. However, just a moment later, the woman wanders back into the street, and is immediately flattened by an oncoming truck. Kable (or rather, Simon playing Kable) mutters something on the order of “at least I tried”, and then turns back to the combat at hand. This is clearly played for lulz, as they say on the Internets; and it arises out of the same cynicism that Bruckheimer, Bay, et al. always display in abundance. But there is something about the purity and extremity of Neveldine and Taylor’s cynicism that distinguishes it from the attitudes of Bruckheimer and Bay, who in contrast might be said to lack even the courage of their cynical (non-)convictions. The excessiveness of Neveldine/Taylor’s attitude is what accounts, both for the way that I am claiming some sort of a “critical” (though that is not the right word, and should probably be put, in the Derrida manner, “under erasure”) edge for Gamer, and for Gamer’s aesthetic cogency in contrast to the bloat and tedium of, say, the Transformers movies. Neveldine and Taylor gleefully emulate the worst excesses of Tony Scott and Michael Bay, except that they provide us with a brutally compressed, miniaturized version of everything that is overblown and grandiose in the work of such high-budget filmmakers. Any ten minutes of Gamer is equivalent to an entire three hours of Transformers (with the added bonus that we are spared the irritation of having to endure the screen presence of Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, embodying straight white male teenagers’ narcissistic and sexual fantasies respectively).
[All this needs to be argued on the level of cinematic form -- though I lack both the patience and the skill that would be needed to perform a David Bordwell-like quantitative analysis of how cinematography and editing work in Gamer. But even a quick look shows how extreme Gamer is, in its embrace of (and even excess over) what Bordwell calls "intensified continuity": the post-1960s visual style in American (and some other) films that involves "more rapid editing... bipolar extremes of lens lengths... more close framings in dialogue scenes... [and] a free-ranging camera.” Bordwell claims that, with intensified continuity, “we are still dealing with a variant of classical filmmaking” in continuity with aesthetic practices codified by Hollywood in the 1920s at the latest. In effect, Bordwell denies that the New Hollywood of the 1970s is really all that different, in its aesthetic values, from the Hollywood of the studio era. And yet, when it comes to more recent (post-1990) filmmaking, Bordwell, like so many cineastes, has come to deplore the way that “the clarity and grace of motion seen in classic Westerns and comedies, in the work of Keaton and Lloyd and Ford and Don Siegel and Anthony Mann, gave way to spasmodic fights and geographically challenged chases. At first, the chief perpetrators were Roger Spottiswoode and Michael Bay. Now it’s nearly everybody, and journalistic critics have recognized that this lumpy style has become the norm” (see also here). I’m inclined to think that we have recently passed a threshold. At some point, “intensified continuity” jumped the shark, leading to a new stylistic norm in which “Hollywood action scenes became ‘impressionistic,’ rendering a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even buried it” (Bordwell again). What Bordwell implies, but can’t quite bring himself to say, is that — when it is pushed to this absurd point — the hyperbolic “intensified continuity” of the new century does indeed mark a radical change in aesthetic regimes, even if 1970s Hollywood didn’t. Today, Michael Bay is the new D. W. Griffith (or the anti-Griffith). In adopting these new post-continuity stylistics, and pushing them to the max, Neveldine and Taylor are suggestive as to what the new aesthetic regime might mean.]
In any case, Gamer offers us a continual cinematic barrage, with no respite. It is filled with shots from handheld cameras, lurching camera movements, extreme angles, violent jump cuts, cutting so rapid as to induce vertigo, extreme closeups, a deliberately ugly color palette, video glitches, and so on. The combat scenes in Slayer, in particular, are edited behavioristically more than spatially. That is to say, the frequent cuts and jolting shifts of angle have less to do with orienting us towards action in space, than with setting off autonomic responses in the viewer. But even in non-action sequences, Neveldine and Taylor usually avoid traditional continuity-based setups. Consider, for instance, the scene, in an early part of the film, where Freek (John Leguizamo’s character) talks to a silent Kable. We do not see all of the actors’ faces, but only extreme closeups in which portions of the actors’ faces nearly fill the screen. There’s an alternation between shots concentrating on Freek, and those that show him talking, still in tight close-up, behind Kable’s face in profile. In these latter shots, there are even rack-focus shifts from Freek’s face to Kable’s, so that we end up with Kable’s face focused but in shadow, while behind it Freek’s face is front-facing but blurry. All this is intercut with blurry, soft-focus flashbacks to Kable’s memory of his wife and child, and then with a hard-edged flashback to the murder of Kable’s friend (played in reverse, and without Kable appearing in the image as the triggerman). It is only at the end of this sequence that we get an establishing shot of Kable and Freek sitting at the base of an enormous concrete structure in the desert (taken in such extreme long shot that the figures of Kable and Freek are quite tiny). This kind of presentation, even in a non-action scene, makes it hard for us even to ground or locate the speakers can be located or grounded in relation to their spatial context.
[I am looking forward to Sebastian Franklin's forthcoming publication of his work on what he calls "executive editing", which should help to clarify what is going on here. Bordwell is useful for explaining stylistic details, but he seems to me to be off the mark when he states that, in classical fight sequences, "the stylistic orchestration of the fight trips off optical, auditory, and muscular responses in our bodies, while the pauses give the movement a chance to echo"; whereas, in action editing post-Michael Bay, we get instead "a vague busyness, a sense that something really frantic but imprecise is happening." Bordwell, as a cognitivist, insists on reading the beautiful orchestration of motion through space and time in classical fight sequences as something that stimulates the human sensori-motor system in a certain way. But the real point is, that these classical scenes' articulations of time and space establish an ontological consistency which goes beyond mere sensori-motor stimulation. (Deleuze is getting at something like this when he writes of the gap or suspension between stimulus and response that is the point of articulation in movement-image films, and that grows to encompass the entire cinematic universe in time-image films). Whereas intensified continuity (or what I would see, in films of the last decade or so as post-continuity) is precisely that sort of filmmaking that abandons the ontology of time and space, and the articulation of bodies in relation to this, in order to instead set up rhythms of immediate stimulation and manipulation -- the shots, and the way that they are edited, have only to do with their immediate visceral effect on the audience moment to moment, with no concern for any sort of pattern extending further in space and time. In other words, it is Michael Bay's cinematic practice that really conforms to Bordwell's cognitivist view of the essence of cinema, despite the fact that Bordwell deplores this practice. While the practice that Bordwell (rightly) celebrates for its cinematic mastery absolutely resists being understood in Bordwell's reductionistic terms].
In other words, Gamer exemplifies a regime of vision, and of narration, that is quite distant from older Hollywood norms. This regime implies, in a certain sense, a heightened reflexivity: as Bordwell says of intensified continuity, “gestures which earlier filmmakers would have considered flagrantly self-conscious… have become default values in ordinary scenes and minor movies”; and yet, even as “stylistic tactics…come forward,” nonetheless “viewers remain in the grip of the action,” instead of being “alienated” from it or made aware of its constructedness. Or, to put the point a little more straightforwardly: as Bruce Reid puts it, Michael Bay’s movies ” not only flaunt every reasonable expectation of believability and internal consistency, they make no sense. Edits seem random, every rule of film grammar is tossed out the window, and the headlong rush of movement forward is all.” Such a sort of filmmaking shouldn’t work; and yet it does, as Bay’s high box office grosses prove.
But what Gamer gives us — as I was trying to suggest above with my comparison between it and the Transformers films — is a version of what I am calling post-continuity that is as expressive as it is compressed and foreshortened. This is because Neveldine/Taylor directly envision (as Bay does not) the politico-economic regime of control to which this sort of aesthetics corresponds (which it expresses, or resonates with). Doubtless this can partly be attributed to Neveldine/Taylor’s low budget and guerrilla-filmmaking tactics (like their use of the RED digital camera system described here). But it is also evident in the ways Neveldine/Taylor continually vary the stylistics of the film, depending on the expressive requirements of each scene. For instance, there is one sequence in the film which (in contrast to the scene I described above) does adhere to an entirely classical shot-reverse shot pattern. This is the scene in which Angie speaks to a male social-work bureaucrat, attempting to regain custody of her and Tillman’s child. The bureaucrat sits at a desk in the middle of an absurdly large and empty room. There are long shots, at the beginning and end of the sequence, of Angie walking towards this desk, and then walking away (with the click of her heels on the floor highly amplified). In between, we get an alternation, following the rhythm of the conversation, of the two speakers (each of whom is shot, by the textbook, either in head-and-shoulders medium closeups, or in head-and-torso shots over the shoulder of the other speaker). Of course, the conversation goes nowhere; Angie is quite anguished; while the bureaucrat wavers back and forth between maintaining a “professional” demeanor as he refuses Angie’s request, and letting his obvious contempt for her (as a Society stand-in, and as the wife of a convicted killer) shine through. At one point, he even bursts into “inappropriate” laughter, then quickly controls himself again. Because of the way the sequence is shot, and how it differs from everything else in the movie, the futility of making a human appeal to a bureaucrat, or of appealing to the instituted power system for any sort of justice at all, is equated with the futility and emptiness of the shot-reverse shot convention itself. Shot-reverse shot is nothing more than a formalist cliche; it implies a human reciprocity that does not exist in the commodified, mediatized world of the movie (and that also no longer exists in the world we live in).
This is just one example; but throughout the movie, the use of both textbook cinematic techniques and forms, and of the more extreme (and post-cinematic, video-inflected) techniques and forms that more recently have gained commercial currency, is always calibrated with a reflection on (or perhaps I should rather say, a demonstration of) the ways that these forms and techniques express and embody and instantiate different types of social interactions and relations. I could also mention the absurdist action sequence, where Kable/Tillman escapes from prison, and from the Slayer gamespace, by first drinking down an entire bottle of vodka, then puking and pissing into the gas tank of an “ethanol only” truck, in order literally to fuel his escape. We see closeups of Kable, shots of Simon composited into the gamespace, and even a shot from the interior of the gas tank, as it receives Kable’s alcohol-laden puke. Embodiment, flow, the human-virtual interface, and the human-machine interface are all yoked violently together in the course of a short montage sequence. In little more than a minute of screen time, Neveldine/Taylor demonstrate how and why all those discussions (which we were all so engaged in, in the 1990s) about cyberculture and disembodiment are obsolete — even as they also implicitly propose a scatalogical/micturitional psychokinetics to replace it. Vomitorium indeed…
And this leads us into the concluding sequences of the movie, in which Kable/Tillman finally triumphs over Castle. I can’t really describe these sequences any better than Vishnevetsky, who evokes “the chiaroscuro of the mansion scene, which puts more or less everyone who’s ever cited Jacques Tourneur as an influence to shame… the scene [then] transforms, over the course of a few minutes, into a song-and-dance number and then a fight (but of course the musical is the ancestor of the action movie), then a bit of sci-fi special effects and finally a confrontation on a basketball court.” These sequences all take place in Castle’s castle (as it were), his mansion which is a cross between a high-tech wonderland (that even Michael Jackson might have envied), and a fortified bunker. The continually-changing chiaroscuro lighting, instead of concealing a woman-transformed-into-a-panther, prepares Tillman for, and sets off, a vision of his missing daughter, whom it turns out has been kidnapped by Castle: Tillman thinks that she is really there, but it’s only a 3D laser projection (of “pornographic” image quality, Castle says). Tillman then fights off Castle’s goons, and knocks them out one at a time, as they dance in lockstep to Sammy Davis Jr.’s version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” lip-synced by Castle.In the final confrontation, Castle tries to force Tillman, through nanocell control, to kill his own daughter with a knife. Tillman resists, and asserts his freedom by finally turning the knife on Castle himself. Only this isn’t really a victory for free will over conditioning, since we see via montage that Tillman is only able to do this because Simon has come online to control him as well. Is “freedom” anything more than the decision between alternative, battling compulsions whose source is elsewhere? This is not the only moment in the film when Neveldine/Taylor’s SF extrapolation touches on the dilemmas of contemporary neuroscience.
Gamer fulfills all genre expectations, even up to the defeat of the bad guys and (apparent) liberation of the world from post-Fordist mechanisms of control. At the same time, Neveldine/Taylor don’t exactly leave us with exalted hopes. What they do accomplish, is to map out for us the system of audiovisual entertainment that one major facet of the control society within which we increasingly find ourselves enmeshed today. They don’t “critique” this control society — if anything, they gleefully embrace it. But they offer us something that is arguably better than critique: they provide a kind of map (both cognitive and affective) of contemporary entertainment/gamespace, pointing up its extensiveness, its affordances, its limitations, and the degree of our unavoidable complicity within it.
[Most serious film critics (the ones I respect, at least) tend to prefer "small, modest, humane, novelistic movies" that go against the entertainment and publicity tide; or else, they cling to "contemplative cinema", the long-take, long-shot, sparse-dialogue style that has become a staple of the international festival-and-art-house circuit. Now, I admire the beautiful films of Bela Tarr and Tsai Ming-liang as much as anybody; and I am moved by the humane, heartbreaking, neo-neorealist political vision of films like Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy and Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop as well. But I think that there also needs to be a space for critics and theorists to come to terms with films like Gamer, that are fast, cheap, out of control, and knowingly exploitative. Such films are, in their own cheerfully perverse way, in touch with the urgencies of the moment, and with the social Real, in a way that contemplative cinema and modest, humanist cinema are not. These films have their own aesthetic merits, which should not be overlooked out of cine-nostalgia.]
Roy Halladay
As Dave talked about the Phillies downgraded their farm system to swap out an ace who wanted to test the free-agent waters next year, Cliff Lee, for another who was willing to sign a bargain extension, Roy Halladay. Halladay is also a slight upgrade over Lee.
Over the past three years Halladay has been the second most valuable pitcher in the game and one of only seven twenty-win players. He excels at limiting walks (under two per nine in each of the last five seasons) and getting ground balls (never less than 50% GB per BIP), while striking out an average to above average (in the past two years) number of batters. That combination is more than enough to make him an elite pitcher.
In the build up to the last season’s trade deadline, when it looked like he might be dealt, I broke down his stuff. He throws a cutter, two-seam fastball, curveball and the occasional changeup. In that piece I noted that he throws his cutter and two-seam fastball frequently to both RHBs and LHBs, giving him two fastballs against all batters. Here I wanted to look at where, horizontally, these fastballs were thrown compared to the average RHP’s. Here is how it looks to RHBs.
RHPs throw their cutter away to RHBs. Halladay does this even more so: he rarely throws the pitch inside and very often throws it to the outer fourth of the plate. But his two-seam location is more different than average. While the average RHP throws his two-seam fastball down the middle of the plate to RHBs, Halladay throws it extremely inside.
Against LHPs we see the mirrored pattern, with the pitches switching roles. Overall this means that Halladay has a fastball he can locate on the inner or outer quarter of the plate against both LHBs and RHBs. This allows him to throw strikes without having to throw over the heart of the plate while mixing up the horizontal location of his pitches. I am sure this is a huge part of his success.
Recapping ‘The Wire’: Episode 2
So in episode two of The Wire, our heroes in the police department—and the non-heroes among the bunch, because some of these cops really are the bottom of the barrel!—get their very own office space, in the basement of the police department. Which is “dank,” at best. We learn very quickly about the loser cops, because the kind of hot white one with the bad attitude and his dumb friends go into the projects at 2 a.m. all drunk and start shaking people down, and then the awesomeness happens, which is that the people in the projects start pelting them from above with bottles and old TVs and stuff. That is excellent and reminds me of various trips to the projects from my youth! And then the really terrible thing happens.
In the aftermath of this ridiculously ill-advised incident—which ends in some kid from the projects losing an eye and which was entirely motivated by an unearned, macho sense of self-worth (”Who does that dyke think she is, bossing us around?” is basically what the dumb hot white one, named Herc, says of his coworker, who is actually busy doing policework while he picks his fat nose)—the leader of the squad, Lieutenant Daniels, who is black, has to come in and tell them how to lie about what happened so they get off. This is a truly horrible moment!
And the show spends some time examining how he made this decision, with his awesome wife Marla, who is the perfect, perfect, perfect character: this African-American woman of a certain age and education, who is a realist and yet still an idealist, who understands things in a very clear, very 1970s-black-liberation way; she has everything figured out as a system, with an endgame, as a historical process, as an interaction with the artifacts of a superstructure. I have met this woman (of various ethnicities, but nearly always of the same age) in real life repeatedly, and she is always completely right and clear-eyed. But it seems near-impossible to put her counsel into practice in the complicated day-to-day, as I think Lieutenant Daniels agrees.
And this incident is where you first get a sense of the great, sucking-in force that is so famous about The Wire. I started to understand, a bit, the insane devotion that verges on addiction among people who’ve written about watching the show. Like, a week went by between watching episodes one and two because I was like, “Oh I don’t know, I bet this gets pretty good, but the first episode seemed so long….” And now I am like “Oh hey, this show is in it to win it.”
Though you know, we’ll see. Life is busy, due to the artifacts of The Man’s capitalist superstructures, and there’s only so much time to watch TV.
Previously: Episode 1.
Video: How to Preheat Your Pan
You might have learned how to tell when your pan is hot enough in home-ec class: just observe a water droplet or two on the pan's surface and wait for it to bead up and roll across the hot pan. But did you know this trick has a name?
It's called the Leidenfrost Effect. Ideally, you want a mercury-like ball of water to hover over the pan, which happens at 320°F or the Leidenfrost point. The water should evaporate more slowly than it would at lower temperatures but if many tiny bubbles form, that means the pan is too hot.
This neato two-minute video from Rouxbe, the online cooking school, explains the very good life knowledge. Watch it, after the jump.
How to Preheat Your Pan
[via Houseboat Eats]
Related
The Food Lab: The Importance of Resting Meat
The Food Lab: Perfect Boiled Eggs
The Food Lab: Animal Fat Mayonnaise
NHL Winter Classic; Fenway Park Concessions Guide
I'm writing about Fenway because this year's NHL Winter Classic will be held at Fenway Park on January 1, 2010 (photo from Boston Globe).
You know I lo+ve concessions maps. Thanks, Red Sox, for this Fenway Park Concessions Guide. It's an SAT bubble chart And a map.More info for the NHL Winter Classic:
-Tailgate parties will not be allowed on any of the Boston Red Sox operated parking lots.
-Food and beverages will be available throughout the ballpark at concession stands and carts managed by Aramark. Visitors may not bring any food or drink items into the ballpark.
-Alcohol is served at Fenway Park at various Aramark vending stations throughout the ballpark. Fans must be of legal drinking age to be served. Guests will not be allowed to bring alcohol into and out of the ballpark. Beer will not be sold after the 10-minute mark of the third period.
-You CanNOT bring bottles, cans, thermoses or other beverage containers into the ballpark.
Audrey Horne
via en.wikipedia.org Wikipedia at it's best... "For the Norwegian post-grunge band, see Audrey Horne (band).... It is rumored that Lynch's Mulholland Drive (film), which was originally conceived as a television series, was also envisioned as a spin-off centered around Audrey in which she goes to Hollywood to pursue an acting career." I didn't know that!
The Real Big Trade
Last week, I titled my post about the Curtis Granderson three way trade “The Big Deal”. That deal is now small potatoes compared to the three team blockbuster that Toronto, Philadelphia, and Seattle are poised to complete. After a day full of changing names, here’s the current belief on the final package.
Toronto gets: Kyle Drabek, Michael Taylor, Travis D’Arnaud
Philadelphia gets: Roy Halladay, Phillippe Aumont, Tyson Gillies, Juan Ramirez (he now goes by J.C.), $6 million in cash
Seattle gets: Cliff LeeThis is a true blockbuster. Halladay and Lee are both among the top five or six pitchers in the game. You rarely see two premium players of this quality moved in the same deal. And, it’s just a fun trade, not your normal big market buying good player from little market deal.
So, let’s look at why each team made this deal.
Let’s start with the Blue Jays. They were obviously over a barrel with Halladay after the debacle of trying to trade him this summer. New GM Alex Anthopolous knew he needed to move his ace for the best package he could get, but also come away with enough young talent to sell this as more than an admission that they screwed up in July. In the trio of young players they’re getting from the Phillies, they were able to do just that.
Drabek, Taylor, and D’Arnaud are high quality prospects. For one year of Halladay (and $6 million in cash, which isn’t trivial but less useful to a Toronto team that won’t win in 2010), that’s a very strong return. Anthopolous did well to come away with that level of talent, given his leverage in the situation.
On Philly’s end, the motivation for this move seems clear – get a #1 starter locked up beyond 2010. They didn’t feel that was possible with Lee, so they were willing to take a downgrade in the farm system to swap out an ace for one that they could lock up. The theory is pretty sound, I think, especially given the rumored 3 year, $60 million price tag that came with Halladay’s extension. That’s a bargain for a guy as good as Doc, and the extension provides significant value to the Phillies.
Seattle’s aim is also pretty clear – win in 2010. Not content with adding Chone Figgins and making a few other small moves that would help them maintain their status as a .500ish club, the Mariners saw an opportunity to put themselves in the AL West race and took it. Lee is a huge upgrade for their pitching staff and a perfect fit for Safeco Field. The cost was fair to middling prospects, not premium guys who would help the team in 2010, and the Mariners saw this as a chance to add wins at a far below market price without sacrificing too much of their future.
For all three franchises, the thought behind the deal is sound. There are legitimate reasons for fans of all three teams to be happy about this deal. However, I think Toroto and Seattle fans can feel comfortable that this was the best their team could have done. Philly fans, I don’t think you can feel that same way.
The Cliff Lee to Seattle portion of this trade just seems very light in return for the Phillies. They’re getting two power arms with a lot of questions marks and a speedy center fielder without a lot of power. None of these guys are top tier prospects. This is the best Philadelphia could have gotten for Lee? Really? A pu-pu platter of interesting, high-risk guys not really close to the majors for a Cy Young quality pitcher who is already well on his way to Type A free agency?
And, even if that’s true, why clear $8 million from the books by trading Lee? Surely, you could have moved Joe Blanton without eating any of his salary, even if you didn’t love the deals being offered. Or, how about this – don’t sign J.C. Romero, Brian Schneider, and Ross Gload, whose 2010 salaries are about equal to Lee’s. Replace those three reserves with league minimum guys and you’ve saved enough money to keep Lee around.
Halladay will help them, and the extension he signed is a great deal. But it just seems like they bent over backwards to make this particular deal, when there were so many other ways of going about it. It just seems to me that the Phillies could have had Halladay and Lee, and that reality would leave me pretty frustrated today if I was a Phillies fan.
Building a News App in Under Two Months
Unbeknownst to the non-technosavvy inputter of data, she is practicing DRY, and Object Oriented principles within the editorial workflow. By creating a poll, she is connecting pollster, candidate and contest objects together. via www.shhhaw.com There's a lot right in that sentence.
Ice Cream Sandwich Bench
The Ice Cream Sandwich Bench. Need I say more? This, and more new from Jellio.
NYC Anti-Soda Commercial Shows Man Drinking Tall Glass Of Fat
No. You do not want to watch this video. Just promise the New York City Department of Health people that you won't drink sugary soda so much. Then we'll all be healthier, happier people, and nobody has to watch this video. (Video is embedded below.)
I warned you.
"Drinking Fat" [YouTube]
The iPhone Reality Show
In September, I received a cryptic email: “We are interested in hiring Mr. Aaron Hillegass for a 1 week event in Italy from December 6 to 13 2009 related to iPhone development. The goal of this event is to document how to develop an iPhone App in detail. Signed, Alessio Zito Rossi.” My response was essentially “What … uh … what?” via www.possibleprobable.com This sounds fun. An Italian telecom CEO hired a bunch of iPhone developers to build an app in one week. The hook is that there was no plan, and that the process would become a reality show - very Web 1.0! The company was called "wikimeety," and that name is enough to merit a blog post on hello, typepad.
And now for something utterly internet-pop-culturish
via kpreid.livejournal.com
Corrections: Matt Taibbi, Goldman Sachs and Heidi Moore
A letter from Jim Ledbetter, the editor of The Big Money, corrects a fact in our column yesterday on Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s treatment at the hands of the financial press. In discussing a piece by Heidi Moore at The Big Money, we conflated the amount of Goldman Sachs’ total mortgage assets with AIG with the amount of their government bailout funds.
Big Money editor Jim Ledbetter writes:
I read your entertaining piece on the Awl about Heidi Moore and Matt Taibbi (this is the first I am learning of “concern trolls.”) I agree with the thrust of some of what you said. But I think in the context of the WSJ article, you have seriously misrepresented what Heidi wrote in TBM back in August.
You wrote: “So much, then, for Moore’s point that Goldman wasn’t appreciably more exposed than other banks trading with AIG, since ‘Merrill Lynch received $12 billion, as did France’s Société Générale and Germany’s Deutsche Bank’ after the $80 billion insurers’ bailout.”
Heidi never wrote that Goldman’s exposure was lower! I don’t think we knew then, nor do we know precisely now, what Goldman’s exposure is. She was comparing apples to apples: how much of the AIG bailout ended up in Goldman’s pocket? That’s the issue originally raised by Taibbi. But you’ve mixed in an orange, by talking about their overall exposure, which was simply not the subject of Heidi’s article.
Even if you’re right, by the way, and GS exposure was $33 billion, and they only netted $12 billion from the bailout, then that means that the government left them on the hook for $21 billion—which surely does not bolster Taibbi’s point that the government serves as Goldman’s lackey.
I do hope you will correct this glaring misuse of numbers.
Thanks, and best,
Jim Ledbetter
Editor, The Big MoneyChris Lehmann responds:
Big Money editor James Ledbetter has written in to dispute that the sum that Wall Street Journal’s reporters mention as the extent of Goldman Sachs’ exposure at AIG–$33 billion in total mortgage assets—represents a qualitatively different figure than that used in Moore’s original takedown of Taibbi, which was the $12.9 billion in government funds that Goldman received as part of the AIG bailout. In comparing Goldman’s bailout take to that of other major banks, Moore was not asserting anything about Goldman’s total exposure in the meltdown—a point I had missed, since Moore initially presented the comparison in the voice of an anti-Goldman conspiracy adherent. That’s still no excuse for flubbing a key category distinction, though, and I apologize to Moore and Ledbetter for doing so.
The Way Teachers End
Examiner column for December 16.Students end their semesters with euphoria and determination to do even better next time. For teachers, a class ends (borrowing from T.S. Eliot), “not with a bang but with a whimper.”
After the “Happy Holidays” and “Good byes” are exchanged, a teacher is left with grades to figure out. Anyone who has ever evaluated a colleague’s performance knows that grading is no fun. Even when the grade is a good one, evaluators have anxiety about balance and fairness as they turn in those final assessments.
And so as students end with a sense of triumph—or, at least, relief—teachers end with an angst-ridden task that must be done quickly. In my George Mason writing classes, this anti-climax is mitigated by the topic of their last papers: endings.
For while I was girding myself for that last “whimper,” I found some gems in that tall stack of paper. Zeina speaks of the end of a lifelong friendship as “difficult, sad, confusing, stubborn, and something I hope to not experience again. I feel like there is an empty bubble where she used to be.” I encourage students to embrace complexity but express themselves simply, instructions that seem contradictory to many. This paper exemplifies that feat.
James sees a “misplaced focus” in the way we view endings. He theorizes that we don’t celebrate or mourn what has ended. “Our emotions associated with endings like a death stem from a fear of what the ending will bring. We are more afraid of beginnings than ends.”
Binh, living at home, analyzes the way he ends all of the arguments he has with his parents: “…rudely and abruptly, because they are my parents. But I can walk out and slam the door because I know they will still be there when I come home. There will be time to apologize later.” His paper is full of self-knowledge as he admits that, “One day my mom won’t be there any more to yell at or cook for her ungrateful son; my dad won’t be worrying about my whereabouts either.”
The personal epiphanies that sometimes accompany the best pieces of writing are what make English teachers return year after year, to instruct and grade and take roll. We certainly hope students will learn to read insightfully and write clearly in our classes, but what we really want is for our students to know themselves better when the class is over. The “ungrateful son” is an example of someone who has more insight at the end of the paper than at the beginning.
Chris’ paper is clever and philosophical, and a good way to end this column. He starts by announcing, “This is the beginning of this paper,” and makes a case for recognizing time’s passage as “…something you cannot defend yourself against.” He concludes his reflection by observing that, “This paper is now over. The time you have spent reading it is time that cannot be replaced. Don’t have this same feeling on your deathbed. So go do something you love and embrace life, from beginning to end.”
Teachers often learn from their students, making those endings bangs rather than whimpers, and that’s the ending we all hope for.
Your Best Shot 2009: Taking Flight
A selection of flying swings photos from Your Best Shot 2009.
Photos from abbyladybug, oliver zelinski, notthatcool, Andrea Barsacchi, and Mister . Brown.
4 8 15 16 23 42
photo by virginhoneyThe chance of such a sandwich lasting longer than 5 seconds in my presence is about equal to the chance of Lost coming to a satisfying conclusion in 2010. Yum.
The iPhone Reality Show
In September, I received a cryptic email: “We are interested in hiring Mr. Aaron Hillegass for a 1 week event in Italy from December 6 to 13 2009 related to iPhone development. The goal of this event is to document how to develop an iPhone App in detail. Signed, Alessio Zito Rossi.” My response was essentially “What … uh … what?”
Mr. Rossi, I would gradually figure out, had decided to put together a team of iPhone programmers and designers to develop an iPhone app in one week. And his team would film the whole process. And he wanted me to lead the team.
I had lots of questions: What did the app do? Who was coming? Who was going to watch the film? The answer was always, “We will see.”
The whole enterprise seemed rather weird, but I signed up. If this was going to happen, I figured that I would rather be at the helm than watching from the sidelines.
Having now spent a week with Alessio, I now know why it seemed so weird: Alessio had no idea what was going to happen, and he was completely OK with that. Usually, when I do a gig, the client wants to know exactly what is going to unfold. Alessio was willing to write the checks, stir the pot, and hope for something great. I think he pulled it off. (Alessio Zito Rossi, it should be mentioned, is not a crackpot — he is, in fact, the CEO of a telecom company.)
He sent me an airplane ticket, and I flew to Venice. The rest of the team trickled in from every corner of the world. Each had written a successful iPhone application, and each had signed up for this crazy thing.
Us, left to right:
- Jim Matthews (New Hampshire) - Fetch (ok, not an iphone app)
- David Hodge (Los Angeles) - iBart
- Matej Bukovinski (Slovenia) - LPPbus
- Eddie Wilson (Richmond, Virginia) - SnowReport
- Jonathan Badeen (Los Anglese) - FastCapture
- Peter Watling (New Zealand) - BubbleWrap
- Me
- Emanuele Vulcano (Milan) - Mover
- Max Schönig (Berlin) - CloudApp
- Steve Shi (Bejing) - Louis Vuitton Soundwalk
- Matteo Caldari (Italy) - TimeTheDistance
We were all a bit disoriented. I think each of us thought the others must know more about what we came to do. This much we knew:
- We were to write a social media application called wikimeety — the T-shirts had already been made. (What is it supposed to do? Anything we wanted.)
- There would be cameras on us the entire time, and the video would be streamed live onto the viewers on the internet. (Who was going to watch it? Anyone could. Perhaps no one would.)
What happened? You can watch the highlights.
It was a pleasure to work for a week with this team. Each was a good engineer and a good man. We worked together at least 12 hours per day and ate all our meals together. I didn’t hear an unkind word the entire week.
In the end, our plan relied too much upon a PHP developer who abandoned the project 4 hours in. We did the submission process, but after some testing and debate decided to pull the flawed binary. I hope we can put the last few finishing touches on it over the next month or so.
The source code for the entire app is available at http://commandguru.svn.beanstalkapp.com/wikimeety/ (You can check it out using Subversion.)
Did anyone watch? I don’t have exact numbers, but the story was picked up on The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Gizmodo, and TechCrunch.
I would like to send a big shout out to everyone involved in this project; it was an absolute delight to work with all of you. In particular, I want to thank Alessio for picking me to lead the team. It was a great honor, and I hope I did my role justice.
Getting started with MySQL 5.5
Some time go, we announced a new release model for MySQL. As all new things, it had some initial hiccups (with MySQL 5.4 we were still getting acquainted with the new model), but now it seems to be in full swing.
By the time you read these lines, MySQL 5.5 will be available. If the mirrors aren't seeded yet, the impatient can compile and use the new version from the launchpad source tree..Overview
What's this new release anyway? I'll leave it to Kaj's blog to give you the full description. Suffice it to say that this release is the second milestone of the current installment. It is of beta quality, and it will mature to RC quality. There will be yet another milestone before we release a GA in mid 2010.
One thing that this milestone shows is that there are no dead weights. If a feature doesn't make the deadline, i.e. it doesn't reach beta quality by the scheduled date, it will be dropped, and eventually rescued at the next milestone.
With the introduction of the milestone model, we have also increased our internal QA, especially thanks to the Random Query Generator, which finds bugs in early stages of the code faster than any other method. (1)Built-in InnoDB plugin
The InnoDB plugin 1.0.5 is included in the distribution, and, unlike MySQL 5.1, it's built-in. There is no need to load and register the plugin. The performance enhancements developed for MySQL 5.4 are now available together with the other enhancements available with the InnoDB plugin. This was already available in the previous milestone, but it's worth mentioning it now, because not many people are aware of that.Semi-synchronous replication
Of all the new features, this one is probably the most relevant. It is based on a patch made by Google to the InnoDB engine, and adapted by MySQL developers to make it engine-independent.
In short, it's a safety device that establishes some internal communication between master and slaves, and makes sure that at least one slave has received the changes being committed. That is, before committing, the master waits until at least one slave has acknowledged that it has received the portion of binary log necessary to reproduce the transaction.
Some caveats apply:
- It's called semi-synchronous replication, because it doesn't necessarily apply to all the slaves. Although you can manually check if the replication has worked for all the slaves, it's enough for the master to make sure that at least one slave has got the goods.
- Received by a slave doesn't mean "executed". The slave acknowledges when it has got the binary log, even if the SQL thread is busy or stopped.
- If there is no slave that can acknowledge receipt (e.g. slaves are all down or stopped), then the master reverts to the normal asynchronous operation.
To use this feature, you need to install two plugins: one for the master and one for each slave. No need to compile anything, though. They are provided with the binaries. All you need to do is load the appropriate plugin for each server.master > INSTALL PLUGIN rpl_semi_sync_master SONAME 'libsemisync_master.so';
slave1 > INSTALL PLUGIN rpl_semi_sync_slave SONAME 'libsemisync_slave.so';
Additionally, there are a few variables that you must set, either in the options file or online.master > SET GLOBAL rpl_semi_sync_master_enabled=1;
slave1 > SET GLOBAL rpl_semi_sync_slave_enabled=1;
Now that the system is ready, let's see how to use it.
Before doing anything, we ask for the value of two important status variables:SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Rpl_semi_sync%tx';
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_no_tx | 0 |
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_yes_tx | 0 |
+-----------------------------+-------+
The first one is the number of failed synchronized transactions, the second one is the number of successful ones. Since nothing has happened so far, they are both zero.The first operation (a table creation) was successfully transferred to a slave. Let's do one more.create table t1 (i int not null primary key) engine=innodb;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.13 sec)
SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Rpl_semi_sync%tx';
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_no_tx | 0 |
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_yes_tx | 1 |
+-----------------------------+-------+Also this one was successful.set autocommit=0;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
insert into t1 values (1);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
COMMIT;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Rpl_semi_sync%tx';
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_no_tx | 0 |
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_yes_tx | 2 |
+-----------------------------+-------+
Now, let's try something sneaky. On each slave, we execute "STOP SLAVE SQL_THREAD". Normal replication would not work, but semi-synchronous replication will go on.
insert into t1 values (2);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Rpl_semi_sync%tx';
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-----------------------------+-------+
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_no_tx | 0 |
| Rpl_semi_sync_master_yes_tx | 3 |
+-----------------------------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
The semi-synch replication has worked. However, if we query both master and slaves, only the master has the new record. The slaves have it only in their relay logs, which you can easily ascertain with mysqlbinlog.Enhanced partitioning syntax
About one year ago, I briefly announced that this feature was in the making. With some interface improvement, it is now part of the regular partitioning. It's an extension of partitioning BY RANGE. As you know, you can only partition on one column value, and you can only partition on INTEGER columns. Both these restrictions were lifted in 5.5, with a syntax change that makes the code more readable and the overall feature more usable.
You can now partition by date, datetime, varchar, and char columns, not just integers, and you can use more than one column in your list. The most immediate usage of this extension is the ability of using dates without resorting to functions that convert the dates into integers. For example:The COLUMNS keyword does the trick. The manual has more examples.CREATE TABLE t2
(dt date,a int, b int, c int)
PARTITION BY RANGE COLUMNS (dt)
(
PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN ('2009-01-01'),
PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (MAXVALUE)
);
The partition helper has been updated to handle this new feature and generate partitions accordingly.SIGNAL and RESIGNAL
If you have used stored routines extensively, you will certainly have asked yourself "why isn't there any way of raising an exception?" In the SQL standard, exception handling is implemented using the SIGNAL and RESIGNAL keywords, which were notably missing in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 stored routines.
There have been many clever hacks by several community members to emulate the missing SIGNAL, but none were quite satisfactory. After long waiting here we have SIGNAl and RESIGNAL, which make stored routines programming much more robust and easier to debug. An authoritative example on how to use the new syntax is available in Roland Bouman's blog.
There is more. For the complete list of features, have a look at the official manual.
Happy hacking!
(1) For the more technologically savvy, here's how Philip Stoev, one of my distinguished QA colleagues, describes the enhancements:Historically, most of the MySQL tests have been manually created, however a modern database is so complex that it is impossible to test manually even a tiny percentage of the available functionality. Therefore for Betony [codename for MySQL 5.5], and the upcoming Celosia [5.6], the majority of our testing effort was concentrated around stochastic testing, using random data and millions of random queries to validate the behavior of the server across a wide range of scenarios and workloads.
For each new feature, and some existing ones, we automatically generated tests that attempt to cover all relevant SQL constructs, including the interaction between the feature being tested and existing code within the server. For features that have concurrency implications, we ran the random queries as a stress test or along with concurrent DDL statements. For areas such as the partitioning, we used the random queries to functionally validate the new code, by comparing the result from each query to a reference source, such as a previous version of the server.
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN
Bordain's latest
Tony Bourdain is back in the saddle he rode to celebrity with "Kitchen Confidential."
What to Expect From Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw -- Grub Street New YorkThe best sauce in the world is hunger.
Most Hits First 162 Career Games 1954-2009
On Sunday, we looked at the players since 1954 with the most home runs in their first 162 games. Today, let's look at the hits leaders.
Rk Player #Matching H ▾ 2B 3B HR 1 Ichiro Suzuki 139 Ind. Games 248 34 8 8 2 Kirby Puckett 125 Ind. Games 215 16 8 1 3 Nomar Garciaparra 120 Ind. Games 213 38 13 32 4 Wally Moon 120 Ind. Games 213 31 9 15 5 Vada Pinson 123 Ind. Games 211 51 9 18 6 Orlando Cepeda 122 Ind. Games 208 44 5 30 7 Hunter Pence 125 Ind. Games 208 43 10 24 8 Garry Templeton 119 Ind. Games 207 23 13 6 9 Kevin Seitzer 122 Ind. Games 205 33 7 15 10 Ryan Braun 116 Ind. Games 204 40 8 47 11 Juan Pierre 124 Ind. Games 204 19 7 1 12 Pablo Sandoval 122 Ind. Games 203 47 4 24 13 Carlos Beltran 126 Ind. Games 203 31 10 22 14 Tony Oliva 117 Ind. Games 202 39 7 30 15 Dave Stapleton 121 Ind. Games 200 41 5 12 Ryan Braun makes both lists. Here are Braun's totals for his first 162 games:
Games PA AB H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS SH SF IBB HBP GDP 162 Ind. Games 707 656 204 40 8 47 134 38 156 .311 .352 .611 .963 0 6 3 7 16 .
December 14, 2009
spot instances
Amazon's doing some interesting pricing innovation with EC2. The latest -- spot instances. More info from Werner Vogels' blog:
The central concept in this new option is that of the Spot Price, which we determine based on current supply and demand and will fluctuate periodically. If the maximum price a customer has bid exceeds the current Spot Price then their instances will be run, priced at the current Spot Price. If the Spot Price rises above the customer's bid, their instances will be terminated and restarted (if the customer wants it restarted at all) when the Spot Price falls below the customer's bid.
Clever, and plays to the strength of the Amazon cloud, which is its elasticity. As Vogels points out, spot instances are perfect for tasks that don't need to be started / stopped at a particular time.
My annual quest to find the original location of the
My annual quest to find the original location of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree on Live/Bing maps' birds-eye view turned up a neat little coincidence. The tree's owner, Maria Corti, is a fifth grade teacher at Cider Mill School in my hometown of Wilton, Connecticut. Corti lives in Easton, CT and the 76-foot-tall Norway Spruce used to stand 10 feet from her bedroom window. She had been told that she may have to remove the tree in 5-10 years, which alleviated some of the guilt she felt at chopping it down. This year the tree's Swarovski crystal star topper has been made over with 720 LEDs, 44 circuit boards, and 3,000 feet of wire for crowd-pleasing lighting tricks.
The Deal As We Know It
The trade has had moving parts all day long, but as we understand it currently, it looks something like this from the M’s perspective:
Phillippe Aumont, Tyson Gillies, and a third player rumored to be J.C. Ramirez for Cliff Lee.
There’s a bunch of other stuff going back and forth from the Blue Jays and Phillies, but this is the relevant portion of the trade to M’s fans. And, to that, I just have to say that this is so amazingly awesome, I’m still trying to figure out how on earth this is actually happening.
Aumont is a good relief prospect. He could be in the majors this year, and he’s got all-star closer upside. Gillies is a potential high OBP center fielder with speed. Ramirez has the best arm in the system. They’re all prospects. And the whole lot of them aren’t worth three months of Cliff Lee, much less an entire season. Breaking it down numerically, since that’s what we do here.
Lee projects as roughly a +5 win pitcher for 2010. Given the expected cost of wins on the market, that makes him worth about $20 to $25 million for the upcoming season. However, the dollar per win values for high end players are usually based on multi-year contracts, as players of this caliber trade a little bit of cash for long term security. Since the Mariners are assuming no long term risk, his value is probably more like $25 to $30 million.
If the M’s can’t sign Lee to an extension, it’s almost a mortal lock that he’ll be a Type A free agent, which means that the team will get two draft picks if he leaves via free agency. The combined value of the two compensation picks is another $5 to $10 million, depending on what specific picks the M’s would receive.
So, the asset that is Lee for 2010 plus potential draft picks is worth somewhere between $30 and $40 million. His 2010 salary? $8 million. He’s a $22 to $32 million net asset. That’s enormous – he’s one of the most valuable properties in baseball.
The three prospects the M’s gave up? None of them are top notch, elite guys. They all have potential, but their risk-reward profiles do not put them in the top tier of minor leaguers. Based on the work of Victor Wang, we can quantify the present value of Aumont and Ramirez at about $5 million each and Gillies at about $3 million. That’s $13 million in total, or about half of what Lee is worth.
This is, quite frankly, a heist. The Mariners are getting a Cy Young caliber pitcher for some decent-but-not-great prospects. They aren’t giving up Morrow. They aren’t giving up Saunders. They aren’t even giving up Triunfel. And yet, they walk away with one of the five or six best pitchers in baseball.
Forget that we probably only have Lee for a year. We’re paying for about two months worth of his services and getting four months for free.
Seriously, dance in the streets. Build a bust of Zduriencik and place it on your mantle. Name your first born son Jack and your daughter Jackie. When this becomes official, hug someone. This trade is that good.
-- This post came from: U.S.S. Mariner, and is copyright by the authors. This RSS feed is intended for the personal use of readers and not, for instance, spam blogs.
The Deal As We Know It
Machine Bee (yellow paper)
Nicolas Lampert Machine Bee (yellow paper) $20 Buzz a while. Print from the Machine-Animal series. two color screenprint 19"x25" heavy stock, acid free paper (bright yellow color) signed
I’m most worried the Mets might freak out too and do something crazy, making matters worse, just to try and ‘make a splash,’ like step up and sign Joel Pineiro to a terrible contract, or overbid to sign Bay, just to have something to put on disaply. The thing is, it’s OK for me to lose my cool, I can be emotional… the Mets can’t. I have no idea what their plan is, or if they even have one, but, whatever it is, gentlemen, stay focused. Please, leave the overreacting and the worrying to me. via www.metsblog.com
Urban Dictionary for $2000, please
Shared by ArtLung
Dooced! on Jeopardy!HOLY CHICKEN MARSHMALLOW BALLS. This was an answer on "Jeopardy!" last night. I am still in a daze after rewinding this segment about four hundred times just to make sure that I was indeed seeing what I was seeing. Aside from that, it looks like the HD portion of KJZZ HD is a bit misleading, don't you think? If not, then I really do need to see an optometrist.
click image above to see the photo on dooce.comby dooce in Daily Photo
© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as Urban Dictionary for $2000, please. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.
Great job, Michelle! I’d say besides Michelle’s rap...
Great job, Michelle! I’d say besides Michelle’s rap skills, the best part’s at the very end.
mdfsmash: Check out my amazing rap voice over skills at about 1:22 in ;)
Chad Vader & Obama Girl Get Freaky The KEY OF AWESOME #9 (via barelypolitical)
Habitat: Sound and Vision
More often then not, technology companies are turning to design deities to reinvent our everyday gadgets. Wireless electronic brand Parrot recently paired with prolific designer Philippe Starck to create a very special kind of speaker, revolutionizing the acoustics of home sound systems without losing sight of Starck's panache and sensibility. The Parrot Zikmu home system, designed specifically for iPhones, iPods and other digital players, stands 2.5 feet tall and resembles two upside down trumpets. The svelte wireless audio towers communicate with each other using Bluetooth technology and produce 360-degree sound that radiates through the Parrot Zikmu's flat membrane, NXT speakers. Better yet, users can control the system through the use of a compact remote control and stream tunes directly from their desktops. The beautifully designed dock comes at a considerable price tag, retailing for $1,500, but will look and sound sharp in any given space.
Fire and Knives
I really like the cover on the first issue of Fire & Knives, a subscription-only food magazine based in the UK.
(via eat me daily)
Tags: Fire and Knives food magazines
Note: I’m Freaking Out a Bit
Yes, intellectually, I know the Mets never had a chance to trade for Roy Halladay.
Also, I know there are legitimate concerns among interested teams regarding John Lackey’s elbow, and so I realize it would be unwise to over-commit to him, especially if the contract is not able to be insured.
And so, technically, while I know signing Lackey or trading for Lee or Halladay was never going to happen, as a Mets fan, emotionally, I can’t help but feel like I was just punched in the stomach.
I think it’s just knowing there are less options available today than yesterday; and so there is less chance of significant improvement. Or, it’s this feeling that, while other big-market teams are moving forward, my favorite team is collecting back-up catchers… while being sued by another. Or, perhaps I’m just not very excited about the idea of signing Jason Bay and Bengie Molina.
This is not to say Bay is terrible, or that the Mets have no options, or that they have no trick up their sleeve to be better… they might. I don’t know. I am not judging the off season… yet. I will not assume to know who wanted what for whom, and how much it could’ve cost for so-and-so, and so I intend to reserve judgment until the off season is complete. However, right now, today, seeing how other teams are improving, and being creative in doing so, I can’t help but freak out a bit.
I know I shouldn’t, but I am.
What’s more, I’m most worried the Mets might freak out too and do something crazy, making matters worse, just to try and ‘make a splash,’ like step up and sign Joel Pineiro to a terrible contract, or overbid to sign Bay, just to have something to put on disaply.
The thing is, it’s OK for me to lose my cool, I can be emotional… the Mets can’t. I have no idea what their plan is, or if they even have one, but, whatever it is, gentlemen, stay focused. Please, leave the overreacting and the worrying to me.
Rachel + Lots of Makeup = January Vogue
We've all known that a Vogue cover was coming for Rachel McAdams since we spotted her sitting with Anna and Sally at Alexander Wang's show in September.
And we've just gotten our first look at it. The first thought that popped into my head was over-styled suburban housewife, especially in terms of that hair and makeup. When images of Kate Gosselin pop into your head for even a split second, it's not a good thing. I also started coming up with Go Fug Yourself headlines that I'm pretty sure they'll write.
Of course, like all Vogue cover girls, Rachel is exceptionally pretty. But this cover? Not so much in my opinion. Perhaps it's that fuchsia lip with the bleach blonde hair that's throwing everything off? Maybe it's the incredibly awkward and erect pose? Or perhaps I'm wrong and I just like Rachel looking a certain way.
It's probably a bit of all of the above. But really, all I currently concentrate on is my deep desire to wipe that lipstick and pancake makeup right off her face. What do you think? Is this a more interesting look for Rachel and for Vogue?
Or do you think that between this and the news that Andre is actually judging on the new season of America's Next Top Model, Anna is most certainly donning her bad idea jeans, er, Prada shift?
longtimest favoritest
longtimest favoritest
Atkins Non-Tendered
Garrett Atkins is an intriguing addition to the free agent pool. His career has been on a pretty steady downward trend for the past four years. From his six-win season in 2006 to his below-replacement season in 2009. His wRC+, which adjusts for Coors, has gone from 145 in 2006, to 117 in 2007, to 98 in 2008 and finally an ugly 65 this past year.
A repeat of his 2006 season is vanishingly unlikely, but still, a rebound to 2007 or 2008 form–a league average third basemen–could help many teams. So will we see such a rebound?
In 2009 his problem we batted ball based, not plate discipline based (his walk and strikeout numbers were fine). His FB/HR rate dropped to a career low 7.3%, which is troubling when playing half his games at Coors, but the bigger problem was his BABIP of just .247. Before this year he averaged a BABIP of .320. What happened there? Turning to Baseball Reference’s BABIP by batted ball type:
BABIP +--------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+ | | Atkins Career | Atkins 2009 | League Aver. | +--------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+ | Ground Balls | 0.247 | 0.256 | 0.235 | | Fly Balls | 0.108 | 0.055 | 0.142 | | Line Drives | 0.711 | 0.600 | 0.718 | +--------------+---------------+-------------+--------------+The problem was definitely with balls in the air. They not only went for HRs much less often but they dropped in for hits at a much smaller rate. Below I broke up the playing field into ten zones, counted the fraction of Atkins balls in the air to each zone and color coded each zone based on its BABIP (darker the better). The image on the left is for 2006 to 2008 and on the right is for 2009.
Atkins is just not hitting the ball as far: the four closest zones have more balls in play in 2009 than in 2008 and all but one of the farthest six zones have fewer. Atkins can plays serviceable defense at third base, walks at an above average rate while striking out at a below average rate, but if he wants to have a job as a starting third basemen he is going to have to get back to hitting the ball with some authority.
Espresso 1.1 arrives with 11-day giveaway
MacRabbit's Espresso has been updated to version 1.1, and along with it, the company is offering a contest where you can win a copy of the web development software for yourself and a friend. Version 1.0 was released back in March.
The contest takes on a nagging subject with a sense of humor. MacRabbit is challenging contestants to come up with witty "Buy Now" messages for the demo version of Espresso. Submissions can be sent via Twitter or e-mail.
Espresso 1.1 includes a revamped workspace, image preview, an improved projects organizer and other various improvements. You can find a complete list of changes here.
Espresso costs 59.95€ (nearly $88 USD) on its own, 49.95€ (a little more than $73 USD) for those who already own CSSEdit 2, and 79.90€ ($117 USD) if you want to purchase it with a copy of CSSEdit2. Espresso can be used in a full-featured trial mode for 15 days and requires OS X 10.5 or higher.TUAWEspresso 1.1 arrives with 11-day giveaway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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2010 Lunar Calendar, Take Two
The TinyShowcase calendar might be gone, but Rendij’s 2010 Lunar Calendar is still available.
(via arthur)
The making of an Eames fiberglass chair
From 1970, this video shows how Eames fiberglass shell chairs were made.
Greg Allen says:
Tags: furniture how to videoThe idea of design has been so thoroughly associated with computers in my mind, I'd forgotten the essential sculptural processes it used to involve: carving, modelmaking, molding, pouring... How design and art ever stayed separate in those days, I cannot imagine.
2010: Already Sold Out
I managed to miss out on Tiny Showcase’s 2010 glow-in-the-dark calendar this year, featuring the artwork of Alec Thibodeau. Apparently Providence locals may still be able to nab a copy at Craftland.
Ansel Adams' Lost Los Angeles
While looking for something else at the Los Angeles Public Library, Gerard Van der Leun stumbled across some 1940s photos of LA taken by Ansel Adams. They had not been seen for a long while.
Tags: Ansel Adams Los Angeles photographySo I would conclude that with the LAPL material we are getting a rare chance to look at photographs a great photographer chose not to show the world. Obviously none of these images even touches upon the vast and central work that establish Adams as one of the greatest American photographers, but they do provide an interesting footnote to what Ansel Adams saw and thought worthy of photographing while ambling about Los Angeles during the opening months of World War II.
Not bad for the little guy, especially considering that shooting...
Not bad for the little guy, especially considering that shooting the sun directly through tree branches is one of the most unforgiving subjects for revealing optical flaws in anything but high-end pro glass.
Millennium Falcon Bed
Kayla Kromer's light up Millennium Falcon Bed is a Star Wars geek dream come true, complete with LED lights and and hideaway spot for a keyboard. Pair it up with the Millennium Falcon Mac Mini mod and you're ready to jump to light speed into the sector of Tattoinweenie!
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El Tono in South America
I've always been a fan of the street artist El Tono, and his ability to adjusts and morph his simple geometric line patterns to the different social contexts he works in. He's the master of making street art that operates as folk art, and folk art that operates as street art. He was recently in Peru and Brazil, making posters and painting buildings. In Peru her worked with Equipo Plastico, making posters based on the "Chicha" style of street postering. Here's a cool image, and more can be found HERE and HERE.
While in Sao Paulo he painted a building with Nuria, and there are a bunch of great photos of it HERE.
Programming note: I'm on furlough again
As happened in mid-October, I'm going to be off from work all this week on a mandatory unpaid furlough, as part of a program The Star-Ledger instituted to control costs in this bad economy for newspapers. So no posts from...
Career Opportunities No question. So far, this is the best...
Shared by sippey
I'm so glad Merlin is diving into the deep, deep irony of Richard Scarry.
No question. So far, this is the best one.
Appreciate her line of vision and expression; it’s like she’s watching Lynn Swann catch a Hail Mary and dreaming of a future career.
“Someday, I’ll be sliced into breakfast meat and admired by a pig-child. Someday…”
Exactly, kid, you’re the football; not the guy who catches it.
Also, technically, you’ll only “work in the supermarket” for a day or two. It’s a career with a high — what? — burn-out rate, I guess.
The Overtoun or "Dog Suicide" Bridge
Shared by eliz
WHOAUnited Kingdom, Europe | Architectural Oddities
Located near the village of Milton in the burgh of Dumbarton, Scotland, there exists a bridge that for some reason or another, has been attracting suicidal dogs since the early 60s. At a rate of around one a month, dogs have been regularly leaping from the bridge; an estimated 600 have been reported jumping. Even more strange are the circumstances behind these incidents of kamikaze canines. Not only have they been plummeting to their deaths from the bridge, but many have witnessed the dogs actually climbing the parapet wall before making the jump. Even stranger are the reports of dogs surviving their brush with death, only to return to the bridge for a second attempt. Many theories have arisen on why these doggy suicides occur at such a regular pace, but nothing conclusive has been found. The Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has sent representatives to investigate, but they too were stumped by the cause of the strange behavior.
Five Elastic Years of infosthetics.com
On the occasion of the recent fifth birthday of this blog, we thought a bit about the archival nature of the whole enterprise. With (almost) daily updates about fresh projects from visualization and information aesthetics, about 1950 different projects have been described and documented up to now. So here [moritz.stefaner.eu] is a first step towards making this growing archive more accessible: a custom adaptation of the elastic lists principle for the 1950 posts of infosthetics.com.
Here is how it works: The little tiles on the left represent the individual posts, with color stripes representing their categories. You can find a color legend in the category filter on the right. In addition, you will find filters for the number of comments, year and author. Clicking one of the filter entries will display only matching posts, and also update the number of items for each filter accordingly. If you click a post, you can see its details on the bottom, and visit it by clicking the preview. In addition, the filter values that belong to this post are marked with a grey background.
The little bar charts in each filter show you the relative number of posts in the current filter context (red bar) compared to the overall percentage (grey bar) - so, in the example above, you can see that for the selected category infographic the number of comments is slightly higher than usual and the posts seem to be more recent overall.
There is certainly room for improvement (keyword search, represent links between projects...), but we thought it would be good to share it anyways - so try it out and let us know what you think! Do you think this is worth pursuing, and which other browsing options/modes could be interesting to you?
(Note by infosthetics: Best birthday present ever! Thnkx Moritz!)
December 13, 2009
Inbox Unicorns With Gmail & IMAP
The Problem
Like many folks, I consume email using a GTD-ish approach of an Inbox and an Everything Else box. I’ve disabled autocheck on my Mac, and cranked the polling time on my iPhone to an hour.
My personal email is hosted on Google Apps, which provides the great Gmail web experience along with an excellent IMAP implementation. Likewise for my previous and current company mail. The Gmail Inbox / All Mail paradigm maps neatly to the aforementioned GTD approach.
On the desktop, I use Mail.app. I prefer it over the Gmail interface for a number of reasons including offline search and its ability to aggregate a number of accounts with the “magic” folders Inbox, Sent and Junk.
One place where Gmail’s interface punks Apple Mail is one-button archiving. It even has a keyboard shortcut! Wham. Hit one key, and that email disappears from the Inbox forever.
With Apple Mail, archiving a message requires a click, drag and a prayer, exacerbated by every additional email account. You could drive a truck through the hole Fitts left in your otherwise optimized process.
The Solution: Archive via Delete
It’s possible to bend Gmail, IMAP and Apple Mail to your will. The following steps describe how to configure things so that Delete acts like Archive: one click (or keypress) archives messages in Apple mail on the desktop and the iPhone.
Step 1. Enable advanced IMAP controls. You’ll find this under the Labs tab in Gmail settings.
Step 2. Enable auto-expunge. This is found under the IMAP/Pop tab in Gmail settings. This sounds scary, but isn’t. Gmail keeps a copy of each message in All Mail, regardless if it’s in the Inbox or not.
Step 3. Configure Apple Mail. Uncheck “Move deleted messages to The Trash mailbox” and set the IMAP prefix to “[Gmail]”.
Step 4. Use “All Mail” for sent messages. Since Gmail already stores every message, sent or received in All Mail, this step just instructs Apple Mail to work that way too. If you have multiple accounts, Sent is aggregated just like Inbox.
Step 5. Configure your iPhone.
Presto! Faster email consumption.
In Apple mail you’ll see something like this:
On an iPhone, the Delete icon will remove messages from the Inbox, but leave them in All Mail. Note: Be careful not to tap Delete when viewing messages in All Mail—they’ll be permanently deleted!
TL;DR
- Use Gmail, IMAP, and Apple Mail tricks to read & process email faster.
- Uses fun terms like “auto expunge” and training yourself that hitting Delete is okay.
- Vader.
Postscript
I’ve been using this to manage my email for 2 years. It works great, is fast, and frankly hitting Delete when I’m done with an email is really satisfying.
Open Colour Standard: free/open alternative to Pantone
Ginger coons writes in about the Open Colour Standard, "an effort to create a new colour standard to help free/open source graphics programs bridge the gap between screen and print."From the article: "What we have, then, is a venerable, widely supported, but largely inflexible and very expensive de facto standard. It has a huge impact on both print and digital media, not to mention the clothes you wear, the color you paint your living room, even the specific shades used to define healthy dirt or high-grade orange juice. It is, in short, a bloated monopoly eating up more and more of the color market... If [Open Colour Standard] works, this effort could open up spot color, make open-source software more viable for pre-press, and maybe even inspire a little kitchen table chemistry. Most importantly, it would take the cross-platform treatment of color out of the hands of a private company and put it where it belongs, with users."It's like Pantone's spot colour standard [ed: a widely used proprietary system for describing "spot" colors -- that is, colors that need special inks to print. Pantone distributes both the inks and books of color swatches. Designers pick colors out of the book and the printer loads the extra ink into her apparatus at print time], but not necessarily in opposition to it. Just different.
opencolour.org is the official site, currently in the form of a wiki hosting discussion about how an Open Colour Standard can/should be created. Here is a great big backgrounder, explaining and documenting the first stages of an original, not tied to an ink manufacturer, colour standard that F/LOSS graphics users can call their own.
And here's a piece explaining the rationale and history behind an Open Colour Standard. Seems straightforward, but is proving to be surprisingly controversial. Looks like a lot of people really do see creating a new colour standard as futile, useless and hopelessly quixotic.
Open Color Standard (Thanks, Ginger!)
(Image: untitled photo, licensed Creative Commons Attribution, from iboy_daniel's photostream)
Previously:
- Rainbow created with 5000 Pantone color chips - Boing Boing
- Lego Pantone values - Boing Boing
- Learning to talk changes how we perceive color - Boing Boing
- Humans will hand render any image like a digital printer - Boing Boing
- Scientist: Hugh Hefner Owes Everything to the Evolution of Color ...
- Behemoth printer is practically a wall - Boing Boing
Sabean Strikes Back: Non-Tenders Ryan Garko
This move is flabbergasting.
Ignore, for a moment, that the Giants essentially gave away Scott Barnes. Brian Sabean acquired Ryan Garko in late July. Up until that point, he was hitting .285/.362/.464 with 11 homers and a .361 wOBA in 273 plate appearances. With the Giants, he would experience some legitimate struggles, batting .235/.307/.330 with two homers in 127 plate appearances. That’s a bad spell for anyone, but this is a 28-year-old who batted .283/.353/.480 in the American League over his last three seasons. Odds are, Garko will rebound towards his career numbers more so than his career Giants numbers.
This move comes down to two things. Either Sabean and company have absolutely no plan to speak of, or this was their plan all along; shipping off their ninth best prospect – a left-handed starting pitcher with an impressive performance in a hitter friendly league – for what amounts to a month of plate appearances. I’m not sure which should terrify Giants fans more, but I’m leaning towards the latter. At least the promise of no plan is exciting and leads to unpredictably and spontaneous bouts of anger. That beats the heck out of a constant dull roar of anger because your favorite team’s front office considers long-term potential for extremely short-term gains an equal trade.
What may be the worst part about this – and mind you, that’s saying a lot – is the Giants are probably going to sign a free agent first baseman now. Maybe they’ll lock onto Jim Thome or Carlos Delgado – the jokes about Sabean’s obsession with old players would write themselves – but it’ll probably be someone like Adam LaRoche. Why Adam LaRoche? Because getting marginal upgrades like this when it costs you one of your top 10 prospects and millions more is exactly the type of move that caps this massacre of foresightedness with one violent stroke:
Ed Wade and Dayton Moore need to be on notice. Sabean’s not letting you take that crown of most silly off-season move without a fight.
Very Pleased
Being married to someone you respect for being somehow better than you keeps affection alive. That this impressive person chooses you year after year makes you more pleased with yourself, fueling the kind of mutual self-esteem that can get you through decades.
via www.nytimes.com
So far, this seems to be working!
Stumptown Printers on Monacle
Our good friends at Stumptown Printers (who have been the long time printers of the Celebrate People's History posters) are the focus of a new short video put together my Monacle Magazine. I couldn't figure out how to put the actual video here on our site, so you'll have to go watch it HERE. It's a cool little movie, with many cameos by the CPH posters, esp. the new Dil Pickle Club poster!
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