The horror that is Lady Gaga...
...in Barbie form.
It just goes on and on.
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January 9, 2010
“iPhone’s for Sheep; Android’s for Geeks”
David Pogue says an ardent army of "Fandroids" attacked his mostly positive Nexus One review with the same mouth-foaming irrationality as Apple, Microsoft, and Linux fanboys of years past. Crazy people saying crazy things on the internet aside, Pogue makes a good point: Android has come to represent a kind of hacker counterculture, whose members dismiss Apple products as closed, proprietary, designed "for dummies" and sheep. I thought Pogue's review was well done, but I'll admit it. When I go to a tech conference I expect to see most people carrying an iPhone. But when I spot an Android handset (which I do more and more)? A small part of my brain assumes that person is someone with superior technical skill, someone who values openness, and someone who is ahead of the curve.
Shutting down
I’ve seen a number of situations recently where entrepreneurs decided to shut their startups down while they still had cash in the bank. (Contrary to popular mythology, I’ve never seen a case where investors forced an early-stage startup to shut down before they ran out of cash — it has always been voluntary). Shutting down is an incredibly hard thing to do. It takes great maturity and intellectual honesty to realize things aren’t going the way you hoped and that it might be better to just close shop and do something else.
How entrepreneurs handle shutting down is very important. First, try to return as much capital to your investors as you can (after paying off employees and other important debts – but don’t waste money on an expensive legal process). Second, if you’ve developed IP, spend a few months trying to sell it to recover as much capital as you can (often investors will offer a “carve out” to incentivize entrepreneurs since the likely return to investors will be under total number of preferences). Don’t go off starting a new venture before you’ve properly closed down your current one (I’ve seen this twice recently – very bad form). Finally, for your own learning as well as your reputation, write a detailed post-mortem about what went right and wrong and send it to your investors, and then try to follow up with in-person discussions.
Here’s the good news. One of the great things about angel and venture investors is that failure is accepted, as long as you do it in the right way. Venture investors will often fund entrepreneurs who’ve lost their money in the past. They understand that if you build an interesting product and, say, market forces turn dramatically against you, that’s a risk they took — and the type of risk they will take a again. Also, entrepreneurs tend to be judged by their wins (max() function), not their average. You’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs have failures in their past that no one remembers once they have some success.
A Verified Compiler for an Impure Functional Language
A Verified Compiler for an Impure Functional Language
We present a verified compiler to an idealized assembly language from a small, untyped functional language with mutable references and exceptions. The compiler is programmed in the Coq proof assistant and has a proof of total correctness with respect to big-step operational semantics for the source and target languages. Compilation is staged and includes standard phases like translation to continuation-passing style and closure conversion, as well as a common subexpression elimination optimization. In this work, our focus has been on discovering and using techniques that make our proofs easy to engineer and maintain. While most programming language work with proof assistants uses very manual proof styles, all of our proofs are implemented as adaptive programs in Coq's tactic language, making it possible to reuse proofs unchanged as new language features are added.
In this paper, we focus especially on phases of compilation that rearrange the structure of syntax with nested variable binders. That aspect has been a key challenge area in past compiler verification projects, with much more effort expended in the statement and proof of binder-related lemmas than is found in standard pencil-and-paper proofs. We show how to exploit the representation technique of parametric higher-order abstract syntax to avoid the need to prove any of the usual lemmas about binder manipulation, often leading to proofs that are actually shorter than their pencil-and-paper analogues. Our strategy is based on a new approach to encoding operational semantics which delegates all concerns about substitution to the meta language, without using features incompatible with general purpose type theories like Coq's logic.
Further work on/with LambdaTamer for certified compiler development.
The Minimalist of Technique
I'm torn between ignoring this guy altogether and making hay out of his mistakes and sloppy technique by way of reminding myself and others how NOT to cook .
Once again the author of the New York Times column "The Minimalist" shows us that cooking does not have to take a long time as long as we minimize the degree of care and skill that we bring to the kitchen. But first let me point out what Mr. Bittman gets right or does well as he shows us how to cook a Tri-tip steak with romanesco sauce.
1) He gets the pan hot before he puts the meat in to cook.
2) The sauce, although not to my taste, is well-crafted
Now the stuff that I don't recommend.
His take on bovine anatomy would get him in a lot of trouble if he was butchering a cow for someone who understood the retail value of a Tri-tip steak. Last time I looked, cattle were quadrupedal and bilaterally symmetrical, which implies that there are two of each distinct muscles for every one cow, making this statement false"First, there is only one per cow, so it is not all that common."
Tri-tips are located at the posterior-ventral end of the sirloin between the round (hind leg) and the sirloin (think of sirloin as the hip). Since each cow has two sides then there should be TWO tri-tips per cow, not one.
Although he does not give an oven temperature to finish the cooking it appears that his oven is much too hot. The evidence for the overheated oven is in the appearance of the meat after it is cut. Notice the thick band of well-done and the small lens of rare towards the center. That type of layering is indicitve of very rapid heating associated with high oven temperatures and usually results in
- Higher rates of moisure loss
- Reduced denaturation of connective tissue due to reduce availabilty of water (moisture) for hydrolysis
- More rapid coagulation and shortening of muscle fibers resulting in tougher meat that is also more prone to squeeze out water
Making an already bad situation worse he does not let the meat rest before slicing so juice leaks out at an accelerated rate.
Further capitalizing on an already nearly ruined piece of beef he uses a serated knife which exacerbates moisture loss by "sawing" instead of "snipping" the muscle fibers thereby maximizing their surface area for water loss. The serrated knife also makes ugly "wavy" looking slices for a highly unprofessional presentation.
"The Minimalist - Tri-Tip Is a Delicious Cut of Steak, but Hard to Get - NYTimes.com:The best sauce in the world is hunger.
Dave Kingman 1983 New York Mets Topps Baseball Card
Dinged Corners: 1983 Topps Mets baseball cards has this and other cards.
As I look at all these pictures of players that were "big" I am struck by how small they look by today's standards. Dave Kingman was a big time power hitter. He would have hit about 85 home runs if he played in say 1998 and had um modern workout methods.
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January 8, 2010
We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human
We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends. We know that it's significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health.-- Daniel Gilbert
Will the Journal Be Pleased by Sewell Chan’s Departure From the Times ‘Metro’ Section?
Shared by Jake Dobkin
I'm crying.
Sewell Chan.For the past few months, The Wall Street Journal has been marshaling staff and resources for its fledgling New York bureau. Editor John Seeley and hiring manager Deborah Brewster have been interviewing all over town, and have already hired some reporters who are set to start later this very month. While originally reported to launch in April, it looks like the bureau will begin reporting its own stories by February. Its goal is to compete with the Times on its own turf: the news, politics, and culture of New York City (and State!). Starting with a reported staff of twelve and a budget of $15 million, obviously that's a tall order. But news today that Sewell Chan, one of the Times "Metro" section's powerhouses, is transferring to a Washington beat, has got to have at least some people at the Journal smiling.
"Really, I am at a loss — at a loss to try and calculate Metro’s loss," wrote section chief Joe Sexton in a memo to staffers today. "It is great for him. It is wonderful and exciting for this paper ... But it still leaves me at a loss." He went on to describe Chan, who helped found the paper's popular and prolific City Room blog in 2007 and continued to oversee it ever since, thusly:
City Room, sometimes called a blog, was and is, of course, way more than that. And Sewell, its creator and conscience and beating heart from Day 1, was no less than all of that.
Sewell was brave, relentless, generous, mercilessly competitive, religiously careful, wholeheartedly committed. He was a pioneer, a trailblazer, an evangelist, a warrior, a mentor, a student. And always, utterly, a Timesman.
He’s left me nonplussed before. At one of those many moments, I sought out [Times Executive Editor Bill] Keller (he really is good at these kinds of memos), and he found some words to capture what Sewell is, and what he has been so central in creating.
It's amazing how quickly Sewell has become the gold standard for a particular, extremely valuable kind of Times journalist. Editors who want a beat covered with industry and inventiveness will wish aloud that they had "a Sewell." Anyone planning to launch a new venture, especially a Web journalism venture, sets out to find "someone like Sewell." You hear things like that all the time. And I don't think the key to it is that Sewell is comfortable with the new medium (though he is). I think his journalistic qualities are timeless. Sewell is one of the very few people I've interviewed for a job who was emphatic about wanting to do beat coverage. At a time when it seemed everybody was in thrall to "long form narrative," yearning to do large, important but unspecific projects, Sewell understood the thrill of mastering a subject, developing sources, breaking stories and generally acquiring go-to-the-bank authority. What seems to drive him — more than the glory of page-one bylines or the satisfaction of literary writing — is a wide, insatiable curiosity. That, combined with a canny instinct for a story and (really important) the sheer infectiousness of this passion for news, which draws others into the project, is why City Room works so well.”
Pretty high praise, eh? Veteran Journal staffer Nikki Waller, who will be overseeing the online development of their new bureau, has got to be pleased she's not competing with that. "Sewell actually exceeded people's expectations for how long someone could do that," one newsroom staffer said today, noting that his replacement, Andy Newman — who currently runs the Local blog for the paper — will not have much choice about keeping up the pace. "The job sort of demands 24-hour attention. Whoever's going to do it is probably going to have to keep the same metabolism."
Chan's departure comes on the heels of his friend and fellow City Room big-name blogger Jenny 8. Lee last month, but in recent months Lee had not been viewed to be as critical a part of the reporting team. As for whether the Times is yet worrying about their upcoming new rival, reporters say there's not a lot of talk about it in the newsroom. "The Times already has the apparatus to dominate city coverage," said one staffer. "That takes years to build, and the Journal doesn't have any of that."
Changing of the Guard at City Room [City Room/NYT]
Read more posts by Chris Rovzar
Filed Under: ink-stained wretches, jenny 8 lee, john seeley, media, metro section, new york times, sewell chan, wall street journal
Why Leslie Harpold's Sites Disappeared
Leslie had a special kind of magic. But today there's no trace of her sites.
As long as those sites were up, her brand of humanity was alive, pure, unedited and quenching. The availability of her writing made her slightly less absent. Sad isn't really an appropriate construct for missing Leslie. And sappy sentimentality wouldn't please her at all.
But that writing should remain on the Internet. Those sites should never come down. They belong here like Leslie belonged here. Immortal.
-- a comment by Liria Mersini
A little over three years ago, the web designer and online essayist Leslie Harpold died at age 40. Leslie was a friend of mine, part of a circle of early web creators who discovered the medium as it was blossoming in the mid-'90s. We hung out together on a private mailing list for a decade watching the web (and ourselves) grow up. Leslie left behind a vast body of online work in the form of essays, web sites, weblog entries and photos.
Since that time, almost all of it has disappeared.
Leslie's family allowed her domains smug.com, harpold.com and others to expire and politely turned down all requests to mirror her sites. Several of her friends, including me, had offered after her death to pay the costs required to keep them online.
The recent death of Brad Graham, another early web publisher, has renewed interest in the fate of Leslie's work. I sent an email yesterday to Leslie's niece, asking if it would be possible for some of her friends to reprint her work as a book and web site. Today I heard back. They will not allow anything to be republished. Because I've been told that some of her writings might be a sensitive issue for her family, I replied to her niece that if this is indeed the case, those particular works could be excluded from reprint.
This did not go over well.
I was told that it's none of my business why her family doesn't want her work republished, which is absolutely true, and that her legacy "is not dependent on websites or books; her legacy is with every person who knew her and loved her." This is only partially true. Leslie was an early pioneer in the creation of autobiographical content and experimental web design. She left behind thousands of web pages, many of which are as memorable as Possible Scenarios for Heaven from 2003.
Leslie's family appears to have decided to let her entire body of work disappear and be forgotten completely. The only things that are left online are articles she wrote for other sites, such as The Morning News.
This raises an important question for those of us who create work on the web that we publish ourselves. When heirs decide to bury a web creator's body of work by shuttering sites and rejecting all republication requests, can anything be done to save the material?
If the heirs of Charles Dickens had decided that his novels were not his legacy, they could have spurned all publishers and let the books fall out of print, but the existing copies would not have vanished entirely. There still would be physical copies of the books to read and some would've survived long enough to fall into the public domain.
For works created on the web, however, the only thing keeping them around is an active publisher or a copyright license that permits others to reprint the material. A copyright holder who wanted a web site to disappear completely could take it offline, demand its removal from all archives and never allow republication. Leslie's work will not begin passing into the public domain until 2065.
Perhaps this is the way it should be. No one has found an email or web page where Leslie stipulated her desires for her work in the event of her death, leaving the decision to her heirs.
But everything I learned about Leslie over the years tells me that she'd want this part of her to survive.
Slide Show: David Levine
—To read about David Levine’s drawings, see the related post by Garry Wills. To view more images, please visit the gallery.
On David Levine (1926–2009)
Garry Wills
It is a charming little dog, meticulously drawn, that faces us, all its curlicue hairs traced, its cantilevered thin legs ending in little paws (1971). Only on a second look do we see that the tiny face staring out at us from this fluff ball is that of Richard Nixon. Then, in a double-take (click!), we realize that this is Checkers, the dog Nixon used in his maudlin television address to stay on Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential ticket in 1952. A less adventurous artist might have done the obvious—made Nixon cower behind the dog he was using as protection. Levine did the unexpected. He made Nixon the dog. And as usual, there was a deeper purpose. He was saying that Nixon would not only do anything to get what he wanted, he would become anything. Later, when abortion was the issue, Nixon would become a fetus (1971). How does one give a fetus identity? With the nose, of course, the Nixon nose that Levine celebrated so relentlessly.
Having to puzzle out, however briefly, why the dog is Nixon was a typical reaction to Levine’s cartoons. They teased. Why is General Westmoreland’s neck so long and curving (1976)? A moment makes one realize it is an ostrich neck, the better for hiding one’s head from reality. Why does Linda Tripp’s head sit atop the body of a large bird (1998)? Oh, of course—a stool pigeon. A Levine work often needed deciphering. Sometimes this was because the attributes were so clever. Al Gore was drawn “straight” during his presidential campaign, but what are all the little clothes suspended around him (2000)? A closer look shows the tabs used to put different dresses on paper dolls, Levine’s comment on how Gore was changing personae.
But Levine did not need attributes to get his meaning across. He might have drawn Milton with a little devil beside him to show that the poet made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. Instead, Levine shows the man himself as diabolical (1978). He might have drawn John Wayne as the sunny cowboy others depicted. Instead, considering Wayne’s support of every kind of war, he drew him with the face of a fanatical killer (1997).
Levine often did the unexpected. After all, he had a huge range of subjects to cover when illustrating articles in The New York Review—classical figures (working from statues), Renaissance figures (relying on paintings), modern figures (from photos). What other American cartoonist was asked to draw, say, Jonathan Sumption (2000) or Fernando Pessoa (1972)? He even had to draw ideas—linguistics (1963), Mannerism (1965), finances (1964), the military industry (1964), art (1968), automation (1968).
In order to represent such a wide range of subjects, he needed a vast store of techniques. Obituaries reduced him to a few characteristics—heavy cross-hatching, big heads on small bodies, etc. Actually, he used large areas of pure black or pure white for many of his faces. Look, for instance, at Harold Lloyd hanging from a girder—his face is a white blank, except for the shade thrown by his straw hat (1984). John Quinn is all white, even his hair (1978). So, of all people, is Rubens, the master of chiaroscuro (1978).
And he was not trapped in the big head, small body format. He often did normal-size bodies—Elvis Presley(1981), John Pope-Hennessey (1991), Ford Madox Ford (1966), Twiggy (1968), Aldous Huxley (1977), Cesar Chavez(1975). He had to do Michael Jordan full length because he presented him as Leonardo’s universal man in the circle and the square—the image on the Italian one-euro coin (1999). What’s more, he often reversed “his” format and drew small heads on big bodies—Charles II (1979), Charles V(1977), Richard Ford (1987), Velázquez (1986), Paul Taylor (1987), Orson Welles (1972), John L. Sullivan (1988). He made each of Marilyn Monroe’s breasts bigger than her head (1973).
Levine had a larger field for originality because he realized that readers of The New York Review would get arcane references. When he had a tiny grotesque Nixon crouch on the fallen female body of Vietnam (1973), he knew the readers would see the reference to Fuseli’s incubus—only where Fuseli’s imp is instilling a nightmare in the woman, Nixon is delicately dropping a little bomb down her throat. When he drew the fictional character Zuleika Dobson (1966), his audience would know why he used Max Beerbohm’s style (with its mockery of Beardsley). When he drew the fictional Pamela, they would know why she covers her pudenda with a letter (1972). The picture of Nixon devouring himself (1974) would bring to mind Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.
Levine was a man of high intelligence, wide reading, and solid artistic training. He composed, shaded, and drew with the eye of a practiced painter. But more than that, he had great psychological insight into his subjects. What he revealed could be scathing. The sadness of Richard Burton’s career is in the picture of his drink-raddled face and bleary eyes as he poses, in his Hamlet costume, tiptoe on the skull of Yorick (1989)—the real death’s head is his own.
Despite such dark visions, Levine had a kind of surreal imagination that took the next step, the way Mark Twain used to. It was not enough for Twain to say that a train was so slow it had no need of the cowcatcher; he added that the cowcatcher was needed in the rear of the train to keep cows from ambling aboard. In the same way, Levine began with a picture of Lyndon Johnson crying little crocodiles for tears (1965). But later on, he had to top that—he shows a crocodile shedding little tear-images of Lyndon Johnson (1966).
Given the run of his working years, his great subject had to be Richard Nixon. Herblock, too, was a great artistic foe of Nixon, but his Nixon is often a stick figure and Levine’s is a rounded tragic portrait. Consider the two men’s treatment of the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in the White House tapes. Herblock shows a little Nixon doll dangling in the gap, holding on to the severed tapes on either side of him. Levine shows a seated and solemn Nixon, his hand over his heart in a pledge of truthfulness, but he had phlebitis at the time, and from his swollen left trouser leg some tape reels are spilling (1974). Levine brought us many aspects of the man—Nixon in sheep’s clothing (1970); Nixon asleep with a panda bear doll beside him on the pillow (1971); Nixon dangling from the last helicopter leaving Saigon (1971); Nixon crying dollars for tears in the ITT scandal (1975); Nixon as a rugby player, with the globe as the ball (1973); Nixon as Boss Tweed (1973), as Queeg (1974), as the Godfather (1972). The sixty Nixon drawings should be put in a book, to be called The Nixoniad.
The treasure house of Levine images—thousands of them—contains actors, athletes, musicians, scientists, philosophers, movie makers, pontiffs, all brought to life (sometimes brought back to life) by a magic pen and an incisive brain. What a loss that he is gone.
—A slide show of drawings by David Levine can be seen here.
Roger Ebert: Nil By Mouth
Everyone's linking to it for a reason: If you haven't yet read Roger Ebert's reflections on losing the ability to eat, drink, and talk, do it now.
Holy Time Travel, Batman!
Michael Steele, facing criticism from within his party that his new book is distracting from his duties as RNC chairman, now claims he wrote the book before he took the helm of the GOP last year. But here's the thing. Our Eric Kleefeld masochistically volunteered to read Steele's book this week. He finished a couple of nights ago and reports that the book is almost entirely focused on events in 2009 that happened while Steele was chairman, suggesting the book was completed late in the year. He also refers to himself in the book as, um, RNC chairman. Makes you wonder.
WTF?!?!
“Since 2006 the U.S Navy has tried to give the Sea Shadow away but as of February 2009 nobody has taken the offer.”
I have a big birthday coming up, and if anyone is searching for an appropriate, one-of-a-kind, but low-dollar gift for me…well let’s just say HINT DROPPED.
is Google good for history?
Following are Dan Cohen's prepared remarks for a talk at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, on January 7, 2010, in San Diego. The panel was entitled "Is Google Good for History?" and also featured talks by Paul Duguid of the University of California, Berkeley and Brandon Badger of Google Books. This is cross-posted from Dan's blog
Is Google good for history? Of course it is. We historians are searchers and sifters of evidence. Google is probably the most powerful tool in human history for doing just that. It has constructed a deceptively simple way to scan billions of documents instantaneously, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of its own money to allow us to read millions of books in our pajamas. Good? How about Great?But then we historians, like other humanities scholars, are natural-born critics. We can find fault with virtually anything. And this disposition is unsurprisingly exacerbated when a large company, consisting mostly of better-paid graduates from the other side of campus, muscles into our turf. Had Google spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Widener Library at Harvard, surely we would have complained about all those steps up to the front entrance.
Partly out of fear and partly out of envy, it's easy to take shots at Google. While it seems that an obsessive book about Google comes out every other week, where are the volumes of criticism of ProQuest or Elsevier or other large information companies that serve the academic market in troubling ways? These companies, which also provide search services and digital scans, charge universities exorbitant amounts for the privilege of access. They leech money out of library budgets every year that could be going to other, more productive uses.
Google, on the other hand, has given us Google Scholar, Google Books, newspaper archives, and more, often besting commercial offerings while being freely accessible. In this bigger picture, away from the myopic obsession with the Biggest Tech Company of the Moment (remember similar diatribes against IBM, Microsoft?), Google has been very good for history and historians, and one can only hope that they continue to exert pressure on those who provide costly alternatives.
Of course, like many others who feel a special bond with books and our cultural heritage, I wish that the Google Books project was not under the control of a private entity. For years I have called for a public project, or at least a university consortium, to scan books on the scale Google is attempting. I'm envious of France's recent announcement to spend a billion dollars on public scanning. In addition, the Center for History and New Media has a strong relationship with the Internet Archive to put content in a non-profit environment that will maximize its utility and distribution and make that content truly free, in all senses of the word. I would much rather see Google's books at the Internet Archive or the Library of Congress. There is some hope that HathiTrust will be this non-Google champion, but they are still relying mostly on Google's scans. The likelihood of a publicly funded scanning project in the age of Tea Party reactionaries is slim.
* * *Long-time readers of my blog know that I have not pulled punches when it comes to Google. To this day the biggest spike in readership on my blog was when, very early in Google's book scanning project, I casually posted a scan of a human hand I found while looking at an edition of Plato. The post ended up on Digg, and since then it has been one of the many examples used by Google's detractors to show a lack of quality in their library project.
Let's discuss the quality issues for a moment, since it is one point of obsession within the academy, an obsession I feel is slightly misplaced. Of course Google has some poor scans--as the saying goes, haste makes waste--but I've yet to see a scientific survey of the overall percentage of pages that are unreadable or missing (surely a miniscule fraction in my viewing of scores of Victorian books). Regarding metadata errors, as Jon Orwant of Google Books has noted, when you are dealing with a trillion pieces of metadata, who are likely to have millions of errors in need of correction. Let us also not pretend the bibliographical world beyond Google is perfect. Many of the metadata problems with Google Books come from library partners and others outside of Google.
Moreover, Google likely has remedies for many of these inadequacies. Google is constantly improving its OCR and metadata correction capabilities, often in clever ways. For instance, it recently acquired the reCAPTCHA system from Carnegie Mellon, which uses unwitting humans who are logging into online services to transcribe particularly hard or smudged words from old books. They have added a feedback mechanism for users to report poor scans. Truly bad books can be rescanned or replaced by other libraries' versions. I find myself nonplussed by quality complaints about Google Books that have engineering solutions. That's what Google does; it solves engineering problems very well.
Indeed, we should recognize (and not without criticism, as I will note momentarily) that at its heart, Google Books is the outcome, like so many things at Google, of a engineering challenge and a series of mathematical problems: How can you scan tens of million books in a decade? It's easy to say they should do a better job and get all the details right, but if you do the calculations with those key variables, as I assume Brandon and his team have done, you'll probably see that getting a nearly perfect library scanning project would take a hundred years rather than ten. (That might be a perfectly fine trade-off, but that's a different argument or a different project.) As in OCR, getting from 99% to 99.9% accuracy would probably take an order of magnitude longer and be an order of magnitude more expensive. That's the trade-off they have decided to make, and as a company interested in search, where near-100% accuracy is unnecessary, and considering the possibilities for iterating toward perfection from an imperfect first version, it must have been an easy decision to make.
* * *Google Books is incredibly useful, even with the flaws. Although I was trained at places with large research libraries of Google Books scale, I'm now at an institution that is far more typical of higher ed, with a mere million volumes and few rare works. At places like Mason, Google Books is a savior, enabling research that could once only be done if you got into the right places. I regularly have students discover new topics to study and write about through searches on Google Books. You can only imagine how historical researchers and all students and scholars feel in even less privileged places. Despite its flaws, it will be the the source of much historical scholarship, from around the globe, over the coming decades. It is a tremendous leveler of access to historical resources.
Google is also good for history in that it challenges age-old assumptions about the way we have done history. Before the dawn of massive digitization projects and their equally important indices, we necessarily had to pick and choose from a sea of analog documents. All of that searching and sifting we did, and the particular documents and evidence we chose to write on, were--let's admit it--prone to many errors. Read it all, we were told in graduate school. But who ever does? We sift through large archives based on intuition; sometime we even find important evidence by sheer luck. We have sometimes made mountains out of molehills because, well, we only have time to sift through molehills, not mountains. Regardless of our technique, we always leave something out; in an analog world we have rarely been comprehensive.
This widespread problem of anecdotal history, as I have called it, will only get worse. As more documents are scanned and go online, many works of historical scholarship will be exposed as flimsy and haphazard. The existence of modern search technology should push us to improve historical research. It should tell us that our analog, necessarily partial methods have had hidden from us the potential of taking a more comprehensive view, aided by less capricious retrieval mechanisms which, despite what detractors might say, are often more objective than leafing rapidly through paper folios on a time-delimited jaunt to an archive.
In addition, listening to Google may open up new avenues of exploring the past. In my book Equations from God I argued that mathematics was generally considered a divine language in 1800 but was "secularized" in the nineteenth century. Part of my evidence was that mathematical treatises, which often contained religious language in the early nineteenth century, lost such language by the end of the century. By necessity, researching in the pre-Google Books era, my textual evidence was limited--I could only read a certain number of treatises and chose to focus (I'm sure this will sound familiar) on the writings of high-profile mathematicians. The vastness of Google Books for the first time presents the opportunity to do a more comprehensive scan of Victorian mathematical writing for evidence of religious language. This holds true for many historical research projects.
So Google has provided us not only with free research riches but also with a helpful direct challenge to our research methods, for which we should be grateful. Is Google good for history? Of course it is.
* * *But does that mean that we cannot provide constructive criticism of Google, to make it the best it can be, especially for historians? Of course not. I would like to focus on one serious issue that ripples through many parts of Google Books.
For a company that is a champion of openness, Google remains strangely closed when it comes to Google Books. Google Books seems to operate in ways that are very different from other Google properties, where Google aims to give it all away. For instance, I cannot understand why Google doesn't make it easier for historians such as myself, who want to do technical analyses of historical books, to download them en masse more easily. If it wanted to, Google could make a portal to download all public domain books tomorrow. I've heard the excuses from Googlers: But we've spent millions to digitize these books! We're not going to just give them away! Well, Google has also spent millions on software projects such as Android, Wave, Chrome OS, and the Chrome browser, and they are giving those away. Google's hesitance with regard to its books project shows that openness goes only so far at Google. I suppose we should understand that; Google is a company, not public library. But that's not the philanthropic aura they cast around Google Books at its inception or even today, in dramatic op-eds touting the social benefit of Google Books.
In short, complaining about the quality of Google's scans distracts us from a much larger problem with Google Books. The real problem--especially for those in the digital humanities but increasingly for many others--is that Google Books is only open in the read-a-book-in-my-pajamas way. To be sure, you can download PDFs of many public domain books. But they make it difficult to download the OCRed text from multiple public domain books-what you would need for more sophisticated historical research. And when we move beyond the public domain, Google has pushed for a troubling, restrictive regime for millions of so-called "orphan" books.
I would like to see a settlement that offers greater, not lesser access to those works, in addition to greater availability of what Cliff Lynch has called "computational access" to Google Books, a higher level of access that is less about reading a page image on your computer than applying digital tools to many pages or books at one time to create new knowledge and understanding. This is partially promised in the Google Books settlement, in the form of text-mining research centers, but those centers will be behind a velvet rope and I suspect the casual historian will be unlikely to ever use them. Google has elaborate APIs, or application programming interfaces, for most of its services, yet only the most superficial access to Google Books.
For a company that thrives on openness and the empowerment of users and software developers, Google Books is a puzzlement. With much fanfare, Google has recently launched--evidently out of internal agitation--what it calls a "Data Liberation Front," to ensure portability of data and openness throughout Google. On dataliberation.org, the website for the front, these Googlers list 25 Google projects and how to maximize their portability and openness--virtually all of the main services at Google. Sadly, Google Books is nowhere to be seen, even though it also includes user-created data, such as the My Library feature, not to mention all of the data--that is, books--that we have all paid for with our tax dollars and tuition. So while the Che Guevaras put up their revolutionary fist on one side of the Googleplex, their colleagues on the other side are working with a circumscribed group of authors and publishers to place messy restrictions onto large swaths of our cultural heritage through a settlement that few in the academy support.
Jon Orwant and Dan Clancy and Brandon Badger have done an admirable job explaining much of the internal process of Google Books. But it still feels removed and alien in way that other Google efforts are not. That is partly because they are lawyered up, and thus hamstrung from responding to some questions academics have, or from instituting more liberal policies and features. The same chutzpah that would lead a company to digitize entire libraries also led it to go too far with in-copyright books, leading to a breakdown with authors and publishers and the flawed settlement we have in front of us today.
We should remember that the reason we are in a settlement now is that Google didn't have enough chutzpah to take the higher, tougher road--a direct challenge in the courts, the court of public opinion, or the Congress to the intellectual property regime that governs many books and makes them difficult to bring online, even though their authors and publishers are long gone. While Google regularly uses its power to alter markets radically, it has been uncharacteristically meek in attacking head-on this intellectual property tower and its powerful corporate defenders. Had Google taken a stronger stance, historians would have likely been fully behind their efforts, since we too face the annoyances that unbalanced copyright law places on our pedagogical and scholarly use of textual, visual, audio, and video evidence.
I would much rather have historians and Google to work together. While Google as a research tool challenges our traditional historical methods, historians may very well have the ability to challenge and make better what Google does. Historical and humanistic questions are often at the high end of complexity among the engineering challenges Google faces, similar to and even beyond, for instance, machine translation, and Google engineers might learn a great deal from our scholarly practice. Google's algorithms have been optimized over the last decade to search through the hyperlinked documents of the Web. But those same algorithms falter when faced with the odd challenges of change over centuries and the alienness of the past and old books and documents that historians examine daily.
Because Google Books is the product of engineers, with tremendous talent in computer science but less sense of the history of the book or the book as an object rather than bits, it founders in many respects. Google still has no decent sense of how to rank search results in humanities corpora. Bibliometrics and text mining work poorly on these sources (as opposed to, say, the highly structured scientific papers Google Scholar specializes in). Studying how professional historians rank and sort primary and seconary sources might tell Google a lot, which it could use in turn to help scholars.
Ultimately, the interesting question might not be, Is Google good for history? It might be: Is history good for Google? To both questions, my answer is: Yes.
Better interface: Stubhub or Mets ticket office
JMP posted this as a comment, I thought it deserved more daylight:
I'd love to see the Mets upgrade their online ticket offerings, as there are going to be fewer tickets on StubHub this year, and those of us who have relied on StubHub recently have gotten spoiled with their system.
The Mets online ticketing system assumes it knows better than you. You tell it how many tickets you want at a particular price range or range of seats, and it offers you the best seats available. It gives absolutely no flexibility. It gives you no opportunity to express a preference for the first or third base side when talking about tickets that are available on either side. It gives you no opportunity to express any kind of preference.
People have different taste in tickets, and the Mets should use software that allows people to buy tickets based on those preferences. For some people, the best seat available means as close to the field as possible, no matter what side of the field, even in the outfield, while for others, the last row of the upper deck behind the plate is a better seat than anywhere down the line, no matter how close to the field. Some people like aisle seats, others hate having people climb over them constantly.
Those of us who have been using StubHub have seen a better system. StubHub shows you which sections have availability, and which rows within a section. It's not perfect, but it's much better than the system the Mets currently use.
If the Mets wanted to take a quantum leap, they should look at the system used by one of their namesakes. The Metropolitan Opera uses a fantastic online ticketing system that lets ticket buyers choose a section, then see a seating chart showing exactly which seats are available and which are taken for the performance for which they're buying tickets. They even mark some seats as partial view, discounting them accordingly. It gives the ticket buyer maximum flexibility, and respects that just like baseball fans, different opera fans have different seating preferences. (And I always find that among opera fans who like sports, they're overwhelmingly baseball fans.)
Adding that kind of flexibility might actually help the Mets sell a few tickets to people who wouldn't otherwise buy them...
To this point, I looked at what the Mets were offering as 15 game plans. Why would I give them a $100 deposit when I don't know what my seat will look like? Maybe I don't want plexiglass in my face? Good call JMP.
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@ruthreichl: "Ended yesterday at Maialino, still hopping...
"Ended yesterday at Maialino, still hopping at midnight, eating artichokes, gnawing a crisp suckling pigfoot, tearing guanciale rolls. Happy." [Twitter]
The rise of the punter
Are NFL punters the most valuable defensive players on their teams? Punters think so...and so do an increasing number of coaches and teams.
Steve Spagnuolo, who was the Giants' defensive coordinator before becoming head coach of the Rams last January, was one coach who appreciated what [Giants punter Jeff] Feagles could do. "I used to tell Jeff he was our most valuable player on defense," Spagnuolo says. "He didn't worry about his yardage or net punt average. All he worried about was putting our defense in the best position. He's a tremendous directional punter. He was always trying to back the offense inside the 10, and nobody did it better."
And of course I love this quote by Feagles:
Tags: football NFL sportsThe punter's mind is a lot more powerful than his leg.
How Many Times Do They Have to Say It Before The Media Recognizes That It's a Coordinated Effort??
Dana Parino, former White House Press Secretary: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."
Mary Matalin, former Dick Cheney adviser and GOP talking head: "I was there, we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history." (They did not inherit a recession from Clinton—they inherited balanced budgets and surpluses, which they squandered.)
And now Mr. 9/11 himself gets in on the act...
Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor, failed New York senate candidate, failed presidential candidate: "We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."
Let me see... under Bush we had the anthrax attacks, the shoe bomber, and... what was that one again? Oh, right...
I can understand how that one would slip Giuliani's mind.
[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]
John Olerud’s Hall of Fame Case
via www.fangraphs.com Now, I can certainly understand leaving Olerud out if you are a “small hall” person. However, if you are a big or medium hall person, and would vote for players like Andre Dawson as well as Billy Williams, Tony Perez, and Luis Aparicio, then Olerud is also a hall of famer. He was one of the most talented players of his era at getting on base and at fielding his position, and he did both well for an extended period of time. In my eyes, John Olerud is a Hall of Famer. I agree! Dawson is going to be the new "If he's in..." measure for marginal players. i think it would be better if instead of comparing against the 20-25th percentile, we compared against 50th or 66th. Every player who enters the Hall of Fame should make the Hall better, not drag down the mean.
Roger Ebert on the Role of Memory in Food
Steak 'n Shake is pretty hard to forget. [Flickr: Jose Kevo]
What if you could never eat again, but could remember, bite by bite, slurp by slurp, meals of the past? Roger Ebert writes a beautiful piece in the Chicago Sun-Times about his inability to eat and drink after multiple surgeries. He stopped feeling hungry or thirsty, but instead of focusing on his loss, started remembering vivid eating memories:
Yet I could if I wanted to right now close my eyes and re-experience an entire meal at Steak 'n Shake, bite by bite in proper sequence, because I always ordered the same items and ate them according to the same ritual. It is there for me...Another surprising area for sharp memory is the taste and texture of cheap candy. Not imported chocolates, but Red Hots, Good and Plenty, Milk Duds, Paydays, Chuckles.
Ebert is impressively not bitter or sad about his loss of taste. He's more upset about the loss of dining—the sitting down to share jokes, gossip, laughs, and even arguments. (Unfortunately the surgeries also left him without the ability to speak.) What foods can you "taste" without actually eating them?
We're at dinner right now
Due to a medical condition, Roger Ebert doesn't eat or drink anymore. He doesn't miss tasting food or drink, only the more social aspects of dining.
What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss.
As Ben Trott says, the last paragraph is the killer.
Tags: food Roger Ebert
14 Days of jQuery and the New API Browser
It’s the start of a new year, and the jQuery team’s been hard at work. We’ve been up day and night working to crank out the upcoming jQuery 1.4 release, and there’s a LOT to announce! So much, in fact, that we’ll need fourteen full days to get it all out there… As such, I’d like to announce The 14 Days of jQuery 1.4!
Beginning on January 14th, we’ll start a fourteen-day event. Each day we’ll have fresh videos and announcements — there’ll be code releases, project-related updates, and jQuery UI goodness, among other things. In addition to the announcements, we’ll also be releasing a set of videos over the 14 days with talks and tutorials relating the jQuery 1.4 release and other general jQuery topics. You’ll want to check back at jQuery14.com every day during the two weeks to see what’s new, or sign up to be notified via email. Think of it like an online conference, only longer, freer, and with a bit of mystery and suspense!
But Wait, There’s More!
We’ve got a lot planned for January 14th, but it seemed good to whet your appetite and pre-release some tasty jQuery morsels. Head over to jQuery14.com to learn all about the brand-new jQuery API site:
Be sure to subscribe to the jQuery14.com site or to the @jquery Twitter account for all the updates during these upcoming weeks.
Free Books, Anyone?
The jQuery project is a non-profit, open-source effort, and we rely heavily on donations and contributions to help fund everything we do. We’ll be running a fundraising drive starting now and throughout the 14 Days of jQuery. If you’re a jQuery user, show your support by making a tax-deductible donation of $20 USD or more to the project during the event, and you’ll receive a free jQuery book with your donation.
It’s always important to mention that much of this would not be possible without the help of the jQuery project sponsors; Netflix, JupiterIT Consulting, appendTo, Fusionary Media and Oxide Design Co have all signed on as official sponsors of the 14 Days of jQuery 1.4, along with our favorite jQuery book publishers, Manning, Packt, jQuery Enlightenment, and O’Reilly.
That’s it for now — head on over to jQuery14.com for much more to come!
Graffiti Markup Language Gets An Upgrade
F.A.T. Labs have declared this week "Graffiti Markup Language Week" on their blog - and each day they've posted GML-related updates. What exactly is Graffiti Markup Language? It's an XML file type developed by F.A.T. Labs that stores the motion data created by tagging -- allowing graffiti writers to share, study, and catalog their tags. Check the below for a brief overview:
GML = Graffiti Markup Language from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
What has GML week brought us so far? Over the past few days, F.A.T. Labs introduced:
► An iPhone version of Graffiti Analysis DustTag v1.0 - this handy App allows users to trace their tags and add them to the GML database http://000000book.com/ using an iPhone.
► Graffiti Analysis 2.0 - the new and improved Graffiti Analysis includes the aforementioned iPhone App DustTag v1.0, along with updates to the tracking, playback, controls and graphics, as well as previously unreleased source code and downloads to Windows, Mac and Linux versions of the playback and capture applications.
► FatTag Deluxe - the Katsu Edition - an updated version of the Fat Tag App made in collaboration with graffiti legend Katsu.
John Olerud’s Hall of Fame Case
John Olerud is likely one of a multitude of players that doesn’t pass the “feel test” for the Hall of Fame. He only made two all-star games, never won an MVP, and never even won a silver slugger. He didn’t have blazing speed and he played the position of statues, first base.
He wasn’t a power hitter – only 255 HR and 1,230 RBIs, out of the top 100 career in both categories. He did hit .295 for his career, but in 7,592 ABs that doesn’t even crack 2,500 hits, much less 3,000. Especially for somebody who didn’t watch all of his games, like most of the writers who will determine his Hall fate, that resume doesn’t impress.
For those reasons, John Olerud will almost certainly never receive the call to Cooperstown. With a player like Fred McGriff only receiving 21.5% of the vote, it’s possible that Olerud may slip off the ballot after only one year. Personally, if I was given a vote, I would support John Olerud’s hall of fame candidacy.
Admittedly, he is a bit of a borderline candidate. He only played 17 seasons and he didn’t flash power at first base. He was still a tremendous batter. His .398 OBP ranks 65th all time, right around guys like Joe Dimaggio and Johnny Mize. He maintained this throughout his entire career – Olerud had six seasons at or above a .400 OBP and even in the twilight of his career his only posted one season below .350. He walked 504 more times than he struck out, including IBB and HBP.
Olerud did also have power potential, as he supplemented his 255 HRs with 500 doubles. Overall, his career wOBA was .376 in an era where the average wOBA ranged from .330 to .345. Adjusting for the fact that he played in Toronto (slight pitcher’s park) and Seattle (major pitcher’s park) most of his career, Olerud posted a 133 wRC+ for his career. Over 17 years and slightly fewer than 9000 plate appearances, he produced 33% more runs than the average batter. This includes his insane 1993 with the World Series champion Blue Jays, where he hit .363/.473/.599 for a 181 wRC+ and his 1998 with the New York Mets where he hit .354/.447/.521 for a 168 wRC+. In both seasons, Olerud was worth over 8.0 WAR.
Still, that kind of performance would be forgettable if Olerud were even an average defensive first baseman. The position adjustment that we use for wins above replacement is harsh on first basemen for a reason – even an elite defensive 1B usually doesn’t provide as much value as the average fielder. That’s why many people didn’t support Jim Rice’s Hall of Fame candidacy – his career 132 wRC+ is impressive, but combined with poor defense in left field, he becomes merely a very good player, and not a great one.
Olerud was a four-time gold glover, and TotalZone supports his reputation. Between range and turning double plays, Olerud was worth 97 runs above average with the glove. That doesn’t cancel out the position adjustment entirely, but Olerud’s slick fielding at first base still provided his teams with value. Olerud provided more through his defense than average or slightly above average corner outfielders and below average fielding 2Bs and 3Bs.
Olerud wasn’t a good baserunner, but this is the only part of the game where he didn’t excel. His running did cost him nearly 50 runs in value over his career, but over 17 years that adds up to only about .3 wins per season. It does hamper his case, but it certainly doesn’t kill it. By no means can it outweigh the fact that he was one of the great batters of our generation as well as a fantastic fielder at his position.
Olerud is an interesting comparison to 2010 inductee Andre Dawson. According to Sean Smith’s WAR database at www.baseballprojection.com, the two players were within .2 WAR for their careers. Olerud compiled his value through on base percentage and defense at a low-priority infield position. Dawson compiled his through power (.203 ISO), speed (+47 runs on baserunning, GIDPs, and ROEs), and decent defense in the OF (+32 TZ split between all positions), as well as longevity (1700 more PAs than Olerud).
Despite the different ways they compiled value, they ended up providing their teams with nearly the same amount of value. Check the Hall of Fame Zone, courtesy of Sky Kalkman and Justin Inaz:
For those of you who haven’t read Sky’s article on ESPN, check it out. The HOF Zone between the gray lines represents the 20th-50th percentile of all hall of fame position players.
Now, I can certainly understand leaving Olerud out if you are a “small hall” person. However, if you are a big or medium hall person, and would vote for players like Andre Dawson as well as Billy Williams, Tony Perez, and Luis Aparicio, then Olerud is also a hall of famer. He was one of the most talented players of his era at getting on base and at fielding his position, and he did both well for an extended period of time. In my eyes, John Olerud is a Hall of Famer.
The Joy of a Completed Page #9
More like a completed binder... Duane filled up SIXTEEN pages in my A&G binder including this one which was completely empty before:This page is mighty purdy too:
January 7, 2010
Eating & dining
Another surprising area for sharp memory is the taste and texture of cheap candy. Not imported chocolates, but Red Hots, Good and Plenty, Milk Duds, Paydays, Chuckles. I dreamed I got a box of Chuckles with five licorice squares, and in my dream I exalted: "Finally!"
Roger Ebert's "Nil by mouth" is the best thing I've read in a long time. The last paragraph is the killer, but since I'm also a fan of cheap candy, I'm quoting the above.
New Day?
From TPM Reader JY ...
I haven't seen any mention of how quickly the administration tried to release as much info as it could to the public vs. Bush's endless stonewalling when it came to releasing any info that could prove politically damaging. Could you imagine Bush offering up this kind of report to the public without a subpoena?
The Much Awaited Stuff Post
I have downloaded this cool iPhone app — anyway, I think it’s pretty cool — called MailMe Text. It is a simple premise: You press the button, type in a message, and then hit send and it send the message to your email. You may say: Big deal, you could just mail it to yourself. Well … yeah, you could, you’re right. But this saves you a few seconds every time, and because of the way it does it you can easily organize where the emails go in your inbox. I think it’s pretty cool anyway.
So, I’ve been sending myself a few messages: Here are some of the things I’ve been sending myself:
– Just went into a bookstore here in Newport Beach and could not help but notice that just about all of the books in “Current Events” were, in fact, paperbacks.
– The last two years the Baseball Writers have voted in Jim Rice and Andre Dawson who are, unquestionably, two of the more of the controversial of the 109 Baseball Writers choices.* Why? Is it because standards are lessening? Doubtful. Is it because we need to justify the greatness of that 1970s early 1980s era in baseball? Hmm. (This led to the column I ended up writing at SI).
*Here would be my best guess at some of the more controversial Hall of Fame selections by the Baseball Writers:
– Andre Dawson, 2010
– Jim Rice, 2009
– Bruce Sutter, 2006
– Tony Perez, 2000.
– Catfish Hunter, 1987
– Don Drysdale, 1984
– Ralph Kiner, 1975
– Lou Boudreau, 1970
– Herb Pennock, 1948I guess, in the end, the Baseball Writers controversies have generally been built around who they DID NOT vote in — Jim Bunning, Pee Wee Reese, Arky Vaughn, Hal Newhouser and others who had to go in via Veteran’s Committee — than who they did vote in. That’s the strange thing. The Baseball Writers have been, if anything, too staunch. And then, suddenly, they are happy to overlook the various and obvious Hall of Fame case flaws of Dawson and Rice. I’m not saying this is a bad thing — the Baseball Writers want a big Hall of Fame I’m all for a big Hall of Fame. But when you start voting in Dawson and Rice but inexplicably showing little or no support for Raines, Minoso, Evans, Parker, Murphy, Lynn, Reggie Smith, Tony Oliva, Frank Howard, and so on, well, that’s when it gets tricky.
– Can anyone explain why at fast food mall Chinese restaurants they will generously dump more and more food on your plate, but they will only give you one little napkin (and hide the rest behind the counter where you can’t reach the)? Could it be that the food is cheaper to make than napkins?
– I think I want a SodaStream. No, check that: I know I want a SodaStream. I have rarely wanted anything more than I want a SodaStream. But I’m really worried about the disappointment. This thing, supposedly, will allow you to make seltzer and all sorts of various pops at home, which is something I have for 20 years. Well, I want it for the pops — I don’t like seltzer. I want to make my own Diet Cola. But what if it tastes terrible? What if it’s a huge disappointment? What if I get it and then I end up feeling like I have to go to the story to get my Diet Coke anyway? I don’t know if I could handle the disappointment.
Interlude: My quick thoughts on the hall of Fame ballot. You know the eight I voted for and why I voted so these are just dispassionate thoughts about the voting and the players.
Andre Dawson, 77.9% — Not surprised or unhappy, his election was inevitable for three or four years (which makes you wonder why it didn’t happen three or four years ago). Class ballplayer, class man, he certainly adds dignity to the Hall of Fame.
Bert Blyleven, 74.2% — One last elbow to the ribs from the BBWAA as he falls five votes short. He will get in next year.
Roberto Alomar, 73.7% — I don’t like or agree with the extra credit some writers connect to a player’s first year on the ballot. But it’s a reality. Alomar’s spitting incident cost him a first-ballot entry. He will get in next year.
Jack Morris, 52.3% — I think he will get elected in 2011. I really do.
Barry Larkin, 51.6% — A good showing for first ballot, I feel sure he will get in at some point in the next three or four years. But it is also true that he will be racing the clock a little bit because the ballot will really load up with stars in a couple of years. Luis Tiant got 31% his first year on the ballot and seemed like a good Hall of Fame bet … but then the 300-game winners poured in and Tiant’s hopes disappeared.
Lee Smith, 47.3% — He’s just kind of running in place. The voters, it seems to me, have never quite known what to do with relievers. As Mariano and Hoffman push the save record out into the stratosphere, I suspect Lee Smith’s momentum might never build up.
Edgar Martinez, 36.2% — A pretty good showing on the first ballot, I think, considering Martinez was a DH who did not play his first full season until he was 27. The vast majority of players who start this high in the voting get in. I think he still has a fight ahead.
Tim Raines, 30.4% — Improvement from 22.6% a year earlier, I think some momentum is building for him. Will be interesting to see if his old teammate Andre Dawson speaks out for him.
Mark McGwire, 23.7% — His Hall of Fame case is dead in the water. I don’t know if McGwire cares about this at all, but fair or unfair, how he handles his return to baseball could play a role in whether or not he has any Hall of Fame shot with the writers. By the way, the whole “I might use him as a pinch-hitter” thing is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. McGwire hit .187 his last year — and that was NINE YEARS AGO. Pure nonsense. I think and hope that La Russa was just having fun with reporters and trying to deflect that McGwire STILL has not talked to the media.
Alan Trammell, 22.4% — A small boost — you do wonder if Larkin’s presence of the ballot will remind people that Trammell was pretty darned good himself.
Fred McGriff, 21.5% — A lower first ballot percentage than I expected. Turns out 493 homers doesn’t get you what it once did.
Don Mattingly, 16.1% — He got a promising 28% his first year on the ballot but now seems destined to be on the ballot the required 15 years before quietly falling off. One good thinab out it is that every year, around this time, we can remember that Donnie Ballgame was one heck of a baseball player.
Dave Parker, 15.2% — One more year on the ballot for the Cobra. His case is awfully similar to Dawson’s, but Parker’s mid-career drug-infected descent will keep him out.
Dale Murphy, 11.7% — I understand why he gets so little support. But I do believe that at his best — and he was at his best for six to eight years — he was an unmistakably better player than Dawson or Rice at their best.
Harold Baines, 6.1% — The professional hitter stays on the ballot for one more year. I’m still up for starting the Hall of Baines for Professional Hitters. Can’t wait to hear Al Oliver’s speech.
Andres Galarraga, 4.1% — Twenty-two votes for the Big Cat.
Robin Ventura (7 votes) — I’m a bit surprised he didn’t get a little more support than this. He was, before the big injury, a brilliant defensive third baseman with power.
Ellis Burks and Eric Karros (2 votes) — Karros will have to be satisfied to be remembered as the best player in the All-Star Game era never to get picked for one.
Kevin Appier, Pat Hentgen and David Segui (1 vote) — I would LOVE to know who voted for David Segui. I would just love to hear the reasoning for that one.
Mike Jackson, Ray Lankford, Shane Reynolds, Todd Zeile (0 votes) — It’s just an honor to be on the ballot.
– OK, so my thought on the Verizon Maps commercials: They are brilliant. I was going to write an entire post on this, but since I’m already writing about 20,000 words a week I have not had the time to do it. So I’ll sum it up with that one word. Brilliant*.
*OK, fine, I’ll write a few more words — one of my best friends and I often play this little business game. He’s a successful business guy, I’m a goofball sportswriter, so we feel qualified over various dinners to come up with all sorts of ideas how we would handle hugely intense business challenges like how we would save the newspaper business or how we would save the music business or how we would save health care or whatever.
One of the big ones we came up with: How can anyone beat the iPhone? The iPhone is an absolute marvel, there’s just no way around it. It’s a phone that allows you to play games, watch movies, listen to music and do about 12 million other things. It’s small and cool looking and lightweight. I mean, seriously, how are you going to beat it? Are you going to come up with a BETTER phone? Maybe, but even if you could, well, how much better? The Droid is going for the “better phone” concept. But I’m not giving up my iPhone for a phone that might be two percent better. The iPhone is just an overpowering thing.
And then, Verizon comes up with these Map commercials — where they show how much better 3G coverage they have than AT&T (the only company that supports that iPhone). And — BLAM! To be honest, it doesn’t even matter what the map actually shows because what you see is “Damn, that Verizon map looks to be a lot better covered than the AT&T map.” You aren’t thinking: “Wow, I guess that means as an AT&T customer I might not get 3G service in Neverbeenthere, Idaho or Askfordirections, Mississippi.” No, you are thinking: Man, is Verizon service THAT MUCH BETTER?
And then, you start to notice that, yes, you lose some calls on your iPhone. In fact, you lose quite a few calls. And while you are calling back, you wonder: “Would that have happened on Verizon? I mean, they have that really full map.”
And then friends say: “Man, I hate your iPhone. You are constantly losing calls.”
And so on.
Here’s how I know that the Verizon commercials hit bone: AT&T has come back with preposterously shrill and weak comeback commercials where they brought in the second-most famous Wilson brother to yelp that, AT&T does TOO have good coverage and it’s Verizon that sucks and … la la la la … just … shut up already.
A haymaker commercial, like that George Foreman uppercut against Gerry Cooney, really is a thing of beauty. I don’t even LIKE the Verizon commercials. I mean, they’re not really funny or entertaining. But it seems to me they are brutally effective. Contrast that with the Sprint Now Network commercials which are like complicated foreign films with about nine different subplots and mazes … the Pittsburgh Steelers lady jumps out of the bubble, the girl in the skirt is punching her grandmother, the guy on the bowling team drops his bowling ball, I’m entirely lost. I have no idea what Sprint is trying to say.
I’m not proud of it, but let’s face it: I don’t watch TV for complexity. Commercials really need a simple message. This detergent cleans better. This drug will help you have sex if you are old. This phone will not cut off as often as your phone does.
– I love the Tool Band-It; you know that metallic arm band you wear so you can attach nuts, bolts, nails, hammers to your arm. I really think this is the future. Like you have heard that Apple will be coming out with this tablet — well, how are people going to carry those around? You betcha: The Tablet Bandit. People will have all sorts of devices and money clips and keys on their arms. It’s coming. Believe it.
– Went into a Bose store the other day and got stuck watching the 15-minute sales movie that tells you why it is absolutely essential that you get a Bose system for your home. The best part of the movie — SPOILER ALERT: and if you plan on seeing this movie, you might want to skip ahead — is that at some point a salesperson comes into the room and stands in front for a few minutes while the movie is going on. And then, suddenly, he pulls the giant speakers off the walls to reveal (voila) TINY BOSE SPEAKERS! Impossible! The sound was coming out of those little speakers ALL THE TIME!
The salesman I dealt with was really enthusiastic about this, which I appreciated. He revealed the speakers with gusto and gave this great model-on-The-Price-Is-Right look of surprise as he did. It was as if he was saying: “I know. It’s unbelievable. Little speakers.” I always think I should get the name of people like this so I can write their bosses and tell them how impressed I am with their employee’s enthusiasm. But I never do.
I’m going to start. That’s my New Year’s resolution.
– I am indeed live blogging the BCS Championship game Thursday night — will add a link later. And I will be tweeting from JPosnanski. Why? Because: I’m here.
choire: (via alexbalk) It’s always so heartening to see...
(via alexbalk)
It’s always so heartening to see Jake’s rousing support of the rest of the online community.
But I have a question: If the Awl is the “effete white overeducated twee” market, what’s Gothamist’s audience? The “New York Post articles are too long and complicated for me so will someone please summarize” market?
Roger Ebert on Blogging and Dining
After several surgeries following a bout with cancer, Roger Ebert cannot talk or eat. He posted about the experience on his blog. The end is the best.
So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for me, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking...Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now.For whatever reason, I had never put two and two together. I couldn't believe how long his blog posts were, but now it makes a lot of sense. These stories make me happy to work for a blogging company.
The next real-estate bust
Now that Roger Lowenstein has published an article in the NYT Magazine headlined “Walk Away From Your Mortgage!”, I think we can safely stay that what started as a controversial and minority stance has at this point become thoroughly mainstream. (The corollary is that arguments in favor of paying one's debts are now contrarian.) It's a credit to Mark Gimein that his blog entry from 14 months ago, entitled “Morally Conflicted About Walking Away? Don't Be“, was not only one of the first places to make this point, but still stands out as one of the best expressions of the argument.
Similarly, I felt decidedly contrarian when I started arguing against homeownership in September 2007; that view now seems to be moving into conventional wisdom as well.
I'm not actually convinced that real Americans, as opposed to the chattering classes, have moved so far so fast. But it's clear which way the wind is blowing — and it's blowing in the direction of continued house-price declines. Houses are still more expensive to buy than to rent, in most of the country, and of course financing is all but impossible to come by, except for that provided by the government, which means that if and when the government prop is taken away, prices are liable to plunge. If that happens, expect a lot more walking away into cheaper rentals than we're seeing right now, and a whole new vicious cycle of price declines and foreclosures.
Noam Scheiber has been waxing lyrical about the success of the stress tests, but it's worth remembering that banks' balance sheets haven't been subjected to a really tough test since then — and also that those balance sheets are still full to bursting with toxic mortgage-backed assets, as all government attempts (TARP, PPIP) to relieve the banks of those assets have failed to do so.
There are lots of ways in which the US economy could see another sickening downward lurch, and residential real estate is probably not even the most likely. But it's a nasty possibility, all the same, and one worth being alive to.
Another Mets ticket office anecdote
Ed posted this as a comment but I thought it warranted a post. Good info here.
Shannon,
I have a 15 day ticket plan, the orginal deadline was Dec. 18th. I called to say that I wanted to move my seats within the same price range but to a better view and gave them the location ( 528 to 524). They said I needed to take advantage of the on-line partial renew plan and that my name would be placed on a list in the order I renewed. They explained to me that the section I was looking to move into was sold out last year and I needed to wait until they had a renewal totals in,seasons ticket holders, then partial season holders and then 15 day holders had preference.
I made my partial payment and after not hearing from them since the deadline past I called them today. They stated they were currently going through the process of counting non renewals on season tickets, moving 40 game plan requests and 15 day plans on the list who renewed would be getting calls next week. They had my request and stated basically that I would probably get my request based on availability and when I renewed.
They were very helpful, polite and stated everything very clearly.
Thanks Ed, good explanation, and I enjoy this type of information-cycle that we had today on the site. I think it's good for fans to have this type of info-exchange. Much appreciated.
Personally, I still think they should just take your money and move you quickly.
My brain: Wouldn't a computer or excel spreadsheet be able to quickly count the non-renewals? I've never ran a ticket office, what do I know. Just seems strange from afar, but I'm happy to hear they were helpful, polite, clear and that you came away satisfied.
Keep this stuff coming Mets fans!
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Julianne Moore Is Perfect
Julianne Moore's the new face of Bulgari and here's the first look at her campaign, or 'interpretation.' It manages to be both sexy and gaudy, with shots of gold mirrors and crystal chandeliers throughout. Moore wears emeralds, of course. They look about a million times better on her, against the red orange hair and pale skin, than on the white bird wearing the Bulgari bracelet in the last shot.
Bulgari - Shopping - Bird - Gold - Home and Garden
So There Was A Highly Advanced Civilization In The Amazon After All
So Colonel Percy Fawcett has been vindicated. The British explorer, who David Grann wrote about in the wonderful book The Lost City of Z, was last seen in 1925, trudging off into the jungles of the Amazon basin, searching for evidence to support his belief that a vast civilization had once populated the area—the fabled city of gold, perhaps, El Dorado. In the years since, the prevailing opinion has been that he was following a pipe dream, that the harsh physical conditions of the basin have always precluded mass inhabitation. Now, as Grann reports today, at The New Yorker:
In cleared-away areas of the upper Amazon basin, researchers, using satellite imagery, have recently pinpointed a vast network of monumental earthworks, including geometrically aligned roads and structures, constructed by a hitherto unknown civilization. According to a new report published in the journal Antiquity, the archeologist Martii Pärssinen and other scientists have documented more than two hundred and ten geometric structures, some of which may date as far back as the third century A.D. They are spread out over an area that spans more than two hundred and fifty kilometers, reaching all the way from northern Bolivia to the state of Amazonia in Brazil.
The structures that have been discovered thus far represent only ten percent of the whole, according to the archeologists, who attribute the disappearance of the civilization to disease spread by the arrival of European conquistadors in 16th century.
“What is striking about the structures is that their monumentality and sophisticated design are best seen from an aerial view,” says Grann, “where they look like an elaborate geometry equation diagrammed in the earth.”
Or, you know, maybe they’re just alien landing pads.
Nil by Mouth
Lovely piece by Roger Ebert, on whether it’s sad that he can no longer eat or drink.
The Lady Doth Spend Too Much
It's not often that we have stories in common with our sibling site Going Concern (think of them as the Fashionista of the CFO/Accounting world.) Who, you ask, who could bring us together? Lady Gaga, of course. (And yes, we realize this is Gaga item #2 of the day.)
It seems that all that we love about Lady G, from the myriad costume changes to the pianos lit on fire, are the sorts of things that make accounting types go batty. Hence they named her Nightmare Client of the Day.
Turns out the tour isn't really making any money even though every show is sold out, which you can read all about here.
Luckily, we're not accountants so we can just hope that no one reins her in too much. We like our Gaga just fine the way she is, especially when she's sporting bright yellow ombré hair.
The Avon Barksdale Story
Here's the trailer for The Avon Barksdale Story, a documentary about the real-life Baltimore gangster than inspired the Avon Barksdale character on The Wire.
Barksdale's real name, Nathan Avon Barksdale, and his nickname, "Bodie," were both used in the series as composite characters. Avon Barksdale was The Wire's first season's central character. The storyline focused on the Barksdale clan and their ruthless hold on Baltimore's underworld and the intense efforts of law enforcement to stop them. Barksdale was a real crime figure in Baltimore.
(thx, mark)
Tags: The Avon Barksdale Story The Wire TV video
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 shares six interesting soup garnishes. Ever thought of topping that bowl with roasted chickpeas? Or pie dough scraps?
Also on the Kitchn, a recipe for grapefruit ginger tea bread, how to cool a tongue-burning drink pronto, ten ways to use frozen broccoli, and perfect steel-cut oatmeal 101.
- Recipe Review: Grapefruit Ginger Tea Bread: "It's a quick bread filled with fresh grapefruit, nuts and just enough sweetness—the perfect pair to a hot cup of tea."
- The Fastest Way to Cool a Hot Beverage: "Though you might look silly doing it, the combination of blowing while stirring your extra-hot beverage will allow you to drink it fastest!"
- 10 Ways to Use Frozen Broccoli: Suggestion #9: "Steam and mash it with potatoes and a little Parmesan cheese."
- How to Cook Perfect Steel-Cut Oats: "We bring the water to a boil and then stir in the steel-cut oats along with a healthy pinch of salt (this sounds strange, but it brings out the nutty flavor in the oats)."
The Citi Field Experience
I'm sure many of you got today's mass-email from the Mets selling tickets, and as mentioned this morning the 15 game plans are on sale to anyone. One reader has been trying to upgrade his tickets to a better location. Let me repeat, he....wants...to...give....the....Mets....money...... In December they told him he'd have to wait until after the deadline. That makes sense I guess. Well the deadline passed and he had to call the Mets. Shouldn't they be pouncing on this guy? On today's call he was told the Mets have...not sure how to phrase this...basically if you didn't renew your 15er, your name is no longer linked to those seats. Again, fair and makes sense. They gave us two chances and we thumbed our noses, and now they are and should be trying to sell to others. via www.metspolice.com Lots of people have been asking my thoughts on this, so I'm blogging it. The above describes exactly my experience with the Mets, and it's bizarre, although it's not new. I've been a season or partial plan ticket holder with the Mets for ten years, and I know that that's not as long as many other ticket holders, but the Mets have never been good at the relationship they have with the fans, so we shouldn't be surprised. Last year I had a ticket rep who I thought was excellent, and we actually met in person a few times, but she's apparently been promoted and no longer deals with my seats. In past years, the customer experience couldn't have been worse when trying to purchase tickets. So this is not new, despite the recent attention Mets Police has brought to the issue. And believe me, I know how difficult customer service is. I have more thoughts on the matter, of course... I love Citi field. I think it's a near perfect temple to baseball, "Baseball as it Oughta Be," as we used to say. I don't think it needs to be "Mets upped" - the Mets populate the field, so they are the natural center of attention. We had slightly obstructed views this year, but I actually think the tradeoff between proximity to the field and not being able to see one corner of the outfield is a good one. I love the food, and many of the tickets may actually be under-priced (although many of them certainly are overpriced). Another concern I have is that I don't think few sports teams (not just the Mets) are considering the full impact of StubHub on the fans experience. I love making it easier to get money back on games I can't attend, but I don't like going to games and being surrounded by Phillies fans, Yankees fans, or whoever. The majority of season ticket-holders, to my eye, are no-shows for the whole season. I don't know how this will change in the economy, but it's worth watching, esp. as the ballpark experience becomes less communal with all of the ticket tiers, club access, and so on. We attended just under fifty baseball games this year, which is probably more often than we eat dinner at home at our kitchen table. But that's OK, because we love the food at Citi too. My TypePad userpic is a picture of Adriana and I at the game taken by our friend Tien, on our second anniversary date. I literally learned my reading, writing and arithmetic from my parents guiding me through box scores and the New York Times & Washington Post's sports section. It's heartbreaking to think that not only are the Mets driving a hard bargain for tickets (which is fair, as some sections are even sold out!) but that Mets ticket reps appear to not even be returning calls (and this goes back to December, it's not just this week). A couple weeks ago over at the Baseball Prospectus, Colin Wyers wrote about the "Winner's Curse": ...forecasting baseball players is at best imperfect, so anyone—even a major-league team, which has both the most resources and the greatest incentive to get it right—will be wrong at least some of the time. As it turns out, when you make those mistakes in a player's favor, those are the times you're most likely to actually sign that player. It's difficult for us to quantify how exactly this impacts the market for free agents—remember, most dollar-value estimates of a baseball player's worth are based upon actual free-agent salaries. So if the market is distorted, the model won't be able to figure that out. There are ways to figure out a player's value without looking at other free-agent salaries, typically through a marginal revenue product model, where you compute the dollar value of a win to a team and go from there. This approach is fraught with problems as well. First, we lack a lot of information about team finances that would be useful to know in such an analysis, and second, there is the problem that not all wins are created equal from a marginal revenue standpoint. As a result, you have to figure out a baseline for comparison; economist Andrew Zimbalist, for instance, in his book Baseball and Billions, figured marginal revenue products compared to the average player. But then you're left trying to figure out the MRP of an average baseball player. I don't honestly think that we're at a point where we can firmly attribute differences between an MRP model and observed salaries to an actual cause rather than a problem with model specification. In a closed-bid auction (such as buying tickets, or signing free agents) the "winners" have to in effect pay for something that they don't yet know the true value of. And that thrill is part of baseball, but for the Mets to treat their fans this way has been, as I said before, bizarre. I am pretty sure that fans who want tickets (including myself) will end up getting them over the next couple months, but if the Mets went about this a little bit differently, the attitude of their biggest fans would be markedly different.
Today's Mets ticket office anecdote
I'm sure many of you got today's mass-email from the Mets selling tickets, and as mentioned this morning the 15 game plans are on sale to anyone.
One reader has been trying to upgrade his tickets to a better location. Let me repeat, he....wants...to...give....the....Mets....money......
In December they told him he'd have to wait until after the deadline. That makes sense I guess. Well the deadline passed and he had to call the Mets. Shouldn't they be pouncing on this guy?
On today's call he was told the Mets have...not sure how to phrase this...basically if you didn't renew your 15er, your name is no longer linked to those seats. Again, fair and makes sense. They gave us two chances and we thumbed our noses, and now they are and should be trying to sell to others.
Back to the one dude who actually wants tickets. Wants to spend MORE money.
He was told to wait until Wednesday. Today is Thursday where I live. 6 days?
Customer asked how many people are hounding the Mets for upgrades? Rep chuckled and said "not many."
Why make this guy wait? Why? Why? Why?
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Mets Police Decade In Review: How to "Mets up" Citi Field
Mets Police is here to help not hurt. From the archives, May 2009 and a suggestion to borrow some ideas from Yankee Stadium. At least they did the banners...and I've since learned that the Mets have done the baseball cards thing, but it's on the club level.
Some more photos from my trip to Yankee Stadium on Saturday. I think the photos speak for themselves as for ideas the Mets could copy to make Citi Field seem more Mets Field than like a ballpark the Mariners could move into next weekend.
These first two pictures are the "holograms" that I heard of on my first visit. Depending on your angle, they could look like this...
..or like this.
Regardless, the Mets could learn from the Yankees and put up some pictures of their more popular former players.
I'm not going to tell the Wilpons who these players are any more unless they start paying me a consultants fee.
Another way to decorate walls is like this. This is over by the Yankees Museum (imagine that, a room that honors the team that plays in the stadium).
I like this baseball card design. To the left of Yogi is Gehrig, and to his left Ruth. The person cut off on the right is Mattingly.
You'll find this right by the museum.
This next photo is taken from across the River Avenue in the "old" garage, which is why its obstructed by a screen. I mean its not obstructed, it's part of the design of the lot, but I digress.
On the outside of Yankee Stadium they have photos of the current players. I didn't notice until I was leaving.
This next picture shows the entrance to something called a museum. There you can honor the great players and moments from the team's history.
Not the history of a team that bolted town fifty years ago, but the actual team you root for. Neat idea!
The Yankees have placed Thurman Munson's locker in that museum. What fools, don't they know how much artifacts go for in auctions?!
Update January 2010: What's interesting is that I've since learned that the Mets actually do have things like this. However, they are in the suite level.
Starting Monday we'll walk down this hallway and see what the rich people get to enjoy.
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Critic-Turned-Cook Takes a Pie-Making Class with Kate McDermott
Wouldn't the world be a better place if there were more pie? No doubt about it. As a critic, I always wondered why dessert menus so often lacked this down-home treat. Maybe we're shy on hand-crafted pie because it can be such a challenge to make, especially if you're nervous around flour like I am. Cooking I can do, but baking is a whole different, kind of scary beast.
At least that's what I thought before signing up for a pie-making class taught by Kate McDermott at Diane's Market Kitchen near the Pike Place Market. Kate's pie skills have been written about in Saveur. She's shown Ruth Reichl a thing or two, too.
First thing we learned during this intensive baking lesson was that aspiring pie makers shouldn't feel bound by the constraints of the measuring cup. We're looking for a feel, a certain texture in the dough. Two and a half cups of flour go in the bowl, more or less.
Kate's not-so-secret recipe is built on a foundation of Irish butter, Pennsylvania lard ("I know it leaves a huge carbon footprint, but it's the best I've found, even after rendering my own," she explained), and King Arthur flour, the latter preferably kept in the freezer.
When blending the flour and the fat, Kate encourages a hands-on approach: Get right in there and squeeze with your fingers. The results should look like a bowl of mixed nuts. "I know some recipes call for pea size or almond size lumps, but it's best if there are different sizes," she said. Ice water brings it all together into a softball-size lump, which is wrapped in plastic and rests while you prepare the filling. Kate sources her fruit at farmers' markets and is a big believer in heritage varieties, especially when it comes to apples.
Another weapon in her pie-making arsenal are a few vintage Veg-O-Matics. Those gizmos slice a bushels' worth of apples faster than you can tell the story of Johnny Appleseed.
Kate showed us how to roll out the dough and to mend any cracks with water. She calls it super glue. Into the oven go those beauties, and about an hour later we had some mighty pretty pies despite a slight glitch with the oven temp.
These beauties were so much fun to make, and even more fun to eat, I got swept away by a case of pie fever and started scheming/dreaming about opening my own little house of pies. Maybe...
About the author: Former Seattle Post-Intelligencer restaurant critic Leslie Kelly has been working in professional kitchens since the newspaper folded in March 2009 and chronicling her culinary journey from pen to pan for Serious Eats. She also blogs at LeslieKellyWhiningandDining.blogspot.com and is working on a story-telling project for Northstar Winery following one wine from the vine to the table.
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Rating the pundits: 2009 NFL preseason predictions
How accurate are all those preseason predictions about how the coming NFL season will unfold?
In an effort to find out, I collected a number of preseason "team power rankings" two days before the 2009 NFL regular season started in September. These ranking lists are compiled by columnists and pundits from media outlets like Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, The Sporting News, and ESPN. In addition, I collected a fan-voted ranking from Yahoo Sports and the preseason Vegas odds to win the Super Bowl. As a baseline of sorts, I've also included the ranking for how the teams finished in the 2008 season.
Each team ranking from each list was compared to the final 2009 regular season standings (taken from this tentative 2010 draft order) by calculating the offset between the estimated rank to the team's actual finish. For instance, ESPN put the Steelers in the #1 slot but they actually finished 15th in the league...so ESPN's offset for the Steelers is 14. For each list, the offsets for all 32 teams were added up and divided by 32 to get the average number of places that the list was off by. See ESPN's list at right for example; you can see that each team ranking in the list was off by an average of about 6.3 places.
Here are the offset averages for each list (from best to worst):
Media outlet Offset ave. (# of places) CBS Sports 5.6 The Sporting News 5.6 USA Today 5.6 Vegas odds 5.8 Yahoo Sports 5.9 Sports Illustrated 5.9 ESPN 6.3 Fox Sports 6.4 2008 finish 7.3 The good news is that all of the pundits beat the baseline ranking of last season's final standings. But they didn't beat it by that much...only 1.7 places in the best case. A few other observations:
- All the lists were pretty much the same. Last place Fox Sports and first place CBS Sports differ by less than one place in their rankings. The Steelers and Patriots were one and two on every list and the bottom five were pretty consistent as well. All the pundits said basically the same thing; no one had an edge or angle the others didn't.
- Nearly everyone was very wrong about the Steelers, Giants, Titans, Jets, Bengals, and Saints...and to a lesser extent, the Redskins, Bears, Vikings, and Packers. CBS Sports made the fewest big mistakes; their offset for the Bengals was only 4 places. The biggest mistakes were Fox Sports' choice and the Vegas ranking of the Bengals to finish 28th (offset: 19).
- Among the top teams, the Colts, Eagles, and Patriots more or less fulfilled the hopes of the pundits; only Fox Sports and Sports Illustrated missed the mark on one of these teams (the Colts by 9 places).
- The two "wisdom of the crowds" lists, Yahoo Sports and the Vegas list, ended up in the middle, better than some but not as good as some others. I suspect that there was not enough independent information out there for the crowd to make a good collective choice; those two lists looked pretty much like the pundits' lists.
- The teams who turned out to be bad were easier to pick than the good teams. The bottom five picks on each list were typically off by 3-5 places while the top five were off by more like 8-12 places (esp the Steelers and the Giants). Not sure why this is. Perhaps badness is easier to see than goodness. Or it's easier for a good-looking team to go bad than it is for bad-looking team to do better.
For the curious, here's the full Google Docs spreadsheet of numbers for all of the lists.
Methodology and notes: 1) I made an assumption about all these power ranking lists: that what the pundits were really picking is the final regular season ranking. That isn't precisely true but close enough for our purposes. 2) I have no idea what the statistical error is here. 3) The 2010 draft order list isn't a perfect ranking of how the teams finished, but it is close enough. 4) Using the final regular season records as the determining factor of rank is problematic because of the playoffs. By the end of the season, some teams aren't trying to win every game because they've either made the playoffs or haven't. So some teams might be a little bit better or worse than their records indicate. 5) The Vegas odds list was a rankng of the odds of each team making the Super Bowl, not the odds for the teams' final records. But close enough. 6) The Sports Illustrated list was from before the 2009 pre-season started; I couldn't find an SI list from right before the regular season. Still, it looked a lot like the other lists and did middlingly well.
Tags: football NFL sports statistics
A history of Gilbert's practical jokes
This whole issue of a Gilbert practical joke gone wrong? It seems fairly predictable in retrospect, though obviously not to this degree. Some of his jokes have always veered a bit too close to the edge. A few years back, a teammate told me a story that involved Gilbert flinging full bottles of Gatorade at another teammate's vehicle while they were moving at high speeds. I sort of downplayed it at the time, but that strikes me as potentially dangerous behavior, perhaps marginally amusing to adrenaline-fueled teenagers but sort of silly for millionaire adults. But heck, when Gilbert told us he was creating a cartoon series, it was going to be called "Gazo the Pranksta," starring a group of high school pranksters. Inside the stuffed animal promoting the show was a note, that began like this: "Hypocrites, fools and the oversensitive beware." See the pranks and jokes and japes and
Roger Ebert on losing the ability to eat, drink, and speak
his journal's been consistently great lately
Why the Crittenton tale doesn't exonerate Gilbert
I don't know exactly who Mike Wise's sources were for his masterful story about the Gilbert-Crittenton showdown, but you have to guess it's someone who's sympathetic to Gilbert. And the idea seems to be that the truth about Crittenton--if this new version is indeed the truth--will make Gilbert look a whole lot better by comparison. Well, here's one dissenting view. I don't think it makes Gilbert look one iota better. In fact, I'd argue it makes him look a whole lot worse, even if this new version is 100 percent accurate. Why? Well, Gilbert's entire defense has been based on the idea that this was a joke, a prank, an idle bit of tomfoolery that only cranks like the tabloids, the NBA suits and the moralists are taking seriously. It was just silliness, see? But if this new version is true, here's one other person who didn't think the joke
Video: Brooklyn's Backyard Chicken Keepers
Meet Brooklyn urban chicken keepers (or "mother hens") Megan Paska and Katrina Mauro. One day they decided to order chickens online at mypetchicken.com and the next thing they knew, the four-day-old cluckers showed up in a shoebox with a heat pack. Documentarian Liza de Guia visits the backyard in this latest video from Food Curated where the two ladies make raising chickens look like a breeze (they just converted a dog house into a coop, no big deal).
"For now I see them as pets and love them as pets, but when it comes down to it, they're food so, um, when they stop laying it's definitely within the realm of possibility that they'll end up on our dinner plate," said Megan. Watch the video after the jump.
Brooklyn's Backyard Chicken Keepers
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plotzed
the shooter in Halo dressed in neon pink. It's clearly the token characters for gamer's girlfriends trying out the game, but it blends in with NONE of the environments in the game so the other players can spot you from a mile away. Bilbo is the Pink Halo Shooter of this book. via nataliepo.typepad.com I lied. Anyway, who needs "Likes" on comments? Just reblog your favorite comments.
★ Tablet Musings
A few follow-up points speculating on The Tablet.
The Name
I really have no idea what Apple’s going to name this thing, and my track record on such predictions is not good. (I did not think they’d call their phone “iPhone”, if only because everyone thought for years that Apple would make a phone called “iPhone”.)
But if I had to place a bet, I’d guess “iBook”. I certainly wasn’t the first to think of it.
The App Store
The most-asked question from readers was whether I expect The Tablet to be a tightly-controlled software platform like the iPhone. No one doubts that there will be an App Store for any possible Apple tablet computer — either a new branch of apps specifically designed for the tablet (as I expect), or iPhone OS apps modified to run on larger displays, or both. The question from readers is whether I expect the App Store will be, as on the iPhone, the only way to write native third-party software for the device.
To me this is so obvious, I didn’t consider it worth addressing. I say: yes, of course the App Store will be the only avenue for native third-party tablet apps. (“Native” as opposed to web apps, which by definition are wide open.) Whatever the problems and complaints developers have about the iPhone App Store, Apple clearly sees it as a huge win. They love the experience it provides, they love the control, and I’m sure they enjoy the 30 percent cut of the revenue.
What If There Is No SDK on Day One?
I don’t think it’s out of the question that we could see a replay of the iPhone third-party app story, where the SDK is not available until months after the device debuts. Apple-quality SDKs take a lot of time and planning to produce. As with the iPhone, the product could be good enough to ship to users long before the APIs are solid enough to ship to developers. I don’t think it would be tenable for Apple not to even comment on the SDK prospects this time, though. If you thought there was an uproar with “just write web apps for it” in 2007, it’d be far louder this time.
Non-App Indie iTunes Content
But here’s another question re: the iTunes Store and The Tablet. Everyone, me included, presumes that a big part of The Tablet is going to involve e-reader features — some sort of thing where you can subscribe to newspapers and magazines and buy books through iTunes.
Let’s say that’s true. My question here is whether it’ll be (a) like the current iTunes Store for music and video, where the content comes only from major corporate media companies, or (b) like the App Store, where anyone can sign up to be a provider. For that matter, why not let indie bands and filmmakers sign up to sell their music and movies through iTunes?
Amazon lets you self-publish e-books through the Kindle store, but they take the fat side of a 65-35 split. If there were an iTunes book store where Apple took only the thin side of a 70-30 split (as they do with the App Store), I’ll bet it wouldn’t take long for Amazon to sweeten their deal.
Flash
What about Flash? Lots of people are speculating that The Tablet will run an updated version of iPhone OS. If that’s true, then it almost certainly won’t support Flash. Me? I think The Tablet is going to be running its own Whatever-the-Name-of-the-Tablet-Is OS — but if I had to bet, I’d bet on it not supporting Flash, either.
Why? For most of the same reasons why I don’t expect the iPhone OS ever to support Flash. Flash is the leading cause of application crashes on Mac OS X. It is buggy. It’s inefficient. Presumably The Tablet is going to have a faster CPU and more RAM than an iPhone, but that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t going to treat CPU cycles and memory as any less precious than they do on the iPhone.
As I wrote in February 2008, correctly predicting that Apple would not be adding Flash support to iPhone OS:
As it stands today, Apple is dependent on no one other than itself for the software on the iPhone. Apple controls the source code to the whole thing, from top to bottom. Why cede any of that control to Adobe?
In a footnote, I added:
Google and Yahoo provide Apple with web services for things like Maps, Stocks, and Weather. But that’s data, not software.
To my knowledge, Apple controls the entire source code to the iPhone OS. That’s not to say they wrote the whole thing from scratch. Many low-level OS components are open source. But they have the source. If there’s a bug, they can fix it. If something is slow, they can optimize or re-write it. That is not true for Mac OS X, and Flash is a prime example. The single leading source of application crashes on Mac OS X is a component that Apple can’t fix.
Yes, there’s demand for Flash. Yes, if The Tablet ships without Flash, there will be complaints. But the iPhone’s utter lack of support for Flash hasn’t exactly hurt it. (The same goes for Java, as well, but no one really complains about Java’s absence from the iPhone.)
If The Tablet ships without Flash and it proves to be a mistake, Apple can always add it later. But if The Tablet does ship with Flash and that proves to be a mistake, it’d be untenable for Apple to subsequently remove it.
"Smart" pasting at The New Yorker site
Interesting: When you copy text from a New Yorker article and paste it somewhere else, it automatically includes a “Read more: URL” at end of paste.
Copied this:
Then pasted it into an email and it showed up like this (with “Read more” link):
NY Post (and others?) also doing this.
Update: Tynt is what these sites are using. “Measuring reader engagement by how often they copy and paste” talks more about how sites use the data generated by Tynt. [thx ZS]
The Spotted Pig's smoked haddock chowder recipe!!
If I had to choose my all-time favorite restaurant dishes, the smoked haddock chowder from The Spotted Pig would definitely be on there, possibly in the top five. Years after I asked Ed Levine of Serious Eats if he could get the recipe, he finally posts the recipe for me.
When infusing the haddock, think of making a cup of tea. You want to pull all the smoky flavors out into the cream. This will result in a deeply rich soup. Once you make this you will never go back to another chowder.
Thank you Ed and April! (I'm really holding back on the exclamation points here; I'm almost irrationally excited to cook this for dinner tomorrow night...if I can find smoked haddock somewhere in NYC...)
Tags: Ed Levine food NYC restaurants The Spotted Pig
Serious Beer: A Taster Tray at Deschutes Brewery & Public House, Portland, Oregon
Deschutes Brewery's main headquarters are in Bend, Oregon, but their Portland brewpub is definitely worth a visit, especially if you're in the neighborhood visiting the legendary Powell's Books.
We arrived on a Saturday afternoon to find the tables filled with families. This is not just a bar for beer nerds; it's a pretty large restaurant serving lunch and dinner seven days a week. We were happy to settle in with a cask pint of the special Quail Springs IPA while we waited for a table. It was creamy and malty, with floral aromatics and a hint of pine nuts. It wasn't quite as citrusy as we expected, but there were better IPAs to come.
A fair amount of brewing occurs at the Portland pub; our waiter estimated that 80-90 percent of the beer served in the pub is brewed in Portland, with the rest arriving weekly from Bend. The bar has 18 taps, and the offerings change almost daily. Large glass windows allow visitors to admire the copper mash tuns (acquired from a defunct brewery in Germany) and watch the brewers at work.
Of course, the best way to get a sense of the brewery is to do some tasting, and taster trays are a pretty great deal: for $6.50, you get six four-ounce tasting glasses. You can choose Deschutes' flagship brews or almost any of the cask pours and special seasonal beers that are available.
Regular Beers
Many Portlanders are familiar with Deschutes' regular offerings—they're available on tap at many local restaurants and in six packs at grocery stores. Our favorite was the Bachelor Bitter, a copper-colored ale with a nice malt backbone and restrained hopping. This beer has nice body and a mellow nutty flavor. We also liked the Mirror Pond Pale Ale, which has a lemon peel bitterness and refreshing hop flavor. The nitrogen-enhanced taster of the Jubelale was creamy and smooth, with notes of caramel popcorn and pecans.
Limited Edition Beers
The best part of a visit to Deschutes, though, is the chance to taste their limited-edition beers. Our taster tray included the Arctic Blastonator Weizen Bock, a wheat ale with a big dose of banana and bubblegum flavor (not my personal favorite), the drinkable D. Straat Dubbel brewed with abbey ale yeast, and a sample of Streaking the Quad, a strong Belgian-style ale with butterscotch and pecan pie flavors. While all of these were interesting, Deschutes' strengths lie elsewhere.
Two of the limited edition IPAs were everything we'd hoped for, so delicious that we were sad to finish each glass. The Fresh Squeezed IPA is made in the Portland pub and is not available in bottles (though you can get a growler to take home, and you should.) The menu warns that this bright, flavorful beer is an experimental "citrus bomb" but it's not very bitter, just tremendously flavorful, with nice malt flavor to balance the lemon notes. This is a beer worth traveling for, a beautiful example of a Northwest IPA.
We enjoyed the fruity wallop of the Hop Henge IPA even more—a hint of sweetness warmed up the grapefruit and orange peel flavors, and the malt notes reminded us of freshly baked shortbread. This potent imperial IPA is a part of the limited edition Bond Street Series, and is available in 22 oz bottles.
Though The Abyss is not available as part of the taster tray, you can order it in a snifter. If you imagine stirring good bourbon into a mug of melted dark chocolate, you're somewhere close to the taste of this velvety imperial stout. The Abyss isn't sweet, though—its rich chocolate flavors mingle with notes of dark-roast coffee and blackstrap molasses, figs, vanilla, strong booze, and fresh cream. Though the pub serves desserts including a double chocolate pot de creme, this lovely beer was indulgence enough for me.
Deschutes Brewery & Public House
210 NW 11th Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97209 (map)
503-296-4906; deschutesbrewery.comAbout the author: Maggie Hoffman and her team of tasters are always looking for their new favorite beers. Maggie also writes about cooking for Pithy and Cleaver.
The real danger lurking in the water: Romulus Whitaker on TED.com
The gharial and king cobra are two of India's most iconic reptiles, and they're endangered because of polluted waterways. Conservationist Romulus Whitaker shows rare footage of these magnificent animals and urges us to save the rivers that sustain their lives and our own. (Recorded at TEDIndia, November 2009, Mysore, India. Duration: 17:19)
Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/535W
Watch Romulus Whitaker's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.
Bloodsuckers Own the Night in ‘Daybreakers’
Don’t bother trying to understand the curious logic of Daybreakers, in which the world of the not-too-distant future is overrun with vampires and mankind teeters on the brink of extinction.
It’s a familiar scenario, treated oh-so-seriously by Australian directors Michael and Peter Spierig, whose no-budget 2005 debut, Undead, was sloppy but diverting enough to earn them a call-up to the bigs. This time they’ve upped the ante with expensive-looking CGI, handsome cinematography and a veteran cast featuring Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, and the improvement is marked.
Given the shortage of fresh blood in the world, hematologist Edward Dalton (Hawke) is a very important man indeed. Charged with designing a synthetic substitute, he’s running out of time, and afoul of his bosses. His experiments yield modest success in primates but reduce vamps to so much splatter.
Could a more radical solution exist? Elvis (Dafoe) – a champion of the human resistance, not the undead Vegas crooner – thinks so. A former bloodsucker, he claims to have discovered a cure for vampirism, one that brings the body and soul back to life. Is he for real, or just another loose screw in a world full of them?
Most vampires would bristle at the notion of shuffling the mortal coil back on, but Edward keeps an open mind. He sees no glory in the annihilation of humans, and besides, there’s not enough natural blood to sustain a world of bottom-feeders. If there’s an alternative to famine, he will find it. In doing so, he creates a new enemy: Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), the reptilian entrepreneur who hopes to mass-produce a blood substitute.
Daybreakers is too apolitical to qualify as social satire, though it speaks in no uncertain terms to the dangers of exhausting the earth’s resources. As the latest entry in the vampire sweepstakes, its approach is refreshingly old-fashioned: Rather than romanticizing its bloodsuckers, as has been the trend in the Twilight movies and HBO’s True Blood, it sees them as bogeymen empowered. Freed from the shadows, they own the night.
This is the kind of movie that creates its own mythology, and while Daybreakers adheres to the rules of the genre – its vampires can neither see their shadows nor expose themselves to natural light – it introduces at least one significant new wrinkle. What is it? I’m not telling, except to say it works best the less you think about it. The same could be said for the movie, which is nicely acted, aggressively paced and a whole lot of empty-headed fun.
From Fellini to Franz Ferdinand
David Lynch did indeed direct Marion Cotillard in Dior's second short film last month in Shanghai.
Part II of the Lady Noire Affair won't debut for a few months, but on Janary 14th, Dior will premiere their first music video, also staring the Oscar winning actress.
Marion plays a 'working woman' who transforms into a sultry singer every night. The film was shot in New York City and the song she sings, "Lady Rouge," was written by Franz Ferdinand.
Yoga Boom
Molly explains why yoga is worth trying in 2010. Assets: Yoga Energy Drawing, Woman Doing Yoga On Beach, Yoga Silhoette, Yoga Poses, Yoga Poses Number Two, Yoga Cat , Shiva Painting, Yoga Sillo Illustration, Hatha Yoga Poses, Screaming Cat Video, Time Yoga Article, Laughing And Dancing Video, Yogadownload.com, Yogaglo.com, Vinyassa Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga, Bikram Yoga, Ivankar Yoga, Yoga Pose, Indian Women Doing Yoga, Painting of Shiva with Lamb, Yoga in Times Square, Yoga Class, Woman in Kundalini Pose
Fashion waste
It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.
That's the NY Times writing about H&M and Wal-Mart cutting up and then dumping unwanted inventory on the streets of Manhattan.
Tags: business fashion H and M Wal-Mart
Bristol Palin PR Firm
Bristol Palin, daughter of former Alaska Governor and perennial newsmaker Sarah Palin, is about to make news (and maybe politics) of her own as Bristol sets up her own public relations firm. Bristol Palin filed articles of organization with Alaska's state Commerce Department. Bristol's new firm woll be known as BSMP LLC, based in Anchorage, Alaska, with none other than the 19-year-old Pallin daughter at the head of it. Many are questioning Bristol Palin's credentials and knowledge base for this undertaking, but despite the obvious points that could be raised here, about other family members lacking credentials and knowledge base, I'll reserve judgment and see how she does with it. Public relations is all about hustle and image, so an ambitious young person should have a fair shot at it.Bristol Palin PR Firm suntimes Bristol Palin, daughter of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has set up her own public relations firm, according to a document filed with the state. The single-member limited liability corporation will be known as BSMP LLC and based in Anchorage. Bristol Palin, 19, signed the document as the organizer... Bristol Palin PR Firm
Things my brain ate and loved
Instead of lying here in bed at dawn compulsively composing then deleting mind-emails to personal heroes that will strike the exact right tone of non-cloying self-effacement and non-obsequious flattery that will move them to consider blurbing (awful word) my book, I thought I would write about my dinner, and some other things I consumed yesterday.
(A note before I start, though, that the insomniac nature of this endeavor is making me even more sensible than usual to the innate borders of my thinking and writing capabilities. For weeks or maybe months now a particular quarter-articulated idea has been gestating in my brain and at this point it’s starting to seem like it will remain there, like um some dead unexpelled idea-fetus, forever. Do you ever feel like this, like you are sort of almost but not quite up to synthesizing the information that’s in front of you? I’m talking about that frustrating, tantalizing feeling of being almost smart enough to crack the code, but not quite. Also it seems like stimulants (all my high-strung nerves can handle is a tiny amount of coffee) mask this feeling while depressants simultaneously exacerbate it and, at the right dosages, make you forget the feeling exists. Maybe my 5am brain is my true brain. Scary thought.)
Anyway, for dinner a friend and I went to Minetta Tavern. We were celebrating her raise. She has been working in book publishing now, on and off but mostly on, for eight years. She is making more money now than ever before; she is making less than ten grand per year more than she did in her first job out of college. Oh, beautiful city of dreams! Minetta Tavern was her boss’s recommendation; he said it would probably be busy but they would maybe be able to seat us at the bar.
This restaurant is one of those places whose popularity has coincided with the popularity of ‘Mad Men.’ A famous restaurateur or celebrity comes and refurbishes some “Old New York” dump’s interior and menu while retaining its exterior neon and interior low-ceilinged loucheness and thereby immediately creates an environment where rich and impecunious people can be nostalgic for something they’ve never experienced outside premium cable. I’m not hating on these places. I like a dark Marasca cherry in the bottom of my Manhattan; I don’t even mind that my Manhattan costs $14. But I guess I am not around the fur-wearing, plastic-surgeried, heavily made-up type of restaurant patron often enough that I’m inured to the weirdness of these people’s ways (such as: they don’t seem actually at all to care about food? I saw a man remove the restaurant’s signature burger from its bun and eat it with a knife and fork. He entirely ignored his fries; we are talking about some pretty extraordinary fries here; I wanted to reach over and grab them. First up against the wall, that guy.) Also, the last time I was around these people often enough to become inured to their ways, I was on the other side of the being-served equation. For a few months just before 9/11 (sorry, but that is when it was) I worked at a very “Old New York” steakhouse; at the time I was a vegetarian. By October I wasn’t, but I no longer worked at the steakhouse. Thinking of all the delicious beef scraps I could have eaten at staff meals still fills me with regret.
Indeed, there were seats — miraculously, it seemed, since they opened up the moment we walked in — at the bar. We sat down and the bartenders made little napkin-placemats for us with a flourish, then chatted with us in a leisurely way about what we’d like to eat. They wore blinding-white uniforms and all looked like off-brand knockoffs of actual Mad Men characters, like, “Roger Sterling-Plated.” They subtly discouraged the cashmere-sweatered, polo-shirted young men behind us from leaning in over our heads to place their drink orders; this met with mixed results when, at one point, one of these fellows spilled half his martini down the back of the woman sitting next to me. She was unfazed; she seemed not to feel the beads of moisture through her shirt, or maybe she’d already had a couple of $14 cocktails herself (they are excellent value, potency-wise).
We ate giant chilled shrimp served with artichoke hearts of a bed of “coral vinaigrette.” I bely my secret food non-expertise here when I say that I have no idea what was in this genius quasi-remoulade but it was very slightly spicy, astringent, and so good. I had been skeptical about my friend’s decision to order the unprepossessing “dressed beets;” at this point you can get a decent salad of beets and chevre anywhere (and for a long time I made a version of this salad at least weekly at home; it’s weird how we go through phases with foods where we wear ourselves out on dishes like we do with a favorite album). But this version was different; there was something in the smear of chevre under the beets that gave the dish an unusual dimension of nuttiness, and it wasn’t just because of the walnuts that topped the salad. Maybe it was walnut oil, or just the quality of the cheese? Weirdly it reminded me of the “red eye gravy” at Momofuku Ssam which, I almost wish I didn’t know this, is a euphemism for “coffee mayonnaise.” (I would eat a Dannon-yogurt-sized container of it by itself, probably).
Our main courses, beef marrow bones and steak frites, were very good but unremarkable (except in terms of the quality of the fries, which I have already remarked on). We had switched to beer at this point. I pushed through the crowds in the front of the restaurant to make my way back to the ladies’ room. I didn’t see anyone who I knew enough to recognize as a celebrity but I did see several young women on dates with old men. Or maybe I’m being unfair and jumping to conclusions and it is somehow Parents’ Weekend at NYU, though I think they are probably still on break.
On the way home on the subway I finished reading “My Lost City” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had never read it before. (Bennett gave me his copy of “The Crack-Up” over Christmas.) “My experience of being young and hopeful and then disillusioned in New York City” is a very specific genre of essay, a sort of hard-to-fuck-up genre of essay if you want to be unkind about it, because your audience is already so poised to have “omg me toooo” feelings. But this essay is also a pinnacle of something besides that genre.
Reading it I had the thought of, it would be funny if the This Recording kids were to put it up with just a few alterations to obscure anachronisms, under somebody else’s byline — it would probably read just like a This Recording essay and everyone would be fooled. Then I got home to find that they had! Well, not really. But this summing-up of the aughts by Alex Carnevale is a very good example of the genre I just mentioned, a great one, actually, and a textbook example, if you needed one, of what the Internet can do (via, basically, just juxtaposing text and music and pictures, I know that sounds pedantic but I’m trying to preach to the unconverted here a little).
Another manifestation of what the Internet can do/ recent obsession is the Firmuhment tumblr. This is an example of someone who is using Tumblr “wrong” (while still being, or at least pretending to be, caught up in its addicting popularity-contest aspects) but actually using the blog form completely right — counterintuitively, in this case, by refusing to participate in the conventions (linking out, linkability, dashboard-feedability) we now expect of blogs. And the writing and the feelings, those are good too.
I have also become totally obsessed with the Luxirare food and clothing blog. This woman, “Ji,” constantly fields questions from commenters who want to see her obsessive, bizarre, high-concept food and clothing creations, which she photographs with magazine-quality production values, turned into something they recognize as the next level of notoriety — a magazine, a cookbook, a TV show. She rebuffs them by saying that the Internet is her medium of choice; there are things she can do there that she can’t do elsewhere. It’s a little weird to me that at least some of these things haven’t been forced upon her a little bit anyway; if I were a fashion or even a New York magazine editor I would make WHO IS JI? a cover story. But aside from my curiosity about how she affords it all (though I guess she has mentioned, half-jokingly, a trust fund), I am not remotely skeptical about her strategy.
The Black Box Disease
“The smartest people I know disdain abstractions, preferring to speak in concrete specifics. Take Paul Buchheit, the genius behind Gmail. When he talks about building web applications, he doesn’t think about high-level things like the underlying semantic structure of the data — instead he talks about the little “heads” that read data off of the hard disk and how fast they can move.”
- Aaron Swartz, The Genius is in the DetailsThere’s little question that most contemporary software engineers have only a vague understanding of the software and hardware stack they use every day. I think this is a sign of a still-maturing industry, in which “black box” abstractions are training wheels whose advantage will wane with time.
Abstractions have an “opacity”, and the smartest people I know prefer transparent abstractions to opaque ones. In the context of programming systems, this notion instantiates as the distinction between a language which makes it easy to look underneath high-level features and one which hides implementation details away. This is a general explanation of the attractiveness of small-kernel languages, in which most abstractions are implemented in the language itself, available for inspection (and modification). The same applies to large software projects: abstractions which reuse existing metaphors are superior to those which create new ones.
So if we are to be master engineers, we should avoid abstractions which permanately hide details, and instead, seek out those which allow us to ignore the details when convenience allows, but promptly think through the abstraction when necessary.
January 6, 2010
Emma
Nicolas Lampert Emma $20 One of the many aspects of Emma Goldman's life that amazes me is just how often she traveled the US and the world to address crowds. In some cases, her speaking engagements numbered over 300 per year. This print utilizes a map design to honor her dedication as a public speaker and to celebrate the ideas that she helped spread across the land. three color silkscreen 19"x25" heavy weight, acid-free paper signed
50 years of Advanced Programming – an Anniversary Seminar on Algol 60
The influential Algol 60 report was created 50 years ago after a meeting in Paris held from 1 to 16 January, 1960. A seminar marking the 50th anniversary of Algol 60 will be held next week:
This seminar marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the ALGOL 60 report. Its significance and influence will be presented and discussed by a panel of distinguished speakers. Contributions for this anniversary from several of the pioneers in this field will be included. The talks will be followed by discussion - till 5pm. This is a joint meeting of the Computer Conservation Society and the BCS Advanced Programming Specialist Group. More details of the programme will be given before the event on the website of the BCS Advanced Group – see the page for the APG January event.
Date/Time: Thursday 14th January 2010, 2.30 - 5.00 p.m.
Venue:The Library, The Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London S.W.7.
Contributors:
Mike Woodger interviewed by Brian Wichmann
Brian Randell on "Early compilers"
Cliff Jones with a contribution from Tony Hoare
Richard Bornat on Peter Landin's early work
Cliff Jones with a contribution from Luca Cardelli
David Holdsworth speaking on revivifying the KDF9 compiler
Peter Onion speaking on practical aspects of using the Elliott 803 compilerSession Chairmen: John Florentin and David Hartley
Be Productive Using Vim - Learn These 101 Hacks
I have always been an avid Vi enthusiast. And I have tried to keep abreast of the new features in Vi. Did you know Vi has a powerful adversary ? Yes you guessed it right, it is Emacs. But that has not stopped Vi from gaining faithful followers for itself. Myself being one of the staunch supporters of Vi.
Vim is the modern avataar of Vi and is created and maintained by Bram Moolenaar. Vim is choke full of features which would put any other text editor (except perhaps Emacs) to shame.
Once you learn to use Vim, it will bring immense power at your fingertips. With a few key strokes you will be able to accomplish text editing tasks which might otherwise take you a significant amount of time and effort.
However, you need to master a few skills in learning Vim.
Ramesh Natarajan at theGeekstuff.com has authored a very useful book on Vim named "Vim 101 Hacks".
It is a downloadable eBook that contains 101 practical examples on various advanced Vim features that will make you fast and productive in the Vim editor. The book is targeted at newbies and intermediate users of Vim.
If you are interested in buying an up-to-date book on Vim, do check out Vim 101 Hacks. It is worth the money well spent.For more news, tips, and reviews on all things Linux, Open source and Free software, visit Linux Help blog.
Notes, thoughts, stuff
Well, I’m here in California getting ready for the BCS Championship. And I’m here in California writing about the Hall of Fame. And I’m here in California appreciating that I’m not in the Kansas City snow. And I’m here in California feeling bad for my family that IS in the Kansas City snow. And I’m here in California re-reading the Jared Allen story that will run in Sports Illustrated this week — without question a story that uses the word “badass” WAY more often than I’ve ever used it before. And so on.
I have a whole bunch of snippets and notes about a million things — including a point-by-point look at the Hall of Fame ballot — that I will be posting at some point tonight.Possible topics: Verizon commercials, Soda Stream, bookstores, the Tool Band-it, fast food Chinese and Bose sound systems.
I also wanted to take a moment to promote my brother in arms Mike Vaccaro’s appearance tomorrow in New York at the Varsity Letters event. More on this in the later post, but right now I can only say: Mike’s book The First Fall Classic is that … classic. If you are in New York and a baseball fan, you must go. No, really, you must. In fact, I’m going to give Vac a secret sentence … and if you get that sentence when you go, and then send it to me via email I might just send you a prize of some kind. More later.
I pretty much had to do this
After seeing this post at Dinged Corners about the New Mets Revival courtesy of Jason Bay, I was compelled to create a fitting tribute.
So who else clicked on the picture of Jason thinking it was an embedded video?
Also: I had COMPLETELY forgotten that Bay was originally an Expo. I'm really starting to slip.
halifax grain terminal
on past trips to halifax, we had stayed right up the street from this grain terminal. this time we were on the other side of the city in the suburb of bedford. however, on a particularly nice afternoon we took a quick drive over to point pleasant park which sits adjacent to the shipping port and the grain terminal – after walking around the park for a couple of hours i stopped by to see what had changed in the past two years. from the looks of it, not much.
Um, OK
Paul Thurrott, reporting from CES in Las Vegas:
I spent about an hour and a half meeting with [Lenovo] this morning and while I am charitably described as a ThinkPad fanboy, the truth is, they just make the best notebooks on earth. And now they’re getting even better. It’s dizzying. I posted a bit about this yesterday, but there is so much going on here. In fact, their near-final version of a tiny notebook with a breakaway tablet screen absolutely kills anything Apple could possibly announce later this month. It’s not even close.
If You Are Going to Use Stock Photos...
Might as well go with NASA.
This was among the last good finds I came across at the Providence In Your Ear, before it closed years ago. Sitting in a clearance bin were three double-disc sets of Hermann Nitsch’s massive harmonium drone.
Of the recordings, Nitsch said:
In 1968, I got a harmonium as a wedding present from my wife. From then on, I sat at the harmonium and played almost exclusively long notes that never wanted to end. I tried to listen into the infinite structure of the stars, into the unimaginable spaces searching for sound. The joy of beautiful colors, of (almost intoxicating) combinations of sound was most important but at the same time it was carried by the almost presumptuous task to conjure, to sing of, and measure the extent of cosmic space. The course of the stars were to be put to sound.
From Flat to Flight
Portland’s Curiosity Group has posted a gorgeous stop-motion video, plus a printable PDF so you can recreate the main character at home. Nice.
(via Curiosity Group former intern, Corey Thompson)
Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Curiosity Group, papercraft, stop motion, video
The PAPERMAG iPhone App Has Arrived!
access to all of PAPERMAG's online content, including our daily "Tips" section -- which points you toward the best of the best goings on around New York City -- all the juicy tidbits from our WordUp! blog and all of the fashion, art, music, and nightlife coverage that makes us your go-to for keeping ahead of the curve. Download it today on iTunes. via www.papermag.com
Graffiti Analysis
DustTag is an iPhone application designed for graffiti writers that visualizes the motion involved in the creation of a tag. Motion data is recorded, analyzed and archived in a free and open database, 000000book.com, where writers can share 3-D animated representations of their hand styles. All tags created in DustTag are saved as Graffiti Markup Language (GML) files, a new digital standard used by other popular graffiti applications such as Laser Tag and EyeWriter. DustTag is fully compatible with the Graffiti Analysis 2.0 software suite, which is available online for free on the DOWNLOADS page and can be used to playback DustTag creations from the iPhone on OSX, Windows or Linux desktop systems. via graffitianalysis.com Thanks, Jake.
formspring.me
Rex Sorgatz, serial tree killer!
I kid. But I am curious as to whether you read all of these in print, and if so, why? Aside from the economics, the thought of hauling some 20-odd magazines to the recycling pile every month makes me tired.
I love, love, love the form of magazines. The greatest jobs I’ve ever had in my life involved such insane tasks as arguing over cover lines and quibbling about kerning. I completely realize (and often advocate) that they won’t be here in 15 years, but that’s because of economics, not because of formal quality. I love carrying them on the train, I love pulling them out of a bag at the Magician to talk about, I love writing on them, circling things, saving them. I own every issue of some of my long-lost favorites: Spy, Might, Talk, Mondo 2000, Lingua Franca, The Baffler, Brill’s Content, Hermenaut, Speak, etc. (It’s true! Choire has even seen them!)
I have zero nostalgia about newspapers. If the Minneapolis Star-Tribune suddenly disappeared, I think the Twin Cities would survive just fine. (I didn’t think this eight years ago, but in that short time, enough replacements have already sprung up.) But if Wired died, I would be superlatively sad.
The Dungeon of D
Shared by Bru
print-and-play games always make me wonder what will happen when 3d printers will be finally available to the general public...The Dungeon of D is a "print-and-play" (PnP) game, meaning it's not available for sale, but instead you can download PDFs of the components and print them out to make your own copy. In other words, it's an amateur rather than a professional production, but it's worth remembering that "amateur" has its roots in the Latin "amare" (to love); that is, an amateur does what he does for love, not for money. While its rare for any amateur product to reach or exceed professionally-produced products, it can and does happen -- as it has with this game.
Dungeon of D is a dungeon-crawling game; you draw one character card to represent your character, but can encounter others (and learn their special skills) in the dungeon. Your character starts with zero in all stats (strength, intelligence, and agility), but can increase them in play. You also start with 9 "power" cards, which are used in many ways during play -- to overcome obstacles, to determine the power of a monster you fight, to determine what normal or special item you encounter, and what kind of potion you've got. They also represent hit points: you have as many HP as cards currently in your hand.
There are eight levels to the game, and winning means finding the Amulet of D'eugor (read it backwards). Each level contains 9 rooms, one of which is the portal to the next level, but as challenges increase with level, you don't always use it when you find it -- you may want to explore the rest of the level to gain power and items.
There's an inventory system as well -- everything handled with cards, there's no recourse to dice or the like. A clever system of positioning cards under or nearby your character card, and turning them to display different values, suffices for almost everything.
In short, playing The Dungeon of D is something like playing a Rogue-like, but there's also a strong strategy element in choosing which of your Power cards to use (you want to keep the best for critical moments, even at the cost of possibly failing actions in the shorter term).
It's also a beautiful game, mainly because fans of the designer's original edition put together a set of cards that are of professional caliber -- close to Magic: The Gathering's cards in both attractiveness and intelligent information design.
And because it's purely a card game, it's easier to assemble your own PnP version than with most such games -- just print on cardstock and cut apart.
Unsurprisingly, The Dungeon of D has a better-than-7 rating on Boardgamegeek -- which is quite impressive for an amateur effort.
formspring.me
Last year, what magazines did you subscribe to? What magazine subscriptions did you drop? And this year, what subscriptions are you considering picking up? Also, thoughts on THE WEEK?
I added Newsweek, because they became a client. I dropped The Atlantic, because I stopped caring. So now my list is:
Newsweek
Spin
Sunday New York Times
Monocle
The Believer
Metropolis
Rolling Stone
Blackbook
GQ
Harper’s
Entertainment Weekly
Time Out NYC
Esquire
New York Mag
Wired
Technology Review
New Yorker
Vanity Fair
Details
Playboy
Men’s Health
(The last three are things that just started showing up that I never subscribed to. I read *almost* everything in all of them.)
Some other things that I might start subscribing to:
The Economist
Ad Age
Foreign Affairs
Paper
Nylon (seriously! I buy nearly every issue on the newsstand)Rex Sorgatz, serial tree killer!
I kid. But I am curious as to whether you read all of these in print, and if so, why? Aside from the economics, the thought of hauling some 20-odd magazines to the recycling pile every month makes me tired.
The Hobbit. Legend of Zelda. Discuss.
This just makes me feel like an individual destroyed by my own generation's culture. via nataliepo.typepad.com Natalie on reading the Hobbit (for the first time). I promise, I will not reblog comments like this every day.
Boarding Pass/Fail
I have been flying a rather insane amount over the last few weeks. I complain about a lot of things when I’m traveling: the food, babies, people that insist on stuffing overhead luggage when it will NOT fit, etc. The one thing I have never considered is the boarding pass. Tyler Thompson has written an excellent article on why the boarding pass is indeed worthy of scrutiny. Take one look at the old Delta pass above and you’ll see why. As he states, “It was like someone put on a blindfold, drank a fifth of whiskey, spun around 100 times, got kicked in the face by a mule (the person who designed this definitely has a mule living with them inside their house) and then just started puking numbers and letters onto the boarding pass at random”.Tyler has done Delta a big favor and redesigned their boarding pass, the design of which you see above. I think it’s obvious that aesthetically, these are much more pleasing to the eye. I would want to hold onto these after my flight was over just because they look awesome. Now of course, the design of a boarding pass has to be more than just beautiful. There are a number of criteria and limitations in place that might prevent your boarding pass from becoming a little piece of art. Worth mentioning in this regard is Timoni Grone’s response to Tylers inital designs. She runs through a meticulous process to come up with a redesign of her own, taking into account all the necessary “practicalities and priorities”.
The cool thing about his project is how he opened it up to others to submit reworkings and suggestions, a few of which he’s posted as you scroll down his page. He’s provided the Illustrator file for download and tweaking. Make sure to head over there and submit yours if you’ve got something brewing. And feel free to sound off if you too feel like the boarding pass design is indeed a fail.
I must say my favorite part of any boarding pass is the little scribbles the security guards make when you pass the initial check at the metal detectors. They do it with such purpose and apparent deliberation, that I think the scribbles must mean something. I always wonder what would happen if I augment their scribbles with scribbles of my own (or scribble before they do). Would I get sent to Homeland Security? Maybe two scribbles on your boarding pass = terrorist. Anyway. I feel safe knowing we have such a complicated system in place.
I could write a similar article about the terrible design of movie tickets, which I feel have slid drastically in the past few years. Since when is a movie ticket printed on receipt paper worth saving? I used to love hoarding all of my movie ticket stubs — now, calling it a “stub” would be an absurd misrepresentation. I call my movie tickets trash.
Thanks @rohrsh
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Post tags: airplanes, boarding pass, redesign
State of the Prospectus
One of those challenges will be the deluge of new content that we anticipate we'll be providing to readers and subscribers. Our feature content that you all know and love isn't going to change in any way, other than the addition of all the new faces, but we are adding a whole new layer to our writing in the formation of blogs that go far beyond Unfiltered. We will have blogs for all of our subject categories (analysis, transactions, news, prospects, injuries, etc.) that allow our writing to provide instant analysis with our commenting features creating some of the smartest conversations out there. If Will Carroll sees a pitcher leave a game, he can blog what he saw, with more details in the next UTK. A scout calls me on the road at 1 a.m. to talk about what he saw in a Cal League game, no need to wait for a scouting notebook or ranking to share that information. No longer restricted to feature-length pieces only, we can provide more in-depth statistical material, while also having a little fun with it as well, while also share interesting conversations culled from our private e-mail list. Our goal is to overwhelm you with information, and keep you returning to the site several times throughout the day. via www.baseballprospectus.com Baseball Prospectus is a jewel in two industries - sports and publishing (as TPM is in politics, and Serious Eats in food, etc.) Every year they offer their readers a map forward for the new year.
The State of Newspaper Web Design
Speaking of Greg Storey, he’s got a nice piece on just how far even design-minded newspapers have to go to make the shift from paper to digital.
A Small Randy Johnson Retrospective
As you have surely heard Randy Johnson announced his retirement last night. Matthew took the first look at this, noting that he retires as someone who could be a three-win pitcher next year. Here I am going to take a more backward-facing look. Johnson retires as the career leader in strikeouts per inning, and he did so facing almost entirely right-handed (opposite-handed) batters. In Johnson’s career he faced 14,963 RHBs and just 2,103 LHBs, but over 28% of those RHBs struck out. With the pitchf/x data from the past three years he we examine how he was able to do this as a small retrospective of his first-ballot Hall of Fame career.
Over the past three years, those covered by the pitchf/x data, Johnson threw, for the most part, just three pitches: a fastball, which Dave Cameron noted has been losing speed for years and in 2009 averaged less than 90 mph; a slider, which in the same article Dave noted has not lost any speed since 2003; and a split-finger fastball, which functions like a changeup. Over the years covered by the pitchf/x data, since 2007, and against RHBs he thew the fastball half the time, the splitter about 18% of the time and the slider 32%. That he can throw his slider, which typically show an extreme platoon split, that often to RHBs is incredible.
Against RHBs he threw his slider inside and low in the zone, while his splitter was outside and also low in the zone. Not only did he throw his slider to RHBs often, but he did so effectively. Opponents scored 1.4 runs fewer than average per 100 sliders Johnson threw to RHBS, and it got them (RHBs) to miss on 26% of their swings. This is not that far off the average whiff rate of 29%, which is overwhelming generated during same-handed at-bats. His splitter also had a 26% whiff rate against RHBs. That gave Johnson two solid pitches against which RHBs had a tough time making contact, and allowed Johnson to pile up strikeouts.I tip my figurative cap to Randy Johnson and his amazing 22-year career.
A Warmer, Fuzzier Condé Nast
Of all the things that 4 Times Square is known for, being a warm and welcoming environment is not one of them. That's not to say it's a horrible place by any means, it's just a tad frosty.
Apparently, they're trying to change that--at least internally--in 2010. The Observer's John Koblin (who's become the go-to guy on all things Condé over the past year) reports that CEO Chuck Townsend is meeting with each and every magazine in the company for a little chit-chat.
Sounds standard, right? Actually, not so much at the publishing house where corporate camaraderie has never been the standard. This has become especially in January when big boss, Uncle Si, has been known to return to work from vacation with the "Si Surprise", read: the folding of a popular magazine like Domino.
Steve Goodman's "Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear"
Cover of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear by Steve Goodman
In Krystof Wodiczko's striking installation Out of Here: The Veterans Project, currently on view at the ICA in Boston, choppers roar overhead. People scream in the distance. Glass breaks and shatters on the floor. The viewer can see almost nothing; the large room is dark, except for a few windows high above, created by a row of video projections. The view from these windows is obscured; the piece is as much about what you can't see than what you do see. But even more importantly, the piece is about what you hear--and what you can't hear. The chants of an imam become the sounds of women wailing. Gunshots begin to fire sporadically. Military officers yell harsh commands. The rumble of bass—a swarm of Humvees in the distance, drawing closer—gets louder and more threatening. The longer you stay in the room, immersed in the increasing racket, the more palpable the sense of dread becomes. The harrowing sounds of war are not simply about the sounds themselves, but the spaces in between.
In the intriguing new book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear [MIT Press], Steve Goodman explores the power of sound as a tactic of irritation, intimidation, or even permanent harm. Goodman analyzes "environments, or ecologies, in which sound contributes to an immersive atmosphere or ambience of fear and dread--where sound helps produce a bad vibe."
Goodman catalogs a litany of military uses of sound that seem like sinister science fiction fantasies. The "Urban Funk Campaign" was a suite of audio harassment techniques used by the military in Vietnam in the early 1970s. One such technique was called "The Curdler,” or “People Repeller,” a panic-inducing oscillator with the ability to cause deafening impact at short distances. The Windkanone, or "Whirlwind Cannon," was a sonic weapon planned by the Nazis. The “Ghost Army” was a unit of the U.S. Army in World War II that impersonated other units to fake out the enemy, employing an array of sonic deception techniques with the help of engineers from Bell Labs. "The Scream" was an acoustic weapon used by the Israeli military against protesters in 2005. That same year, the Israeli air force deployed deafening sonic booms over the Gaza Strip—producing powerful physiological and psychological effects. "Its victims likened its effect to the wall of air pressure generated by a massive explosion," Goodman writes. "They reported broken windows, ear pain, nosebleeds, anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, hypertension, and being left ‘shaking inside.’ "
The physiological effects of sound get an extended discussion via the concept of infrasound, or sub-20 Hz bass frequencies, which are legendary for inducing bodily harm. Fantastical tales about infrasound and its infamous effects on the human body abound in popular lore. Infrasound devices generally require huge, heavy rigs to produce such powerful waves, which limit their practicality. One of the book's most fascinating accounts is the story of the wily scientist Vladimir Gavreau, who did bizarre experiments with infrasonic waves in his French laboratory in the 1960s. According to Goodman, one such experiment caught Gavreau and his team in a “vibratory “envelope of death,” where they “allegedly suffered sustained internal spasms as their organs hit critical resonance frequencies.” Goodman seizes upon these outer limits of sound – infrasound at the low end, and ultrasound at the high end – and explores them extensively. For him, infrasound and ultrasound, at the edges of our range of perception – illustrate the “unsound,” as he terms it, the “not yet audible.”
Freakish military devices like "The Curdler" may seem like footnotes of the historical record--curiosities from wars staged in far-flung lands. But these devices also hit close to home. Last September, police in Pittsburgh utilized a device known as the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) cannon against G20 protesters -- the first documented use of one of these acoustic cannons against civilians in the United States. At top volume, the cannon is capable of emitting high-pitched warning tones at 146 decibels -- loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage.
Video: Use of the Long Range Acoustic Device at the G20 Summit Protests in Pittsburgh, September 2009
(Source: Sonic Warfare blog)
How do we make sense of these uses of sound? Goodman sidesteps a full-on historical survey of the subject. Nor is he interested in a scientific analysis of the neurobiology of audition. Instead, he presents a theoretical apparatus for understanding these acts of sonic warfare, via thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler, Paul Virilio, and Jacques Attali. Goodman argues for an “ontology of vibrational force,” as a way of understanding “the not yet audible.” Goodman defines vibrational force as a “microrhythmic oscillation,” and uses the idea of “rhythmanalysis”--a philosophy of rhythm developed by the philosophers Pinheros dos Santos, Gaston Bachelard, and Henri Lefebvre—to advance his argument.
Along the way, Goodman delves into a bewildering array of references from the worlds of philosophy, psychoacoustics, art, music, and military strategy. The Futurists' fixation with noise, war, and speed figures in here, from Luigi Russolo's famed tract “The Art of Noises” to Marinetti's fevered exultations: “Load! Fire! What a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathlessness under the stings.” So, too, do the discourses of Afrofuturism, the surreal fictional landscapes of William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, the 1984 cult film Decoder, “audio viruses,” Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the refrain, Jamaican sound systems, the work of the sound artist Mark Bain, and the “Mosquito Anti-Social Device,” a high-frequency tool designed to prevent UK teenagers from loitering.
Sonic Warfare is a heady, sprawling read, densely packed with detail. Goodman's wide range is, in part, influenced by his background. In addition to being a writer and theorist, he doubles as an accomplished producer of dubstep under the alias kode9, wandering a subterranean world of bone-rattling bass pressure, towering speaker stacks, and crowded rooms. His unique dual existence makes him strangely – and ideally – suited for a book which requires not only an understanding of theory and history, but also a close and personal understanding of the powerful physicality of sound itself.
Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California - Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack.
Google Names Phone After Blade Runner, Irritates Copyright Holder
Phillip K. Dick wrote a book called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," which is too long to put in the title of this post, but was adapted into the film Blade Runner (which is awesome.) In this book, the android model in question is called the "Nexus-6." Google's phone, which runs an operating system called "Android" is called the "Nexus One." This has pissed off Phillip K. Dick's daughter.
From the WSJ:
"We feel this is a clear infringement of our intellectual-property rights," said Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick and the chief executive of Electric Shepherd Productions, an arm of the Dick estate devoted to adapting the late author's works."Our legal team is dealing head-on with this," she said Tuesday. The WSJ seems to think that it isn't actually that clear.
Google has its "Android system, and now they are naming a phone 'Nexus One,'" she said. "It's not lost on the people who are somewhat familiar with this novel."I thought that, but I am a dork and was excited about potential Blade Running opportunities that might be coming my way. Meanwhile, the DROID phone name is licensed from Lucas Film.Attorneys who specialize in trademark disputes don't see a clear-cut case. One key issue is whether consumers are likely to be confused and think Mr. Dick's estate was associated with Google's phone.
"Will people buying the Google phone hear the Nexus One name and think that is just like in 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'" asked Marc Reiner, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP, who isn't involved in the matter.
Should Google have attempted to license Nexus One?
I saw my first real-life Nook yesterday on the subway. Initial impressions: The screen’s...
I saw my first real-life Nook yesterday on the subway. Initial impressions:
- The screen’s background color is slightly lighter than the Kindle’s, which is probably more pleasant.
- The touch-LCD area (which was off when I saw it) is distractingly reflective.
- The Nook is much thicker and chunkier than I expected. Its proportions made it look dated.
The biggest disappointment was the case’s attachment method.
The Kindle 2 has a patented side-clip mechanism that keeps the Kindle’s left side securely attached to the case’s midsection. It can’t accidentally fall out, never budges, and looks great.
The Nook doesn’t seem to have any built-in case-attachment method (at least, I can’t find any mention of one or any cases that use it), so it attaches with the old, dumb way that first-generation Kindle owners loathed: diagonal corner loops. These are failure-prone, clunky, and ugly. The bottom slot helps keep it in place better than having loops on all four corners, but it’s bulky and makes the whole contraption look even worse.
On most portable devices, cases are an afterthought, since they’re largely unnecessary. But ebook readers’ form factor necessitates a case for nearly all users — since they don’t fit in pockets (like phones) but also won’t have dedicated soft pouches in most bags (like laptops), carrying them without something to protect their front faces is impractical.
I wonder whether Amazon’s patent prevented B&N from using anything better for the Nook, or whether B&N’s team simply didn’t think it was necessary.
Bipolar.
The Society of Publication Designers recently did a feature on the art direction for the Riverfront Times, an alternative weekly available in the St. Louis area. In this piece they celebrate the work of senior art director, Tom Carlson.
In short, they say, "He does a lot of smart, cool work."
Carlson's best covers at Riverfront Times are complete self-creations, made with stock imagery and Carlson's own technical skills. What photography he uses on the cover is generally by former staff photographer Jennifer Silverberg, and is made-to-order to Carlson's creative direction. "My cover philosophy is object-oriented. I like to go for visual solutions with clarity and directness that render text all but unnecessary. I tend to avoid decorative type choices and use type that just is, and let the words (when we have them) do their job."See for yourself and I think you'll agree, Tom does a lot of smart, cool work.
The article continues to offer a reason as to why Tom is able to be so crafty with his art and design.
As free papers, these weeklies are removed from the restrictions of newsstand sales and subscription renewals. With improved printing and reproduction capabilities (although their art directors would probably disagree about the quality), these papers have been able to get much more sophisticated in their cover designs, now oftentimes rivaling and surpassing other, slicker publications in their regions.Wow, if that's the case then the Riverfront Times must love the web. I mean, if they can produce work of that caliber because they are free from the restrictions of sales and subscriptions, imagine what they can do without the shackles of printing and distribution. At a place that obviously celebrates really great design their website must glow like a thousand angles! And with Tom at the helm maybe a newspaper has finally awoken from their Adobe GoLive '99 slumber.
Oh look, as it turns out the Riverfront Times is just another newspaper that is living in the past and waiting for that Internet thing to go away and to stop bothering them. Pity.
what does a bottle of water mean?
Amazing comment/post on Metafilter from Dave Green (aka turducken), the writer / director of the documentary History of the Joke, about Gallagher.
The stuff I find most fascinating is Gallagher's interaction with his audience -- e..g, his genuine desire to set kids on the straight and narrow, his put-downs of hecklers, and his seemingly Job-like ability to endure physical and psychic humiliations that would cow or creep out most open-mike punters -- which IMO has nothing to do with comedy, and has everything to do with being a 63-year old guy with several ex-wives, grown children, and a heart attack under his belt who can't stop working, and is terrified of what happens when he does.
And if you haven't read it, his interview with The Onion's AV Club is remarkable. Here he is responding to a question about how he's interrupted his opening acts to give them advice on how to perform.
They don’t pay attention to what they’re wearing or how they’re standing. And so we don’t really have a high level of performance in America, or even a demand that people onstage have studied, or pay attention to the performing arts. You can actually take a drink now during your show! You know, George Burns performed smoking a cigar, and never needed a drink of water on a stool. But now this has become a tradition in America. They more or less have a stool ready for you and ask, “What water ya want?” To me, as a visual artist, everything that’s in the picture should have meaning—what does a stool and a bottle of water mean?
Emphasis his.
Opinion: Luis Castillo, the Mets and Orlando Hudson
Yet again, like last off season, Orlando Hudson is clearly sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see what the Mets do with Luis Castillo.
It’s not surprising that the Mets are having a difficult time moving Castillo. The team who might be willing to swap salary now knows the Mets want to move him. At the same time, any team who actually needs a second baseman can just sign Felipe Lopez, or, for that matter, sign Hudson, who, at this point, might be lucky to get the type of deal he signed last off season, i.e., one year, maybe $3 million and with a lots of incentives.
Frankly, if Hudson’s market is really that weak, and his demands are that low, and if the Mets really want him, because they think he can significantly upgrade their infield defense and thus help bring confidence to the pitching staff, I think they should just sign him and put Castillo on the bench.
The Steve Jobs on Magazine Covers Page
85 magazine covers featuring Steve Jobs, from 1981–present, curated by Sam Kuo. See also: the 10 best list at SPD. (Via Greg Storey.)
"In the Shell of the Old" Exhibition in Chicago
In case you are in Chicago this weekend, I have a solo exhibition at ARC Gallery, a feminist artist-run space founded in 1973. Hope to see you all in the Windy City. Brrrrrr!
ARC GALLERY | JANUARY 6-30, 2009
832 W. Superior Street # 204, Chicago, IL 60622
Reception: Friday, January 8 from 6:00-09:00pm"In the Shell of the Old" | Dylan A.T. Miner
Print Media and InstallationARC Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition In the Shell of the Old by Dylan A.T. Miner. Telling stories of the daily struggles faced by working in the building and dismantling of the rural and industrial Midwest, Dylan A.T. Miner's bold and unique vision valorizes the perseverance that contributes to the small victories of the everyday. Through the medium of politically charged relief prints and installation, Miner viscerally connects our daily concerns with those of the past by compelling us to act toward the building of “another,” possibly better world.
With Congestion Pricing, Saving Time Trumps Reducing Pollution
A prime target of the early environmental movement was car tailpipes. And for good reason. Put a human in a garage with a running auto in the old days, and he or she would pass out within minutes and be dead in an hour. Run a few million vehicles daily in New York or Los Angeles, and the toxic air would kill thousands each year and sicken many more.
But as the saying goes, that was then, this is now. Cars now on the road are 30 to 50 times less polluting than in 1970. True, there are more cars being driven more miles, but even with a tripling of VMT (vehicle miles traveled), U.S. passenger vehicles today are probably putting out only a tenth as much air pollution as they did on the first Earth Day. Even trucks and buses are getting cleaned up. Thanks to advocates like NRDC attorney (and local transportation advocate) Rich Kassel, diesel fuels and engines are in a decade-long transition from dirty to clean. (Stood behind a soot-belching NYC Transit bus lately? Me neither.)
Old notions die hard, however. Witness the asthma mantra before and during the unsuccessful 2007-08 campaign for Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. And just last week, the New York Times picked up the same cudgel in a New Year’s Day editorial:
The latest report on air quality from the city’s health department is especially alarming: it showed unhealthy levels of pollution in high-population areas throughout the city. Mr. Bloomberg should revive his fight in Albany for some form of congestion pricing.A classic non sequitur: Yes, pollution is still at unhealthy levels; yes, congestion pricing is needed; but the link from the first fact to the second is tenuous.
To see why, please pay a visit to the Balanced Transportation Analyzer. I’ve set the BTA with “Kheel-Komanoff” inputs: a variable $3-$6-$9 toll to drive into the Manhattan Central Business District (less on weekends and holidays), a 33 percent taxi fare surcharge, and revenues dedicated to make subways and buses cheaper and free, respectively. But my point holds with almost any cordon-based congestion pricing plan:
Direct environmental benefits from congestion pricing -- fewer crashes, less traffic noise, reduced carbon emissions, and cleaner air -- are worth only one-tenth as much, combined, as the time that users of autos, trucks and buses will save getting around. The air pollution benefit alone, computed as the monetary value of fewer illnesses and deaths, is less than $100 million, even counting the reduction in stop-and-go driving inside the CBD, where traffic speeds during the morning and evening peaks are predicted to increase 20-25 percent. In contrast, the projected time savings are worth $2.5 billion, or roughly 25 times as much as the improvement in air quality.
How can this be? The 25-fold difference between time benefits and air benefits isn’t from cooking the numbers. I’ve programmed the BTA with conservative estimates of the “value of time” and liberal estimates of the health value of curbing soot and ozone-forming gaseous pollutants. (I doubled the dollar-per-ton values that the hawkish California Air Resources Board uses to screen antipollution measures.)
Rather, there are three reasons that in almost any congestion pricing plan, whether Kheel-Komanoff or Bloomberg or Ravitch, the value of the time savings will dwarf the air quality benefits:
- On a regional basis, congestion pricing eliminates only a small percentage of VMT. Ditto, tailpipe emissions.
- Emissions from present-day cars (and, increasingly, trucks and buses) are low and trending lower. Thus, the vaunted improvements in traffic flow won't eliminate much car exhaust, because there isn’t much to begin with.
- Time savings from tolling gridlocked roads rise geometrically with congestion. A given percentage increase in speed saves six times as many minutes when the base speed is 5 mph as when it's 30 mph. Considering that slow speeds also imply high volumes, congestion pricing is practically ordained to generate big time savings -- particularly if the tolls are varied by time of day and day of week.
The lesson for congestion pricing advocates is clear: give the "green" angle a rest. We're not in 1970 anymore. (If per-mile emission rates hadn't changed since Earth Day, the air quality benefits would be some 40 times greater, equaling or even surpassing the time savings.) Clean air no longer provides a powerful rationale for congestion pricing.
From a cost-benefit standpoint, the overwhelming reason to adopt congestion pricing in New York City -- in addition to providing a vital new revenue stream for public transit, of course -- is to enable people stuck in traffic to save time.
Curing aggravation, not asthma, should be motivation enough for congestion pricing.
Checking In
Kevin Goldstein already spelled out many of the changes coming to Baseball Prospectus, and I wanted to take a moment to thank him, Christina Kahrl and everyone at BP for the warm welcome I’ve received. I’m happy to be aboard.
As Kevin noted, I’ve tracked the market for player contracts at Cot’s Baseball Contracts since 2005. I know BP.com will be a great, user-friendly upgrade for that information, whether you’re conducting hardcore statistical analysis, putting together a fantasy team or just arguing with a friend about the relative value and costs of, say, Joey Gathright and Brian N. Anderson.
I’ll also weigh in with occasional articles about contracts and developments in the market or the business side of the game. I’ll be eager to hear feedback once the transition of the contract information is complete, and I hope everyone has half as much fun with the numbers as I know I’ll have here at Baseball Prospectus.
Vanity Fair on Twitter fimoculous: First, try to guess who...
fimoculous: First, try to guess who these people are.
Okay, now look.
“Twilebrities are people—“tweeple,” in twitspeak—who spend their days typing 140-character messages into a digital rumpus room of about 55 million monthly users.”
Twumbody twab me twin thwa twfucking tweye.
The 100 best links of 2009
For each of the past six years, I've collected my favorite stuff posted to kottke.org into a "best links of the year" list. 2009's list -- the original 100 kottke.org posts containing those links, in random order -- covers such topics as healthcare spending, Amish hackers, gaussian goats, surfing videos, fun Flash games, Pete Campbell dancing, Rwandan genocide, and something called the McGangBang, as well as the usual array of dazzling video, photos, and art featured on kottke.org in the past year. Kiss the rest of your day goodbye!
Past best-of lists: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004.
P.S. kottke.org's Person of the Year: Chesley Burnett "Sully" Sullenberger III.
Tags: best of best of 2009 kottke.org lists
Tiff: Marco got me my own kindle for Christmas. The sweetest...
Tiff:
Marco got me my own kindle for Christmas. The sweetest part of the gift was the message he hacked to appear when I opened it. I love having a geeky husband.
This is what happens when I give electronics to people. They come pre-hacked. And with fully-charged batteries.
I maintain that giving Tiff her own Kindle was more of a present to myself so I could actually use mine again.
Why the Nexus One isn't exciting
The public release of Google's phone was news but not an event yesterday. (The New York Times used "some polite applause" and "shakes but doesn't upend" in its coverage headlines.)
Why? Because Google didn't physically make the phone.
In partnering with HTC, a company that produces cell phones for every US carrier and two different operating systems, Google ceded control of the overall experience. Never mind that the handset is slim and fairly attractive. It's also generic, and apparently imperfect. When David Pogue pushes your phone's home button, you really don't want it to fail.
There's a huge difference between designing and engineering a device, as Apple did with the iPhone and Palm with the Pre, and a company having a device "built to its specifications". Google was telling HTC, "We want our phone to do this," and HTC was putting the requisite componentry in place. This tends to minimize holistic product definition and by its very nature waters down the innovation. In contrast, Palm and Apple (and Motorola and Nokia, for that matter) manage the entire process, and their software is designed to complement the hardware, maximizing user experience. Google, a company that is strictly virtual, doesn't know how to do this.
Software companies that venture into hardware have to embrace the role of hardware manufacturer. This is true beyond smartphones: consider how Microsoft, which built an empire on software, hit a home run with its Xbox by controlling the end-to-end product creation. (Microsoft makes great computer accessories, too; I'm using a Microsoft keyboard and mouse right now.) But we never saw a Microsoft-branded PC produced by Compaq in the 1990s. All or nothing.
Google is a formidable company with incredible technological prowess. I'm not placing bets against Android just yet. The relative mediocrity of the Nexus One, though, is exactly what we should have expected.
Poll: Food Terms You Should Stop Using in 2010
Certain food buzzwords just make you cringe a little deep down (as we've mentioned before). Sometimes we say the terms out of habit or convenience without realizing how irritating and shudderworthy they really are—until someone else uses it and you remember just how much you hate that word. And then you stop and think, what does that even mean. So which of these fill you with that kind of rage? Vote after the jump.
Birdbath Vesuvio
Recently, after City Bakery's Birdbath moved into the former Vesuvio Bakery space, Eater posed the "Vesuvio Conundrum" in response to an angry reader complaint: "It looks like they're doing business as Vesuvio Bakery to take advantage of tourists whose guidebooks haven't caught up to Vesuvio closing. It doesn't say Birdbath or anything anywhere?"
Photo by Femia, via Eater
It turns out, City Bakery does have its own sign on the facade: In a small frame hanging on the door it says "Birdbath." You could miss it if you're not really looking and, since the door is open in the photo above, it's not visible.
(By the way, is anything more apropos of today's city than a shot of a trendy bakery with a guy pushing a high-tech stroller and a texting lady with a dog in a bag?)
my flickr
Inside, Birdbath is also displaying photos of the original basement ovens (check out these great photos on Lost City), along with text about how "the classic green storefront, familiar to generations, is now an iconic image of the retail city."
All of this brings up the recurring issue of new businesses and entities moving into old, culturally significant spaces, and the question of keeping the old spaces mostly (kind of, sort of) intact, though the original meaning has been removed. Varvatos did it to CBGB, McNally did it to the Minetta Tavern, NYU did it to St. Ann's Church, and then there's the High Line.
my flickr
We're supposed to feel relieved, even grateful, that the newcomers have saved pieces of the city's history, its heirlooms and treasures. And we often do, in fact, feel relieved. I'm grateful that I can walk along Prince Street and still see that "classic green storefront," especially in what has truly become "Retail City."
But we also have to ask what happens when the city becomes a shell of its former self, when its interior is gutted and replaced with something more fashionable and expensive than what came before.
In the end, New York is becoming its own, self-referential museum, a simulacrum complete with wall text to explain where we are--what was here, what remains, what's been altered and revised. We recognize it, while at the same time, it is unfamiliar.
We know that this fate is far better than a bank or a Starbucks. And yet, denied the unadulterated righteous anger that comes when a bank or a Starbucks completely erases our favorite places, in the presence of these preservations and simulations, we're not quite sure what to feel.
Don't Wear Green Tarletan Dresses
From the (1883) Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity:Attention has very frequently been called to the presence of large amounts of arsenic in green tarlatan, which has given rise so many times to dangerous symptoms of poisoning when made into dresses and worn, so that it is very rare now to see a green tarlatan dress. This fabric is still used, however, to a very dangerous extent, chiefly for the purposes of ornamentation, and may often be seen embellishing the walls and tables at church and society fairs, and in confectionery, toy and dry-goods stores. The writer has repeatedly seen this poisonous fabric used at church fairs and picnics as a covering for confectionery and food, to protect the latter from flies. As is well known, the arsenical pigment is so loosely applied to the cloth that a portion of it easily separates upon the slightest motion. Prof. Hoffmann after examining 11 large number of specimens estimated that twenty or thirty grains of the pigment would separate from a dress per hour, when worn in a ball-room.
But green tarlatan is not the only fabric which contains arsenic. We find arsenic sometimes in other substances used in making articles of wearing apparel, usually in the form of arsenical pigments. The writer detected a large amount of arsenic in a specimen of cloth known as "Foulard cambric," which had been made into a dress; after wearing the dress a short time severe conjunctivitis was produced, together with nasal catarrh, pharyngitis, and symptoms of gastric irritation. The pattern of the dress consisted of alternate stripes of light-blue and navy-blue, and contained 0.291 grm. per square meter. Conjunctivitis has also been recorded from wearing of "tulle" dresses. A pustular eruption upon the neck and arms was caused by "a splendid dark-green dress, trimmed with light-green leaves," obtained "from a well-known Parisian atelier;" the dress was found to contain "a large percentage of arsenic."
Excessive irritation of the skin has frequently been caused by wearing stockings colored with an arsenical pigment. The writer has detected arsenic most frequently in light-red, magenta-colored and brown stockings; in one case, that of a child, which came to the writer's knowledge, great inflammation of that portion of the skin which came in contact with the stocking took place first, then occurred symptoms of general poisoning, which resulted in a short time in death.
Dr. Jabez Hogg reports also among other articles of wearing apparel fatal cases of poisoning from the green flannel lining of boots, and poisoning by maroon flannel shirts, by calico shirts, gloves, coat sleeves, hat linings, and paper collars.
New Zelda Wii game in 2010 - plus other Nintendo updates
New DS to have motion control?
Kotaku are reporting that the next Zelda game for the Wii will be out in 2010. No confirmation if this is Japan only or worldwide - I've got a sneaky feeling it will be Easter 2011 for Europe - but this is great news for Wii owners. I've been playing the latest Zelda game - Spirit Tracks on DS - over Christmas and have throughly enjoyed it despite the over-familiar gameplay mechanics. You can blame nostalgia. There is so much goodwill invested into the Zelda series by older gamers that a tinkle of the music alone is usually enough to renew the love affair. Roll on E3 in June, where we should get more details and hands-on.
Nintendo also talked DS too. It looks like a new version of the handheld device - now the fastest selling console in European history - could have motion control.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said about the new DS:
[It will have] highly detailed graphics, and it will be necessary to have a sensor with the ability to read the movements of people playing.
What he means by "highly detailed graphics" is up for debate. After all, Nintendo long since pulled out of the graphical arms race. Could we see PSP standard or better? More interesting is the motion sensor. Do we really want that on a handheld device? Sure, it will be fine at home but do you really want to be waving your hands in front of your DS while on the bus or train? It's bad enough blowing into the mic while playing Spirit Tracks.
What do you think then? Excited by the new Zelda game? Think that motion control will work on the "new" DS.
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January 5, 2010
Why 2.0 is not Developed in the Open
I got a letter asking me why I didn’t use the 1.0 model for developing 2.0, that is, released 1.0 when it reached “usable” and then incrementally improved it.
There are a few reasons for this, but most essential is that with 2.0 a lot of my goals were stuff I had no idea how to do, much of this is internal features, for example looking at the core editor some of my goals here were:
- Allow threaded operations in a transparent way, not having (threaded) parser, spell checker, save (to slow network mount) etc. need to know about buffer locks and similar.
- Simple index-based API for buffer that is fully unicode aware including diacritics, combining marks, and provide scoped settings and the likes in a similarly easy fashion yet at the same time also support line-based indexing without pathetic running times and effecient batch access (search/replace, save, etc.).
- Decoupled layout code based on an API which can support “complex” layouts yet allow efficient incremental updates.
- Extend scope system to allow scopes to come from file’s location in file system and attributes associated with that location plus various other sources like SCM and general file state.
- Allow general preferences to target specific files, folders, and projects.
- Allow commands to run for events such as “document saved”, allow them to run w/o a document but also allow them to be run directly on files from the file browser.
- Provide an abstraction for commands to allow toolbars/palettes, and unified key bindings — that is, introduce an abstract action like “build” that ⌘B might call in certain contexts, but have ⌘B be “bold” in a prose context.
It is only a subset but it should show that it is about data structures, algorithms, modularity, and “abstractions” plus some unification (like make the HTML preview be a command which is re-executed based on the new event system, let smart typing be based on (nested) snippets, etc.).
To realize this I felt it was necessary to start from scratch, and it has involved a lot of experimentation, rewriting, and it is why I didn’t feel like discussing progress in the open because I had no idea about how many of my ambitions would pan out. The program itself has been in a constant state of flux with essential stuff missing because my focus has initially been on all the stuff I didn’t know how to do, as I could always do the “easy” stuff later (and doing the easy stuff first just leads to rewriting it when new insights are gained).
All in all this has been a giant puzzle with a lot of pieces that needed to fall into place. When I did the last status blog post about “90% done” it was because I felt that the last piece of the puzzle had fallen into place — of course it is never so, but all the big unanswered questions have an answer, that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a lot of stuff to do before it is alpha ready, just that the road toward alpha is no longer filled with huge unknowns.
I know a lot of you want me to give some estimate about when the first alpha is out, but if you didn’t already read the software is hard essay then please go read it now! I can’t give any estimate I am able to fulfill, which makes the entire thing pointless and will just set me up for more negative comments.
What I can say is that the code base is nearing 50 KSLOC which in my book is a lot, I didn’t think 2.0 would be more than 30 KSLOC, but in comparison 1.x is almost 40 KSLOC (but with higher redundancy than 2.0).
I feel I should stress that I am not posting these “status posts” in an attempt of painting some picture of TM 2.0 being around the corner to increase sales or avoid having people jump ship. Please make your decisions about what software to use/buy/support based on released software, not what I or someone else writes about “the future” (which none of us can predict).
Hope that gives some more insight in what has been going on for the last few years. I know I aimed to describe some of the abstractions 2.0 will introduce, but the intent was to have someone else write about this which didn’t work out, and me writing blog posts is a serious drain on my resources, and right now I really just want to finish 2.0, I also feel much better about releasing software than writing about what I think the version I hope to release in maybe half a year should probably contain if all the stars align right…
Thank you all for your patience and support during this excercise.
Brad Company
A couple years ago, I was in Chicago on a business trip. My good friend Brad L. Graham met me at my hotel lobby for a night of dinner and subsequent carousing. We hugged warmly, despite the fact that I had met him only a couple times in, as they say, "real life"--but I had known Brad for the better part of a decade; first through a website called MetaFilter and then via another more private site where I and a bunch of other degenerates and perverts hang out and bullshit all the live-long day in order to avoid doing work.
Brad, a tremendously energetic and unapologetic flirt, immediately engaged the staff. After we hugged, he turned to the bell desk attendant and said, in his improbably deep voice, "Excuse me, lovely lady. Could you recommend a restaurant where I could take this devastatingly handsome man?" (I am emphatically not handsome in any conventional sense. I sort of resemble a shorter Toxic Avenger with slightly better skin.) He flashed his trademark snaggly grin, and you could see her respond in kind. She pointed us to some place that I do not remember, but seemed to feature attractive ashtrays.
The flirting towards me was of course harmless and vaguely ridiculous, since he knew very well that I'm straight and married, but he also knew my weakness for wordplay and playful repartee, and so as we sparred throughout the evening, gradually endrunkening ourselves (the business meetings the next morning were murder), we found an easy groove. We shared the same vices and spent the evening reveling in both of them--nail-biting and tearing the legs off of earwigs. (Not really. I'm of course talking about drinking martinis and smoking shitty domestic cigarettes.)
It was a simply *jazz hands* fabulous evening, with Brad making his trademark groantastic punny jokes and occasionally making utterly silly salacious remarks about nearly every male or male-ish person who happened to enter his ambit.
My friend Brad was found dead on Monday, apparently from "natural causes" in his bed. He was 41 years old. I will myself turn 41 in June this year.
I am devastated. I hate the phrase "natural causes." What the holy deep-fried fuck is natural about dying from some handwavey horseshit at the age of 41? Let's leave aside the idea that "natural causes" generally elides the whole idea of providing an explanation of "causes" at all. What fucking causes? I'd like to see some fucking newspaper article describe some poor bastard's death as "natural murder." Fuck. You might as well state that he died from "Stuff."
I am also pissed off. It's difficult for me to make sense of, and I don't know how to articulate it, other than to repeat the completely worn-out trope that death is a bitch, and it's unfair, and frankly, can go fuck itself. I don't really want anyone to die (though of course I've engaged in hyperbole to the opposite, as we all do), but Brad? Really? In the words of I.I. Rabi upon discovering a subatomic particle that nobody had ever predicted, "Who ordered that?"
And it's strange to me to have these feelings--these cloudbursts of tears that have been coming on me for a couple days--over someone who I met physically only a couple times, but who I knew what I would considerably fairly intimately over eight or so years on the fucking Internet. I don't think I'm the only one. The MetaFilter thread announcing his death (technically a subsite called MetaTalk) brought dozens and dozens of old members out of the woodwork (many of whom had to obtain help from the administrators to restore long-lost login passwords) simply because they felt the need to express their utter grief.
I won't go into the details of his storied life. You can look it all up. You should. The man was an Internet legend for a lot of reasons, but those details are boring compared to the man qua man. He was one of the most generous souls I ever had the great pleasure and great fortune to meet. He's gone, and there's a void in the world that will never be filled.
I miss him very much.
I keep thinking of the closing lines of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. "O God--please give him back! I shall keep asking You." Well, unfortunately, I don't believe in God. If I did, I'd be pretty pissed off at him for this fucking horrible nonsense, this worthless, wrenching death. But I'll bet you a million dollars that Brad would forgive Him in a heartbeat. With his last heartbeat.
Brad Company
A couple years ago, I was in Chicago on a business trip. My good friend Brad L. Graham met me at my hotel lobby for a night of dinner and subsequent carousing. We hugged warmly, despite the fact that I had met him only a couple times in, as they say, "real life"--but I had known Brad for the better part of a decade; first through a website called MetaFilter and then via another more private site where I and a bunch of other degenerates and perverts hang out and bullshit all the live-long day in order to avoid doing work.
Brad, a tremendously energetic and unapologetic flirt, immediately engaged the staff. After we hugged, he turned to the bell desk attendant and said, in his improbably deep voice, "Excuse me, lovely lady. Could you recommend a restaurant where I could take this devastatingly handsome man?" (I am emphatically not handsome in any conventional sense. I sort of resemble a shorter Toxic Avenger with slightly better skin.) He flashed his trademark snaggly grin, and you could see her respond in kind. She pointed us to some place that I do not remember, but seemed to feature attractive ashtrays.
The flirting towards me was of course harmless and vaguely ridiculous, since he knew very well that I'm straight and married, but he also knew my weakness for wordplay and playful repartee, and so as we sparred throughout the evening, gradually endrunkening ourselves (the business meetings the next morning were murder), we found an easy groove. We shared the same vices and spent the evening reveling in both of them--nail-biting and tearing the legs off of earwigs. (Not really. I'm of course talking about drinking martinis and smoking shitty domestic cigarettes.)
It was a simply *jazz hands* fabulous evening, with Brad making his trademark groantastic punny jokes and occasionally making utterly silly salacious remarks about nearly every male or male-ish person who happened to enter his ambit.
My friend Brad was found dead on Monday, apparently from "natural causes" in his bed. He was 41 years old. I will myself turn 41 in June this year.
I am devastated. I hate the phrase "natural causes." What the holy deep-fried fuck is natural about dying from some handwavey horseshit at the age of 41? Let's leave aside the idea that "natural causes" generally elides the whole idea of providing an explanation of "causes" at all. What fucking causes? I'd like to see some fucking newspaper article describe some poor bastard's death as "natural murder." Fuck. You might as well state that he died from "Stuff."
I am also pissed off. It's difficult for me to make sense of, and I don't know how to articulate it, other than to repeat the completely worn-out trope that death is a bitch, and it's unfair, and frankly, can go fuck itself. I don't really want anyone to die (though of course I've engaged in hyperbole to the opposite, as we all do), but Brad? Really? In the words of I.I. Rabi upon discovering a subatomic particle that nobody had ever predicted, "Who ordered that?"
And it's strange to me to have these feelings--these cloudbursts of tears that have been coming on me for a couple days--over someone who I met physically only a couple times, but who I knew what I would considerably fairly intimately over eight or so years on the fucking Internet. I don't think I'm the only one. The MetaFilter thread announcing his death (technically a subsite called MetaTalk) brought dozens and dozens of old members out of the woodwork (many of whom had to obtain help from the administrators to restore long-lost login passwords) simply because they felt the need to express their utter grief.
I won't go into the details of his storied life. You can look it all up. You should. The man was an Internet legend for a lot of reasons, but those details are boring compared to the man qua man. He was one of the most generous souls I ever had the great pleasure and great fortune to meet. He's gone, and there's a void in the world that will never be filled.
I miss him very much.
I keep thinking of the closing lines of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. "O God--please give him back! I shall keep asking You." Well, unfortunately, I don't believe in God. If I did, I'd be pretty pissed off at him for this fucking horrible nonsense, this worthless, wrenching death. But I'll bet you a million dollars that Brad would forgive Him in a heartbeat. With his last heartbeat.
Yeah, you know what time it is. And it's not shiretime. via nataliepo.typepad.com (but said by Anil)
Nexus One Flash Impressions
Shared by sippey
I can't believe Google didn't send a Nexus preview phone to Gina.Google announced the Nexus One phone today, which is on sale from Google here. My current contract is up, I'm sick of living with Edge, and I don't want to depend on good enough data coverage for Skype, so I bought one with the T-Mobile plan. As a former iPhone user and soon-to-be-former G1 user, I'm excited about getting a thin and light phone with replaceable battery and a true headphone jack. I'm a huge fan of the trackball in general, so I'm loving that the Nexus One's trackball doubles as a notification system; however, I do fear I'll miss the G1's awesome flip-out keyboard more than "never." I mostly use my smartphone to email/text/Twitter, so I'm looking forward to speaking email with voice input, multiple Gmail account and Undo support. More Nexus One goodness as I discover it... now, to wait for FedEx.
notes on "nexus one"
When I was a kid there was this science show (I forget the name) that discussed an example of a ball falling to the ground. The question posed was what if the ball halved the distance each second, how long would it take for the ball to hit the ground? The answer was infinity, and that's what I feel like with Android. via notes.torrez.org
What social media really means
I keep coming back to Brad Graham's passing—three times since I first found out yesterday—and I keep getting a pit in my chest thinking about it.
I know Brad for one lone, random reason: he had a weblog in the 1990s, and so did I. Back then the blogosphere (a term Brad coined, by the way) was small enough that people could track it on a single webpage. Early bloggers were united by spirit: we were exploring a new medium, and we were very comfortably aligned with one another, despite our diverse interests.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how my connections to the old-school crowd are not as strong as they could—should—have been, mostly because I never got around to dining with my crowd at SXSW. I know lots of people from the early days, and they know me, but I see my old friend Anil Dash refer to these same people as his best friends and I realize I missed a moment.
Brad, though? Brad was your friend. Instantly and permanently. Smiles, embraces, forever remembered and fondly recalled. After our first meeting in New York, I became part of his hug-shaped social circle, and would regularly receive invites to meet him for a drink when he found himself in my city. This is how he treated everyone, and why my community is mourning him especially deeply.
Brad embodied the power of social media, long before it had such a name. Consider: brought together by technology and little else (check out the text in that first-meeting link) I became a longtime friend of a man a thousand miles away. His death is giving me recurrent waves of sadness, even though I hadn't seen him in several years. And I'm sharing my emotions with hundreds of people around the country, some of whom knew him well and others who never even met him in person.
Leave it to Brad Graham to remind us how powerful and touching this medium can be. We'll miss you, Brad. I know I already do.
Two Trees
Cypress Scene IV , originally uploaded by Steve1949 aka my DadThere are many reasons I'll never forget 2009 but the only one that matters is love—this is the year I learned how strong our love is, how it still grows, and how far it can carry us. I love you, Anil Dash.
Getting ready to rumble on NJ Transit 192 local to Clifton
Watching the ramrod give away three buses that should be taking you home stirs something mean and nasty in the hearts of hapless commuters whose queue grows longer and more bristly than Jack's beanstalk twisting its way into a distant world.
Presentation by Ed Catmull, President of Pixar
Called “Keep Your Crises Small”. Low-key but informative, similar themes explored in his HBR essay.
Nexus One
I want to believe. Really I do. But the Nexus One still seems to draw two complaints in reviews:
- A lot of UI work to be done to homogenize applications
- Phone UI itself rough around the edges
- Jeff Clavier on GDGT
When I was a kid there was this science show (I forget the name) that discussed an example of a ball falling to the ground. The question posed was what if the ball halved the distance each second, how long would it take for the ball to hit the ground? The answer was infinity, and that's what I feel like with Android.
Each iteration seems LEAPS ahead of the previous version. Apparently this phone hardware is much faster and has a very nice screen, but the UI still needs "an iteration or two" and that's the problem for me. They keeping needing that.
When they get microscopically close, perhaps I'll take another look, but I'm beginning to feel like it's just never going to happen.
High quality in application development without unit testing
In my last two posts, I've shown a Mac app with full unit tests and an iPhone app with full unit tests. The reality though is that I do not write or test code this way. In this post, I look at why so few applications are actually developed using unit tests. I'll also look at the alternate approaches — both manual and automated — that are normally used to maintain high quality and low bug rates in application development.
Introduction
I have many friends who love unit tests. They never write code without writing the unit tests first. And they love it; the thought of writing code without unit tests seems foolish and scary to them. Test-first approaches ensure that they never write anything that isn't specified and unit tested.
This post is not to dissuade these people from unit tests. If you already know that you know and love unit tests, then stick with them.
But even unit testing advocates should remember that unit tests are about code-level specification and working within certain types of development methodology — they do not attempt to catch all bugs.
This post is primarily for people who have heard of unit tests and are wondering if they are an efficient way to maintain product quality and lower bug rates.
The short answer is: no. If you simply want to lower bug counts, the best and most efficient approach is through system tests.
Difficulties of unit testing for application development
Unit tests don't test the overall program, only isolated units. This creates many holes (integration, timing, re-entrancy, inter-module communication) that need to be tested another way. These limitations are not unique to application development so I'll focus instead on something that is: the difficulty of isolating your units for testing.
Advocates of unit testing claim that you can follow good program design and reduce coupling and integration, making tests easy to write.
Unfortunately, in application development, that's not exactly possible.
As I noted when I was discussing iPhone application design, the code that you write in a Cocoa application is mostly controller classes — since the model and view classes are so reusable, you rarely need to write them yourself.
Controller classes are the classes which link your program together — they join model and view elements together to make your program. The entire purpose of these classes is coupling. The unit tests I wrote for the WhereIsMyMac program were approximately three times the size of the original code due to large numbers of mock objects and tricky hackery to intercept calls into the Cocoa framework — and this was a simple sample application, it could easily be much worse. Every mock object reduces the accuracy of the test by reducing the reality of the test environment and the risk of false positives or negatives in test results.
Since controller classes are so common in applications and the main role of a controller class is to join different objects together, unit testing suffers from the following serious problems in application development:
- Requires huge amounts of mocking code and other fakery (time consuming).
- The resulting tests are far removed from the integrated reality, making false positives and false negatives highly likely and leaving large holes that are simply not tested.
System testing methodologies for application development
The best approach for testing an application is to accept the coupled, integrated, timing dependent, environment dependent nature and test everything in place. The idea is simple: test the complete program in the exact manner (or as close as possible) in which you expect it to be used.
Tests which operate in this manner are classed as "system tests".
The reason why system tests are the most efficient and accurate form of product testing is simple: if you want to ensure low bug rates for the user, test the program in the same way that the user will use it; don't test a fake environment and don't test at levels the user can't access.
Types of system testing
There are lots of ways to system test your code. In order from most important to least important for application development:
- Sanity testing
- User interface testing
- API testing
- Regression testing
- Performance testing
- Load testing
- Scalability testing
I'm not going to give full definitions of these tests here — I'm simply going to discuss their importance to applications and related projects. Follow the links to read more about each one.
Every good application has point 2 and most have 3 and 4 as part of their regular testing methodology — sanity checks occur as part of the development methodology (run your code before you commit) and fall outside formal testing.
The important step in making system tests work is to keep them formalized. If the test is not automated, then it should be formally documented so that each of the steps is correctly run during a testing phase. A basic or ad hoc approach to any of these points doesn't count though: proper quality comes from rigorous and clearly defined testing approaches.
User interface testing
User interface testing is normally performed using testing matrices. In its simplest form, this means a document containing all user interface test cases in a table — a spreadsheet, workprocessor or TextEdit document, it doesn't really matter as long as it is documented.
The rows in the table are all steps in operating your program (selecting menu items, operating buttons, perform edit operations). Every single user interface element in the program should be tested and most should be tested multiple ways to account for different expected effects.
The columns are all environmental differences between runs. Different operating system versions, different computers, different installation settings or different builds of the application (lite, demo or full).
Each cell in the table should then contain the observed result and an indication of whether this is a success or failure according to the specification.
If you can automate the process, then great — there are software tools that will help with this on the Mac. If you can't — yes, user interface testing will get manual and tedious but ultimately, it is the only way to guarantee that the program works as expected. Most of the programs you use have simply had someone sitting in front of them, progressively clicking all the buttons and using all the controls — for every test case in every version.
You need to have the whole table documented and it needs to cover every element of the user interface. The purpose is to remind you to test everything (bad luck will ensure that failure to test a row will guarantee that it contains uncaught bugs).
API testing
In theory, user-interface testing should test everything in a user facing application. It may seem inefficient to suggest API testing (which is normally done for libraries and code modules).
There are three reasons that any substantial application would want API tests:
- Human testers of user-interfaces are lazy, forget or make mistakes
- API tests are automated and can be run at build-time or as part of continuous integration
- You can test issues that may not be obvious during user testing (like data coherency)
For user applications though, it presents the problem that you must create an API layer that can actually be programmatically tested. The common approach is to separate the "model" of your application into a separate module with an API layer.
API testing is similar to unit testing in many respects:
- it is automated
- can be implemented using OCUnit or similar libraries
- can be used to develop your application using test-first methodologies
The difference is that API tests do not separate the units within the module. API tests test the whole module in-place, fully integrated. This means that the API tests can be quite removed from the implementation details — which has the advantage that they can be more easily written by a separate programmer or test engineer, freeing up programming resources. API tests also aim to be optimally efficient: they only test inputs and outputs and don't care about how intermediary steps in the transformation occurs.
API tests attempt to provide a realistic environment and data but do suffer from some of the same limitations as unit tests in that some parts of the environment must be synthetic (the full application will not be present during testing).
Regression tests
After you're happy that your program is working as intended, regression tests ensure that subsequent work doesn't screw it up.
These are tests are normally used for programs that produce a file output. Their operation is basically: run the regression test and compare the output to the "known good" result which was saved previously. If the output changes unexpectedly, the test fails.
For many file producing projects (like a few major open-source projects specializing in video codecs, PDF renderers, DVD authoring packages) this is the only test they include. However, it's all that these types of project require: a good set of regression tests should have high code coverage (exercise almost all of the program) and perform most of the work of API testing too.
Regression tests can be human or automatically driven. Applescript can drive regression tests in full applications or OCUnit can be used to drive regression tests through an API layer.
Specification
One aspect of unit tests that system tests do not cover is that unit tests are a form of specification documentation for the code. You can use the tests as a way of learning what the code is supposed to do and in some cases for instructing the code how it should operate.
API testing can certainly replicate the unit testing specification at the API level.
However, I prefer the old-school approach: document your code with comments. Not with a line or two inside the method but full comment blocks on every single method that document conditions on all parameters and the return parameters and effects of the method. I use a customized version of Xcode's "Script Menu→HeaderDoc→Insert @method comment" to automate the formatting for this.
If the comments at the start of each method are not clear enough for documentation (think about Apple's Cocoa API documentation) then you're not doing your commenting job.
Conclusion
Unit testing an application is filled with difficulties and problems. In my opinion, the time cost of unit testing an application simply outweighs its benefits — especially since unit tested applications still require system tests like user-interface and regression tests for proper validation.
Regardless of whether you use unit tests, formalized system testing — either automated or manual and methodical — is required to fully validate an application and ensure the lowest possible low bug rates.
The most efficient approach is to test the interface that the program exposes in the exact way that the user will use it. For user interface apps, this means user testing matrices. For applications with a lot of model code, this means API tests. For document producing applications, this means regression tests. In many cases though, a combination of all three is best.
Most of these approaches require that you be disciplined. You need to comment your code. You need to maintain user interface testing matrices. You need to refactor your model layer so it has an interface that can be tested automatically. You need to measure the code coverage of your regression tests.
I know these things are tedious. I know that no one wants to write test plans, test documents and API tests. But if you love your program and you want it to suck less, this is work that needs to be done.
The Man Behind The Epic Phantom Menace Review
Heeb Magazine (Or should i say ‘H’ word Magazine) interviews the man who created the 7 part, 70 minute methodical evisceration of The Phantom Menace.
And if you haven’t seen the review yet, check it out. I’ve already watched it more times than I have watched The Phantom Menace. So I’ve watched it twice.
Dave Eggers on his favorite things about newspapers
Dave Eggers likes newspapers, and thinks they make their money from subscribers and direct sales. "The web model is just so much more complicated, and involves this third party of advertisers."
She Can Still Zing 'Em
At a presser this afternoon, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about one of Obama's campaign pledges and whether CSPAN cameras would be allowed to film the House-Senate negotiations on health care reform: "There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail," she pointedly noted.
Upgrading MySQL
Upgrading MySQL Server is a very interesting task as you can approach it with so much different “depth”. For some this is 15 minutes job for others it is many month projects. Why is that ?
Performing MySQL upgrade two things should normally worry you. It is Regressions – functionality regressions when what you’ve been using before does not work any more or works with different result and performance regressions when performance (in a broad sense) is negatively affected.
In general even minor MySQL version upgrade can have both of these issues. It gets larger as you have a larger leap in minor version – Upgrade of MySQL 5.0.30 to 5.0.32 is generally likely to expose less issues than 5.0.30 to 5.0.86. The largest amount of potential issues happens when you upgrade to different major version, especially if you skip over one. MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade is a lot safer upgrade path than 4.1 to 5.1 just because so much more people have followed that road.
So how do people approach the upgrade process ? I will describe couple of processes which I’ll call “reckless” and “safe” with no negative meaning implied
Reckless approach is typically used by small simple systems or by hosting providers. This simply means stopping old MySQL version and starting new one. MySQL always was very good maintaining on disk binary compatibility between version and so you can run MySQL 5.0 database with MySQL 5.1 with no problems in most cases. When storage type changes, such as DECIMAL field got whole another meaning in MySQL 5.0 MySQL generally supports legacy storage format for a while, even if it is not clearly visible. mysqlcheck -A –check-upgrade is a good quick way to check for known incompatibilities and fix them.
The data storage is however only small part of the problem – much bigger is potential behavior changes which may impact your application only subtly – some features can stop working or work differently after change. For example you may get queries returning different result or getting different execution plan, taking minutes or hours even though they were previously sub second. The changes which got a lot of publicity over years is change of TIMESTAMP output format in MySQL 4.1 or changing JOIN evaluation in 5.0 (which could both cause different result set or make query not runnable in MySQL 5.0)
In case you’re using Reckless approach you just hope you’re lucky – you hope you’re using simple enough functionality not to be affected or if you are you are capable of implementing fixes quickly, and what is most important your users will forgive you bugs or potential data loss you may run into
Reckless approach is safest if you’re running application which uses simple MySQL functionality which is unlikely to be affected. If you’re something like SELECT name FROM users WHERE id=5 you can probably go to the earliest MySQL version and still get same result. The more exotic or complicated functionality is the more likely it to be changed. It is also a lot safer to use this approach if you’re using some widely used application rather than your site which exists in single installation – Wordpress, vBulletin etc. With such software, if you’re not upgrading to the most bleeding edge software, chances are someone else has done it before you, and so if there are some problems they have been worked around. The more widely used and well maintained software is the more likely it is to run on wide set of MySQL versions.
Safe Approach So what if you actually care about your user experience or at least about your data ? In this case you may need to take it much slower checking your progress along the way. There is no limit as Safe you can get so I would just outline some reasonable safety for example
Upgrade QA Upgrade needs to start with development/QA boxes. If you’re using safe approach you probably do not do development against your production. Note as soon as you upgrade QA envinronment the code which runs on it may not run well on production until it is upgraded. In case fixing code to run on different MySQL version is taking a lot of time you may wish to create second QA/dev environment just for this project.
Query Validation It is often hard to ensure queries work same way with different MySQL version, unless you have very detailed automated QA. So what you can do is get the backup of the database and get query log (you can use mk-query-digest with tcpdump to sniff out queries if you can’t enable log for any reason). As you’ve gotten database backup and set of queries which is representative enough you should set it up on 2 same boxes and use mk-upgrade tool to run comparison. The tool will run SELECT queries on both new and old MySQL installations and check result set, explain plan and execution time, reporting you on all the differences. When you can analyze the differences and see if there is anything you need to deal with.
Stress Testing Running single stream of queries with good speed is not enough. You also need to perform stress testing to ensure both MySQL does not crash under your load as well s it scales well. There have been number of scalability bugs in MySQL history when issues would only happen at high load. You can do this in test/stress test envinronment or you can do it later when you setup some slaves with this version (or selecting to use version only for new shard and measuring its capacity)
Setting up the Slave(s) If you want to minimize downtime it is best to use MySQL Replication for upgrade. Once you have setup slave with new version and made it to caught up you can use mk-table-checksum to ensure data is the same. It is possible some update statements worked differently in the new version or you run into some replication bug – in any case you need to take care about these if you’re to be safe. Adding the slave with new version for testing is also a safe way to test things out – you can move read traffic to such slave to ensure new version stability and performance while you still have the slave running the old version in case you need to fail back quickly. This especially makes sense for cloud environments as Amazon EC2 where it is easy and inexpensive to temporary get extra boxes for time of upgrade.
Swapping master. Finally as you have your slave running on new MySQL version you want to promote it to the master and upgrade Master too. I’d take the final backup before upgrading and make sure to keep binary logs for some time, in case you run into some serious issues with Master. In many cases you can leave the ex-Master as a slave so you can fail back to the old version easily if you need to. In other cases however it is not possible as MySQL only fully support slaves newer than the master. Older slaves may have issues unable to interpret new replication stream correctly. If this is the problem for you can try Tungsten Replicator which claims to work in both directions (though I have not tried it myself)
Note in case you’re having Sharded envinronment you often approach things a bit differently – upgrading one shard with full validation and when doing reckless upgrades for other shards after you’re sure your application works well with them. You can often stage upgrades in time a bit so if something happens (like MySQL crashes) you have only one/few shard to deal with.
P.S Happy New Year to all of you
Entry posted by peter | No comment
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Beauty Disturbed: Almodóvar's Broken Embraces
Sarah Kerr
Penelope Cruz as Lena in Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken EmbracesIn the summer of 1989, I spent several weeks in Madrid. It was my first time out of the United States, and I was overwhelmed by the shock of difference: the life-giving daily approach to time; the ghost dregs of imperial supremacy; the post-Franco traces of bleak limbo that were thankfully almost done eroding; the particular charisma, not quite the same as what I had absorbed from so far away, in books and movies, as “European charm.” There was a pop soundtrack to that summer, an album that that had come out months earlier but was still at its viral peak. One addictive song especially spilled out of windows onto plazas, with a stately beat and a girlish voice recalling (from the male point of view) an affair with a woman described as half-finished, with the body of a gypsy and “an eye here, a tooth there.”
Only recently did I realize that the video to this song, corny and glorious with late ’80s hair, helped launch a very young Penelope Cruz as a star. In America, several of Cruz’s films in the 1990s, such as Belle Epoque, did well on the art house circuit. But it was over the last decade that Cruz won more commanding stature as an international actress by working on stronger projects in Europe than she was being offered in the States, not infrequently with Spain’s leading director Pedro Almodóvar.
Cruz’s acting can be fierce, earthy, or kittenish as required. But in any of these modes, with her beauty she often seems in old-fashioned ways a bulls-eye for the audience’s gaze. A sequence in Almodóvar’s new film, Broken Embraces, makes explicit her link to arch-browed movie stars of the past. In the scene, she is preparing to shoot a movie, and her hair and makeup are done to look like familiar faces. Not only does she evoke Audrey Hepburn, she evokes Hepburn in two distinct phases—the short-banged gamine of the 1950s, and the wearier soul with the sleek updo from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Finally, Cruz tries out a loosely waved Marilyn Monroe wig. She easily pulls off the glamor. But Broken Embraces shows Almodóvar in a rather Hitchcockian mode of controlled play, opaque and melancholy psychological ripples, and intermittent threat. This is a world in which the warm spontaneity of a Marilyn Monroe would not have wide room to breathe.
Broken Embraces is a sometimes distant film that gains immediacy from Almodóvar’s supremely confident visual style and the rush of its stories inside stories. Especially in the first hour, his lifting of the lid off each new Petrushka doll gives palpable pleasure to the audience. The overarching tale concerns an unattached middle-aged film-director-turned screenwriter (Lluis Homar), whose fate interests us even as he seems too self-contained to manifest much personality. As we observe this man in his Madrid apartment in 2004, he hints in voiceover at mysteries we hope the film will further explain. How and why did he suddenly go blind? And why, when he became a screenwriter, did he change his symbolic enough given name, Mateo Blanco, to the noir pastiche “Harry Caine”?
Soon the film has jumped sideways and back in time to the story of Cruz’s character. When we first meet Lena, short for Magdalena, it is the early 1990s. She is working as secretary to a powerful Chilean businessman in Madrid, and she is consumed with worry for her father, who is in need of medical care. Her physically slight, older, imperious boss (neatly played by Jose Luis Gomez) is disturbing in his patriarchal grip on his surroundings, and both predatory and pathetic in his lust for Lena; for noir layering, we know from a glimpse of the 2004 newspaper that he will end up in jail for shady dealings, and later dead. In these early scenes, Lena seems many things at once. She is a loving and faithful innocent, a natural secret keeper, a capable vendor of her body, a survivor in a corrupt, unjust society.
A few years later, the stories have intersected. Lena, now the businessman’s bejeweled mistress, wants to become an actress. The businessman will finance the successful director Mateo Blanco’s anticipated new film if she stars. The director and his stunning if not overwhelmingly talented leading lady fall in love. To meet, though, they must evade detection by the businessman’s gay son, a soul diminished enough by the loathing of his homophobic father to carry out that father’s command to spy on the lovers in the guise of a behind-the scenes “Making of…” documentary about the film project.
Around halfway through the film, the themes of voyeurism and doomed love have lost some gut urgency and become stylish commentary on the methods and modes of cinema itself. The slate-colored beaches of Lanzarote have a sadness underlined by a scene from Rosselini’s Voyage in Italy, which they watch on TV; and there are more fleeting hints of Vertigo in Lena’s fractured self-presentations, and of Notorious in her entrapment in her lover’s house. And the movie Mateo Blanco was working on turns out to be a strange reimagining of Almodóvar’s own classic comedy, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown—the once-zany beats fall off-kilter in the atmosphere of forboding. These references work quickly, almost like dream images, supporting the changing colors and the absorbing set, both domestic and archetypal, with which Almodóvar guides our eye and mood.
Like several of Almodóvar’s best-loved films—All About My Mother, for instance—Broken Embraces appears to move near its close toward a note of more embracing empathy. We start to see the bigger picture. Motives are sorted out, mostly. The fallout of betrayals is revealed, the hurt and yearning behind them aired and, when possible, forgiven. A feeling of severe loss but also possible consolation returns to the forefront. If Almodóvar is far too commanding an artist for any of this to feel exactly routine, there is a certain perfunctoriness to the film’s resolution. His command throughout this film does not quite feel the same as the rebellious necessity of some of his earlier triumphs. Broken Embraces moves us with flashes of real beauty. But somehow, instead of setting up house in our memory it departs quickly and lightly when it is done.
Buzz: Boston’s Last Offer to Jason Bay
Jon Heyman of SI.com believes the Red Sox made a four-year, $60 million offer to Jason Bay last summer, but retracted it and then offered a three-year, $44 million contract this off season instead.
…this would probably explain why the Mets never felt it necessary to guarantee a fifth season to bay… it seems quite clear only the Mets and Red Sox, and probably the Cardinals, had legitimate, serious interest in bay…
…in my research, i always find the Mariners and Angels interest to be overstated, and the Giants and Yankees were never going to offer the money and years to get a deal done… and, frankly, i would think the Cardinals interest had more to do with leverage against Matt Holliday… and that was the thing, in the end, it was bay and holliday and the Mets and the Cardinals… bay said he had a short list, but i think short might be an overstatement…
…this is not to say he doesn’t genuinely want to be on the Mets… he might… he might not… the point is, the Mets offered the most and he took it… this will of course lead people to speculate he would rather have played in Seattle or Boston, but settled on the Mets because really had no choice… i guess… but, really, who cares… what’s the difference… i’d rather have a guy who hates New York but who gets the job done, than have a guy who loves being here and stinks… the point is, it’s about productivity and helping the Mets win, and if he does that, that’s all that matters to me…
…again, i still would have rather seen the Mets sign holliday… but, if holliday ends up getting an eight-year deal, and the Mets got bay for four, i’d probably switch positions… in either case, i do not think the Mets will ever regret signing bay… i also have seen no evidence from people connected to the team that his contract will hinder their ability to sign other free agents, or retain their own, in future off seasons…
…and so, with that, good luck, jason… and welcome to the Mets…
Look more and see more
My little brother who lives in Asheville stayed with me all last week. Asheville is only 690 miles away from New York City but it’s not just physical distance that comes between me and my brother; having him around reminded me constantly that I spend so much of my time caring about and knowing about things that people who don’t live in NYC genuinely have no reason to care about or to know about. Some people who don’t live in NYC know about and care about some of these things anyway; when I meet those people I feel grateful for the conversational common ground but slightly concerned for their mental health. Like, shouldn’t they probably stop looking at Tumblr and go mountain biking? (You could make the case, of course, that so should I. Well, consider it a resolution.)
Anyway, my brother left some things here: a pair of worn-out, whiskey-stained khaki pants, some old tube socks, and issue 27 of Cindy Crabb’s zine Doris. Somehow I had never read Doris before; this zine, in addition to ‘No More Nice Girls’ by Ellen Willis and both ‘Dusty In …’ recordings, Memphis and London, are all things I discovered over this “winter break” period that I feel like I should have known about for as long as they or I have existed. It’s that feeling of coming home to a thing you know almost immediately that you are going to love without reservation; the feeling that a thing is at once totally new and somehow familiar. It’s almost like the moment you realize you have forgotten enough of your favorite book or movie or album to read or watch or listen to it again without feeling bored or taking anything for granted, except better because the thing is actually new.
Anyway, here is a part of Doris #27 that I am still thinking about days after reading it:
“I used to worry a lot about getting older — about punks getting older. Like what would we all do? We had been taught that to be successful in life you had to go to school, get a job, stick with that job no matter how much it sucked. You needed health insurance, your own little apartment, your own little girlfriend, you needed to go out to dinner, go out to the movies, buy things to make you and your life prettier. As punks we said “fuck that.” We were ugly, we were slutty, we lived all together or nowhere at all. We created our own aesthetics. We got everything we needed from what the rest of the world threw out. Including each other. We were throwouts. We found each other in the trash.
But there was a time when my friends started dying, and there was a time when my friends started standing in the back of the room during the shows and then leaving. And I retreated somewhat too, beacuse there was a part of myself I had to rescue. And now that it was rescued, now that it was flourishing, I wondered what it would be like, out there.”
My brother lives in a group house with a shifting cast of maybe four or five other roommates, some of whom are in couples, and a dog and a somewhat outdoor-only cat. He spends a lot of time thinking about the problems of his housing situation; in my experience the more people you live with the better things can be because it forces you to come up with systems and rules if you are going to live by any kind of standards at all, but this doesn’t seem to be the case in my brother’s house. I don’t know if these people are declared anarchists/punks or if they are just college students who feel like they are going to invent new ways of doing everything that will solve age-old problems via sheer willpower and ingenuity. Either way it doesn’t seem to be working out.
I live by myself in a one-bedroom apartment with my cat (and, when he’s in town — so like less than 30% of this past year — my boyfriend). Every day I think about how lucky I am to have this luxury, and how unsustainable — in every sense — this situation is. Living by my convictions is a luxury in and of itself. Barring Lotto-type intervention, I will not be able to continue to live like this if I continue defining success Bob Dylan-style. I would hazard a guess that defining success that way — “What’s money?” — is easier if, like Bob Dylan, you know that you will always have enough of it.
There is also a two-page comic in this issue of Doris titled “Writing,” about Cindy’s insecurities about writing and her struggles to understand whether her methods or habits disqualify her from being “a writer.” “Was I a fake? What if I was stuck? What was the point? I thought there had to be an answer, a key.” She collected tidbits about the habits of famous writers — “Delmore Schwartz liked to write for only one hour a day. Preferably in a crowded cafe.” “Ursula LeGuin kept a pad of paper on the kitchen table and scratched out sentences between taking care of her kids.”
Eventually Cindy figured out that her questions were “bullshit.”
“The question ‘was I a real writer’ was part of the competitive system I wanted to destroy, where everyone is supposed to strive to do something new that’s never been done, to make a mark on history, to be better than anyone else. I didn’t want that shit, so why was I looking to those labels for legitimacy?” She decided instead to hold herself accountable to her own standards — and to ask herself different questions, like, “Why do I write?”
Some of her answers:
“Writing helps me to look more and see more.”
“I write Doris because I believe that in order to change the world fundamentally, we have to challenge ourselves and each other to be brave and alive. And we have to take our experiences and find the lessons in them and pass on these lessons in a way that doesn’t alienate.”
Also “I believe in care but not a stifling fear or ego driven perfection.”
I thought of a book I’d just finished reading, a book whose publisher had created a national media campaign for it and had printed probably more than a hundred thousand copies. In an interview the author was asked why she had written the book. “I wrote this book because I wanted to figure out what was going on in my marriage,” she’d said.
The last line of the Doris comic about Writing is “It helps me to have a project I can finish and put out there to feel connected and not so alone.”
Information about purchasing this zine — it’s $2.75 — or past issues is here.
The next Apple gadget
From my post on aiaio:[The Apple] tablet's pixels per inch will be impressively high, like the 160 ppi of the iPhone. Most Mac desktop and laptop displays hover around 110 ppi. An 11" screen at 160 ppi will provide almost the same amount of pixel real estate as a 13.3" MacBook screen does now. This will help minimize people's perception that they're giving up detail for size.Apple wants an iPhone in your pocket, an iSlate (or whatever) on your coffee table, and an iMac on your desk, with laptops positioned for students and the mobile workforce. It's ambitious. And more than a little smart.
The next Apple gadget
With sources as authoritative as the Wall Street Journal confirming the pending introduction of a tablet computer from Apple, one can assume the cat's out of the bag for the big Apple news on January 27. But what does it mean?
I'm throwing my hat in the kill-the-small-laptop camp. The iPhone proved that people will use computing power in a portable manner and without a physical keyboard. Despite the name, the iPhone is indeed a computer, with a clever 3.5" form factor. And people use it as such. Indeed, Ai has ecommerce clients generating sales from iPhone browsers on non-mobile-optimized websites.
Given that, why not continue to redefine the portable computing space? Steve Jobs must scoff at netbooks, with their minuscule keyboards and compromised feature sets. Better to redefine the experience with a new kind of device. Just like the iPhone has redefined pocket-sized power, so too can the tablet redefine the small-laptop market.
Apple is shooting for the personal, casual computing market, folks like me who like to get online sitting on the couch and folks like Nathan who want a three-pound computer to travel with. It will be big enough to type on and clear enough for reading, gaming and web browsing.
I bet the tablet's pixels per inch will be impressively high, like the 160 ppi of the iPhone. Most Mac desktop and laptop displays hover around 110 ppi. An 11" screen at 160 ppi will provide almost the same amount of pixel real estate as a 13.3" MacBook screen does now. This will help minimize people's perception that they're giving up detail for size.
Yesterday I postulated to my coworkers that the 13" MacBook is going to disappear. But now I suspect it will turn Pro a few months after the tablet comes out. Portable computing power is important, and with a tricked-out technology package, the MacBook will differentiate itself. Expect MacBooks to shift in price from $1199 and up to $1499 or higher, with the tablet coming in around the thousand-dollar mark.
Whatever it turns out to be, expect irrational and unrivaled consumer desire and interest for it, on a scale that only Apple creates. Google's phone news is a business story: "Look at Google aiming for the smartphone market." But Apple's news is cultural. Which is why they may succeed in their latest attempt to change the game.
davidcho: I’m not sure if everyone else saw this, but...
I’m not sure if everyone else saw this, but just in case, it’s Cho answering the “Can The Awl make money?” question five times.
Modern fossils
Artist Christopher Locke makes fossil sculptures of extinct technology, including cassette tapes, rotary telephones, and boom boxes.
Tags: art Atari Christopher Locke
Roger Ebert on Tilda Swinton
Expert: “Tilda Swinton gave the best performance by an actress in 2009.”
Video: The Avon Barksdale Story (Trailer)
Here’s a trailer for the DVD release of a new documentary that details the life and times of real life Baltimore kingpin Avon Barksdale, the man on whom the infamous character from The Wire was based.
Hit the jump for the full press release.
(New York, NY)- E1 Music is excited to announce the release of The Avon Barksdale Story- Legends Of The Unwired – in March 2010. This gripping film won Best Docudrama at this year’s NY International Independent Film & Video Festival and reveals the raw truth about death, drugs, and violence in the streets of Baltimore, MD. In The Avon Barksdale Story, the real Nathan Avon “Bodie” Barksdale tells all to actor Wood Harris, who played his on screen character in HBO’s critically acclaimed series The Wire.
The Wire was based on the lives of real gangsters. The Avon Barksdale Story is the first to chronicle the actual lives of these real people. Barksdale’s real name, Nathan Avon Barksdale, and his nickname, “Bodie,” were both used in the series as composite characters. Avon Barksdale was The Wire’s first season’s central character. The storyline focused on the Barksdale clan and their ruthless hold on Baltimore’s underworld and the intense efforts of law enforcement to stop them. Barksdale was a real crime figure in Baltimore.
Barksdale says he consulted David Simon, the creator of The Wire, during the early filming of the highly successful mini-series. He says, “The Wire was one long commercial for this!”
During the drug wars of the ‘80s, long before The Wire’s drug kingpin Avon Barksdale entered the mind of David Simon, a young man (named Nathan Avon “Bodie” Barksdale) was in the belly of one of the most violent neighborhoods on Baltimore’s Westside. The Lexington Terrace Projects was one of the most notorious areas in the city making it the perfect backdrop for HBO’s The Wire. But unlike David Simon, an admitted outsider, this story possesses the intimate detailing which can only come from an insider’s view. The real Barksdale brings the riveting fact-filled account of his world now known as The Avon Barksdale Story – Legends of the Unwired. A must see story for all true fans of The Wire!
Previously: Raekwon & Snoop From The Wire Talk Homosexuality in Hip-Hop
choire: (Sorry, Brad Graham’s untimely death has taken me on...
(Sorry, Brad Graham’s untimely death has taken me on some time machine tour of the Internet. I did not know there was a 2003-era record of me and Spiers SMOKING INDOORS AT A NEW YORK CITY BAR. Suck it, new New York. Also: Jesus, no wonder everyone assumed I was a horrible person if my face was stuck like that. Spiers, on the other hand, looks as fabulous as ever. The demon-eye thing is just a party trick she does.)
Choire in a suit! Choire in a suit!
Ah, 2003. The Year of My Bad Haircut.
The Thrill
Joe Posnanski's Best Players in Baseball (from 1970-2009, based on Win Shares, via David) confirmed my childhood belief that Will Clark was the best player in baseball for a couple of years.
My reasons for his best-player status may not be as statistically valid, but they include: Clark homered in his first major league at bat, off of Nolan Ryan; and, as was pointed out in the comments, his 1989 NLCS grand slam against Greg Maddux was, well, thrilling:
The orchid hypothesis
Shared by Jake Dobkin
i am a precious orchidDavid Dobbs tells us about a new theory in genetics called the orchid hypothesis that suggests that the genes that underlie some of the most troubling human behaviors -- violence, depression, anxiety -- can, in combination with the right environment, also be responsible for our best behaviors.
Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people.
From start to finish, this is one of the most interesting things I've read in weeks.
Tags: David Dobbs genetics science
Penguins and a Seal
via randomyesusefulno.com
Recap: Gammons on Mets, Pineiro, Z, Lowell, Perez & Bay
In his interview with WFAN this morning, MLB Network’s Peter Gammons said free-agent RHP Joel Pineiro is seeking a long-term contract that will pay him $12 million per season.
Gammons said, even though Pineiro is good friends with Carlos Beltran and Alex Cora, he feels the Mets will eventually end up signing free-agent RHP Jon Garland.
In regards to trading for a pitcher, Gammons said he doesn’t believe the Cubs will move Carlos Zambrano, ‘because they need to win now.’
Speaking of trades, Gammons said he does not feel a trade of Red Sox 3B Mike Lowell and Mets 2B Luis Castillo is a ‘possibility,’ ‘because there is not enough difference in the money to make it worth it to the Red Sox.’
According to Gammons, Scott Boras played a big role in getting Oliver Perez to begin training this off season in Arizona at the Athletes Performance Institute, which is a high-tech fitness boot camp for professional athletes, with a focus on nutrition, metabolic testing, cardiovascular work, drills and media training.
Gammons said, from what he has been told, Perez is working very hard.
Lastly, he feels Jason Bay will be a good player for the Mets, noting how Bay was never rattled by the Boston reporters, or by criticism from fans and media. He said Bay will play hard every day, and do fine with the pressure of playing in New York City.
The orchid hypothesis
David Dobbs tells us about a new theory in genetics called the orchid hypothesis that suggests that the genes that underlie some of the most troubling human behaviors -- violence, depression, anxiety -- can, in combination with the right environment, also be responsible for our best behaviors.
Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most creative, successful, and happy people.
From start to finish, this is one of the most interesting things I've read in weeks.
Tags: David Dobbs genetics science
Brad Graham
Here’s how one should best be remembered, by Awl pal and designer pk: “Brad”—the longtime blogger, theater enthusiast, coiner of the unfortunate phrase “blogosphere,” serial raconteur and total hound who died yesterday—”did everything gay men are told we should no longer do in this day and age. He drank far too much, he loved to smoke, and he had a taste for distractingly handsome, alarmingly young men. In fact, Su and I once referred to a boyfriend whose name we had forgotten as ‘this many.’ The name stuck, and Brad would tell us for months how ‘this many’ was doing. Brad’s last trip to Chicago left us in some disgusting bar at four in the morning—our fifth for the night—commandeering the jukebox, and Brad howling along to Prince’s “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” Word. (Photo by.)
wolff on carr
The tablet’s magic—which you have not experienced—will “lie in replicating that intimate offline navigation” of the iPhone. Indeed, this not-yet-existent tablet is, you say, an “iPhone on steroids.”
Leaving aside the issue of your prose, let me deal with your loving trust in Apple. It’s become a common condition among media people, the belief that Apple will save us. But how come? Again and again, Apple has shown that it is only interested in what it can control. That it regards content as a low-priced commodity to fill its machines. Your suggestion that Apple and iTunes have saved the music business would be news to anyone in that dying industry stuck now with Apple’s pricing.
Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers
Last week, I wrote a bit about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I've learned, as well some of the more interesting responses.
First, to recap: I had about 18,000 followers of my own back in October, when I got added to the suggested user list. (Let's call these "organic" followers.) If I'd have continued my normal rate of growth, i'd have about 25,000 followers today, but thanks to being on the list, I've got close to 300,000 followers. Surprisingly though, I only get as many retweets and replies as I'd get with my organic number of followers.
I thought at first that maybe the list wasn't valuable to me because I'm not a celebrity; maybe I'm just noise, but could bigger brands find some value by having a large number of followers?
The Results Are In
As I hoped, my initial post about my experiences inspired others on the list to chime in with their findings.
- Creative Commons, despite being a stalwart organization at the intersection of technology and intellectual property, saw no increase in responses after being added to the suggested user list.
- NBC's Today Show is one of the signature brands of broadcast media. But being on Twitter's list? Didn't do anything.
- What about Starbucks, one of the definitive examples of a powerful worldwide brand? Nothing.
I mentioned in my earlier post, that Kim Kardashian is being paid $10,000 a tweet to promote sponsors on her Twitter account. But what are those sponsors paying for? Because, while she clearly has influence over a certain community, and her Twitter page says she has about 2.7 million followers, I think the reality is obvious: Nobody has a million followers on Twitter.
Does that mean Twitter's follower counts are lying? No. Instead, Twitter accounts that have over half a million followers listed actually represent (at most) a few hundred thousand people who've chosen to become organic followers of someone, along with millions who are passively along for the ride. Some of them are inactive users, some are spammers, some just ignore the noise of the accounts that don't interest them, like spam in an email inbox. But they can't count as "followers" in any meaningful sense.
A few people have asked what my goal is in writing about the experience of being on the list, and why I am offering up prizes to encourage asking questions about it. Well, perhaps the best way to articulate it is that I think the list is being used as a useful fiction for distorting the value and promise of this new medium.
The Million Dollar Gift
There are incentives to promoting the fiction of the suggested user list, of course. If I were the brand manager or Chief Marketing Officer for some big company that got on the list, I bet I'd be proudly trumpeting to senior management that "our social media efforts are bringing us thousands of new followers a day on Twitter". Somebody's gonna get a huge bonus for being the beneficiary of an act of random benevolence. Hell, I'm a pretty persuasive guy — if I found the right (i.e. sufficiently desperate) media outlet, I could probably have sold my Twitter account to somebody for half a million dollars. Well, at least I could have until last week.
And the list preserves a certain amount of power and influence for Twitter itself. (Twitter the company, not twitter the medium.) Because, for every one of the organizations i quoted above mentioning how the suggested user list provided them no value, I got a private message from another list member confirming these findings but not wanting to be quoted on the record.
People being afraid to publicly state their opinion about something of little value for fear of antagonizing a particular company is a clear sign of a completely unhealthy dynamic. I don't think the folks at Twitter would retaliate for public criticism by removing people from the list, because Twitter execs are both extremely busy and fairly thick-skinned, but it shows how insecure people feel about having won the follower lottery. (And how pageview-obsessed publishers are: Every entity that was afraid of being removed from the suggested user list is in the business of publishing content online.)
Fact Check
CNN famously reported on Ashton Kutcher beating them to be the first to get a million followers on Twitter; Today's celebrity reporting often includes a mention of a celeb's follower count as a matter of course. But I'm hoping to encourage some skepticism, to provide a basis for fact-checking that demonstrates these pronouncements are inherently suspect. It's a bit like when I worked at a newspaper: Every reporter thought "Well, our circulation is a million copies, that must mean a million people read my column." Facing the reality that only 10,000 of those people read the column, or that perhaps only 1,000 of them were reading the advertisement on the opposite page, forced a useful and important reckoning into some false assumptions that were underpinning that industry's workings.
The truth: Nobody has been able to point me to a single Twitter account that's earned over 250,000 followers on its own. Nobody's been able to point me to a Twitter account on the suggested user list that's gotten favorites, replies, retweets or responses from a larger number. And nobody's been able to demonstrate why the inflated follower count numbers should be used as a measure of anything but the growth in signups to the core Twitter service itself.
That leaves an inescapable conclusion. Nobody has a million followers on Twitter. And being on the suggested user list doesn't add value to a Twitter account, regardless of whether you're a regular guy like me, or one of the biggest brands in the world.
Reminder: I'm running a contest for ideas about how to get more data from my being on the suggested user list. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank since before I was added to the suggested user list. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months.I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea of what information we should query from that data set, as well as one random programmer who contributes code to help.
Here's the prizes and how to participate:
- Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
- If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive.
I'll be picking winners for both prizes on January 15th.
Consumerist Exposé on Best Buy PC ‘Optimization’
Consumerist:
When the Consumer Reports engineers compared three “optimized” computers to ones with default factory settings, there was no performance improvement. In one case, an optimized laptop actually performed 32% worse than the factory model.
It’s also a bait-and-switch tactic, to get you to pay $40 more than the advertised price.
(Today in It's Funny Until it Happens to You)
For many of us, this new media seems fun, and natural, and so much better than the old way. But that doesn’t mean that people who don’t feel the same way are weak, or morons. via newsweek.tumblr.com Who is this frisky Newsweek blogger? There's no byline.
Beltre To Boston
When asked about his plan to improve the Red Sox earlier this winter, GM Theo Epstein emphasized a need to upgrade the defense, noting that his club was not very good in the field a year ago. He wasn’t kidding around, as yesterday, Boston signed Adrian Beltre to take over at third base, adding another premium defender to the earlier acquisition of Mike Cameron.
Beltre isn’t just a good defender. He is in the conversation of the best defensive third baseman of all time. Since 2002, the first year we have UZR data available here on the site, Beltre has put up a total of +104.5. That’s an average of +14 per 150 games over an eight year span. Forget complaints about small sample size or year to year variations – +14 UZR/150 over eight years is impossible to fluke.
It isn’t just the numbers, either. When you watch Beltre play third base, you are amazed at the things he can do. He has perfected the charge on a bunt – no one in baseball comes in on the ball as well as he does. His lateral range is hilarious at times, as he regularly fields balls that are hit directly at the shortstop, just because he can. He has a great arm, often throwing lasers across the field without transferring his weight, showing pure arm strength.
But don’t take my word for it – take the word of the fans who filled out Tom Tango’s scouting report project. Beltre grades out as the best third baseman in the game, rating a 4.56 out of a possible 5, and only five players in the game were graded out higher than Beltre. Or, you could take the word of Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon:
“[Beltre is] clearly the best [third baseman] I’ve ever seen in person,” said Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon. “I think [Evan Longoria] is good, I used to think Scott Brosius was really good. … [Eric] Chavez was good, but Beltre was stupid good. I think Beltre is the best who I’ve ever seen with my two eyes – defender, not just third baseman, but defense.”
Maddon isn’t the only one who feels that way. It is impossible to watch Beltre play third base and not be impressed. There isn’t a question over whether he’s a great defensive third baseman. The only argument you can have is where his glove ranks with the all-time greats.
The Red Sox just signed a great defensive player, but the value for them doesn’t end there. Offensively, Fenway Park should be a huge boon to his numbers, as Dave Allen showed how well Beltre’s game is suited towards a park that is friendly to right-handed pull hitters. He’s leaving the hardest park in baseball for a right-handed hitter and going to one that famously improves the performances of players with his offensive approach. Beltre has been a league average hitter while toiling in Safeco Field, and he has the chance to be much more than that in Boston.
This is simply a tremendous addition for the Red Sox. They got a +3 win player with upside, at age 30, on a one year deal for $10 million. They significantly upgraded over Mike Lowell, and put their defense back on track to being an asset, not a liability. Theo Epstein saw an opportunity to add undervalued assets, and made huge improvements to the team by bringing in both Cameron and Beltre.
Boston fans, get ready to be spoiled. You’ll never see another third baseman play the hot corner as well as you’ll see it played in 2010.
Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software
I favorited a YouTube video: Google Tech Talks January 29, 2009 ABSTRACT In this session, we'll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and learn how to use game mechanics to create an experience that's fun, compelling, and addictive on the Web and mobile. We'll conclude by showcasing some cutting-edge services that incorporate these ideas and show us what future of social and applications will look like. "It's one of my absolute favorite discussions on user engagement & how to think about app / web design & user engagement by using strategy from game mechanics." - Dave McClure (http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2008/03/putting-the-fun.html) A lot of our services here at Google can benefit from simple ways to make them more engaging by applying lessons from game mechanics. Amy Jo Kim's company Shufflebrain builds smart games for social networks, starting with Facebook. (For an example of how Facebook is using Game design to drive user engagement, see: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/12/07/facebook-using-game-design-to-drive-new-user-engagement/) Speaker: Amy Jo Kim Amy Jo Kim, CEO of Shufflebrain, is an internationally known expert in online community architecture. She has helped design social games and social architecture for such companies as Electronic Arts, Digital Chocolate, Viacom, eBay and Yahoo! Her book Community Building on the Web was published in 2000, and has been translated into 6 languages.
RIP Kenneth Noland
17th Stage, 1964.
Epigram, 1961.
In Bed with Kool Keith – Part 1
If you’ve ever thought “KISS is my favorite rock band” and/or “Man I wish I was someone else today,” then you have something in common with hip hop legend Kool Keith. Because Mr. Keith Matthew Thornton aka Dr. Octagon aka Dr. Doom aka Kool Keith aka Robbie Analog aka Clean Man aka Mr. Green aka Willie Large aka … well, we don’t have time or space to name 60 of the master rapper’s aliases. But he started out with the Ultramagnetic MC’s, a Bronx-based hip hop group that every head knows well.
When Kool Keith was in town to perform a show in San Francisco at 111 Minna, I called the promoter and was lucky enough to get the interview. This meeting was not the first time I met KK. My first introduction to him was in NYC in the fall of 1999 when he was on his Black Elvis tour. I also met his parents and helped him tie a cape around his neck and watched as he threw fried chicken at the audience.
Keith and I sat in his Marriot hotel room bed for an hour, so we had to cut the interview into two parts. Please enjoy Part One. In Part Two next week, we will cover Keith’s fashion and Dating Tips.
Episode links: Kool Keith, Dan the Automator
Format: iPhone/iPod (.m4v)
Movable Type Tuesday: Posting to MT from Emacs | BloggingPro
This has been a slow week for MT news. Things should pick up over the next week, though, with today’s release of MT 5. As always, if you have some news to share, post it in the comments. But I did run across one MT tutorial that I wanted to tell you about. Knut Haugen has figured out how to post to MT from Emacs. I know a few die-hard Emacs users that would absolutely love this. Knut is using the weblogger.el xml-rpc interface, which supports a variety of blog APIs. Note the problem Knut has with saving drafts. If memory serves, this problem is common when accessing MT via xml-rpc. via www.bloggingpro.com Why not?
jabulani 2010 world cup soccer ball
the upcoming 2010 world cup is being held in johannesburg, south africa beginning this june. the adidas
designed game ball was just unveiled and is named jabulani, an isizulu word meaning to celebrate.
the ball features 11 different colours chosen to represent the 11 players of each team and the 11 official
languages and tribes of south africa. the design of the ball aims to evoke ‘african spirit’. on the technical
side, the ball uses adidas’‘grip’n’groove’ technology which gives it stability and accuracy in flight. it also
improves on the ‘goose bump’ design pioneered on the 2008 european championship ball. the design was
tested for use at loughborough university in england and at the adidas football laboratory in germany.
many teams around the world have tried out the design and have given excellent feedback. the video
below shows how each ball is made.
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup
http://www.adidas.com
“I draw on cups. Yes.”
Cheeming Boey does astonishing, finely detailed artwork on white Styrofoam coffee cups.
For most, he draws freehand with only a black Sharpie pen. For others, he does painstaking pointillism. But for a very few, he engraves the cup with a tool gentler than a toothpick, making an almost invisible image. Then, sometimes, titles it after old Depeche Mode lyrics. Some of his cups have been plunged 10,000 feet below sea level, where they shrivel up like Shrinkey Dinks but never lose their appeal. Boey’s work beats back the idea that Styrofoam is a non-biodegradable menace by making it beautiful enough to be, well, indispensable.
Images after the jump, and on Boey’s flickr page and website.
Pez Guy Obituary Dispenses Information, Whimsy
As tipped here yesterday in an exquisitely turned riposte from Awl contributor Katie Baker-Bakes, Curtis Allina, the candy company executive who brought the world the modern Pez dispenser, died recently at the age of 87. In case you haven’t yet read his obituary, you should. It is the most interesting article in the New York Times today.
Did you know:
1) “Pez” is a contraction of pfeffermintz, German for “peppermint,” which was the candy’s original flavor. Invented in Vienna in 1927, Pez was originally marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking. (A useless invention, it turns out, as improved 21st-century science now teaches us that there is no reason to not smoke!)
2) Thus, the long-stem, flip-top dispenser design was modeled after cigarette lighters.
3) There is continuing debate among “Pez historians” as to who came up with the idea to put toy-doll heads on the dispensers for the relaunch of the product, newly fruit-flavored and marketed to children.
4) There is a publishing company called Bubba Scrubba Publications. In 1994, Bubba Scrubba published a book called Collecting Pez, by Pez historian David Welch, who insists that no matter whose idea it was to put heads on the dispensers, Allina was the greenlighter. “The idea came from the United States. And for the idea to have come out of the United States and made it to Austria where it could be approved, Allina was the only guy who could have made that happen.”
5) Allina left Pez in 1979 to join Au’Some Candies, maker of candy jewelry, Mega Baby Dips and the baldly derivative Wildlife Klik dispensers. (Though a portion of the proceeds from Wildlife Klik candy sales goes to the Wildlife Conservation Society. So that’s good.)
Christmas Day in January! New Royalty Books Delivered!
Look what was waiting in the mail when MM got back to the office after two weeks away!!! Two new royalty books from a royalty bookstore in Holland. The one on the left, Casa Savoia: Storia di una Famiglia Italiana, is basically a a catalogue of objects from the former Italian Royal House. The one on the right, Koninklijk Fotoalbum, is a lavish photo album of the Dutch Royal Family presented year by year. MM is going to busy for the next few days studying these fabulous new tomes!
Best blogs of '09
Worth checking out: Rex Sorgatz's list of the 30 best blogs of 2009.
Tags: best of best of 2009 lists weblogs
Best Baseball Players of 1970-2009
It’s interesting watching Bonds career — he was very clearly the best player in baseball in the ten year period from 1989-98. I mean if you are being realistic, nobody was even close. And then, right around this time, things shifted. McGwire and Sosa had their home run race. And players like Biggio and Bagwell and Piazza were closing in on Barry’s dominance. Decisions are always more complicated than we tend to make them, but you could certainly understand Barry right around this time going: “OK, this is ridiculous. I am the best player in baseball. And if people don’t believe me … well, I’ll give them a show they’ll never forget.” And, like him or not, he definitely did that. Of course I lead with the Bonds note, because there's never enough Bonds. Joe Posnanski's historical survey of Win Shares is an exciting read. The study of statistics can illuminate the past as it does the present, even for outliers such as Bonds, Bagwell, Biggio and Piazza. Here's what he did: Using Bill James’ Win Shares — I suppose you could use some other statistic, if you like, but I like Win Shares — I added up the best players in baseball for every five year window from 1970 to now... By Win Shares, there have been 11 players who qualify as the best players in baseball. Most of these will ring true to anyone — Bonds, Schmidt, Pujols, etc. — but there are a couple of surprises in the bag... Fun, right? Here then, by my Win Shares calculations, were the best players in baseball the last 30 years … and the players who they beat out... One of the "surprises" player is a big surprise, a player I wouldn't have guessed, a player I may not have even been able to name given his first name and last initial.
Institutional science needs to change
I was having lunch with some old ex-lab friends. Unlike me, who left the lab at the end of the 90s, all three of them have kept on doing research and medicine and have their own labs with students, post-docs, and techs. The good news is that their research is progressing, the bad news is that funding is tighter than ever.
I had asked them who was writing a grant (of course, knowing that one always is writing some grant). There was an awkward pause as all three of them seemed to be lost in their thoughts, then they gave me an update of where things were at, since last I was in science, listing some stats to show how things were getting tighter.
When I left research, I had the naïve idea that I would no longer need to hustle for money. But, we all know, the biz world is just the same. Yet, for sure, the biz world seems to have a multitude of revenue and funding options that don't seem to be available to institutional scientists.
I feel that the whole endeavor of Science (I come from a biology background, so my thoughts are around that area, really) has been stuck in the 60s - the way we fund science, the expectations of the apprenticeship (PhD and Postdoc), the publishing and reputation cycle, the job progression - all seem to have been built in a model that came into being in the science boom of the 50s and 60s and really hasn't changed.
Am I missing something? I've been out 10 years, but it seems like nothing has improved. Funding is tighter, people still can't get academic jobs, and publishing is getting more onerous.
How do I envision the future of institutional science?
I'm not sure.
I've mentioned how science publishing could change, taking cues from the current way we use the Social Web. I think DIYBio points to how science could change how we explore the natural world and who does it. And, brilliant folks, like at Biocurious and Pink Army Coop, are looking at ways to diversify how we fund and participate in funding the future of science.
In summary, the business of institutional science is sclerotic and the clues to how we move forward are right in front of us. And, as usual, institutional culture is in the way of this change.
Do you think the way we do science should change? Can it? Will it in our lifetime? How do you envision the future of science or are we fine the way we are?
Image by caterina
Linkdropping on NoSQL, Lean and Systems Thinking
I thought I would round a collection of links that interested me the past few weeks in various topics. First off: NoSQL databases:
- An almost impossibly detailed run-down of NoSQL databases: http://www.vineetgupta.com/2010/01/nosql-databases-part-1-landscape.html. Part 2 should be good too.
- Slides from a talk by Emil Eifrem of Neo4j on the different types of NoSQL databases: http://www.slideshare.net/emileifrem/nosql-east-a-nosql-overview-and-the-benefits-of-graph-databases
Then over to Lean and Kanban. Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin just published a new book on InfoQ titled "Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both". If you´re not familiar with Henrik Kniberg´s work, I also suggest "Scrum and XP from the trenches". Erling Wegger Linde´s "A Kanban brown bag recipe" is also worth a read.
And in the spirit of Lean: There is a video of talk by John Seddon of Vanguard titled "Cultural Change is Free". Mainly about systems thinking in the public sector, but private sector aren´t infallible either. Seddon often criticize Lean for being wrong in many places, but I often feel he is criticizing a wrongful implementation of lean ideas, much the same as scrum is often criticized for the misgivings of wrongful implementations. Or rather he is criticizing the tool focus of a lot of lean consultants not the lean principles themselves. And he stresses the differences between the Toyota Productions system and other kinds of organizations. You could also check out is talk "Re-thinking Lean service" on InfoQ which deals with the same topic in a slightly different packaging.
Mets Want To Host Winter Classic, Will Probably Mess This Up Too
That's right folks, with talk about the NHL's greatest publicity stunt coming to New York City next year, the word on the street is that the Mets want in on the action. Because nothing says "Winter Classic" like a ballpark that plays host to a team that has trouble finishing games when it starts to get colder out...Slap Shots has learned that if the NHL wants to bring the Winter Classic to New York on the first day of 2011, Jeff Wilpon already has notified the commissioner that the Mets are ready, willing and able to host it at Citi Field.
"I've had several conversations with Commissioner Bettman and have informed him that we'd love to have the game," Wilpon, the Mets' COO, told us by phone on Thursday. "Gary has told me that he and his team will come out and do a site visit early in the year, so I know that we are going to be under consideration."
Beyond that, Wilpon said he has spoken with Rangers CEO Jim Dolan and Islanders owner Charles Wang about bringing the Battle of New York to the nifty ballpark in Queens.
"There's interest there," Wilpon said. "I know the Islanders very much would like to do something."
Oh, isn't that swell! Just stick another terrible team that wears blue and orange in the place and it's like nothing has changed! Only it will be on ice!
Actually, you know what? Let them have it in Flushing. Given the previous adroitness that the Mets have shown with building things, the end result of their attempts to construct the rink for the Winter Classic might be nothing short of hysterical.
Plack: streaming can be blocking? Hell yes.
It's been a week break since I finished the very well received Plack Advent Calendar. And today i'm back on track on Plack development to get ready for the next week Perl Oasis in Orlando.
Streaming != Non-blocking
A few months ago we agreed on PSGI streaming interface for non-blocking applications and it's now implemented in most non-blocking backends like AnyEvent, Coro, Danga::Socket and POE. This is extremely useful to write non-blocking applications in an event driven callback style like Tatsumaki does.
Well, is feels a little weird that the extension is called "psgi.streaming" when we talk about non-blocking applications, doesn't it? At that time we kind of thought the name is confusing, but today it turns out limiting the streaming interface to "non-blocking" is what is confusing, and names are just correct.
Streaming interface is just an interface, and sure, CGI and mod_perl can also stream content if you call print to STDOUT or $r->print repeatedly, right? Streaming does not have anything to do with non-blocking event loop, and PSGI spec is ready for that: psgi.streaming can be true while psgi.nonblocking is false.
Of course, psgi.streaming is still really important for non-blocking apps to implement "delayed response" as well as "server push" using the event loop callback, but there's no reason streaming can not be done in blocking servers as well.
Do we really need it though?
Originally we didn't think about implementing the streaming interface in a blocking server backend, and a quick look of existing frameworks such as CGI::Application or Jifty don't seem to support that kind of non-buffering write. So our idea was that you should change the existing code to do IO-like object that gets a callback if you want to do streaming write. But well that is pull rather than push, so it needs to revert the control of the code, and the existing CGI apps or Catalyst apps that does non-buffering write from their controller code does not really work.
rafl, the Catalyst developer, showed up on our IRC channel #plack today, with the goal to kill Engine from Catalyst in his mind (w00t!), and asked if that kind of non-buffering write is possible without changing the existing users code, and we agreed that it's impossible unless we add psgi.streaming to blocking servers (such as Standalone, CGI and mod_perl) as well.
We already have a Writer middleware that does some kind of fallback, but that does a buffering write and that's not what we want here, so we started implementing non-buffering writes for the blocking servers and that is not particularly difficult.
There are some applications such as Tatsumaki or Plack::App::Proxy that use psgi.streaming and psgi.nonblocking extensions, and it's quite possible they confuse one from the other, and if psgi.streaming is available on most servers, their code can be much simplified. (If you use AnyEvent, just create a condvar and then ->recv on it if it's running in a blocking server)
I'm currently thinking of renaming Middleware::Writer to Middleware::BufferedStreaming so the users can use that middleware as a last resort when the server does not support streaming to run their application, though the ->write might be buffered, and probably promote the "MAY support psgi.streaming" to SHOULD.
January 4, 2010
Open source is terrifying!
Here come the open source culture = piracy articles... from CNN.
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie (novelist and poet Sherman Alexie) added. "It terrifies me."It's more terrifying when someone groups open source with piracy. In my experience, as an artist at times and helping to run an electronics company, open source and open source hardware actually give the maker more control and more artistic ownership.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Open source hardware | Digg this!
formspring.me
Why do you live in New York?
Ooooh, good fucking question.
I used to say I lived in New York because I wanted to figure it out. This is generally true. Even though I visited town several times a year, I always felt like I never understood the city: what drives people, where power emanates, how it ticks. And when I thought about New York in that context, you know what I thought of? Fucking “Sex and the City.” (I’d like to write something about the difference of watching that show from Minneapolis a decade ago to watching reruns of it now in NYC. It’s like a completely different show, even if the episodes are locked in time.)
I feel a great advantage in having moved here in my ’30s. I would be so much more cynical if I had been here at 23.
It’s been two years now, and I have a pretty good grasp on how this city ticks. So now the question becomes: Why do I *still* live in New York?
To this, I have no great answer. I suspect that I’ll stay another year and then head back to the west coast. I feel the same way about LA right now that I once felt about NYC, except instead of “Sex and the City,” I think of “Entourage.” Clearly, this needs to be addressed.
I plan to move back to Minneapolis at some point. I hope to die there. But I’d like to open a pizza parlor before I go.
r.i.p. brad graham
His August 8, 2000 post, Disappointment:
Is there anything more disappointing and frustrating than having driven a great distance to a drive-through fast food restaurant, ordered, paid for and received your lunch, then made a return trip to your office, only to discover that your requested condiment -- the very horseradish sauce that defines the sandwich experience -- was not included in the sack? (Aside from the betrayal by a lover or global war and strife, I mean.)
Yes. Yes there is.
I'll miss you, Brad
"I try to be my own hero. That may sound flippant, but 15 years ago when I was really trying to grasp a direction for my life, a friend wise beyond his years reminded me that no one is perfect, that heroes fall and white knights on horseback are rare. Instead, he said, I should identify those qualities I found heroic and good and valuable in anyone I admired, and cultivate them in myself. "You won't always succeed," he said, "but you'll be better for trying. Losers sit and wish. Heroes try. Be your own hero."
It ends up, though, that most of the admirable qualities I want to have I saw in my father. He was the smartest man I've ever known and understood better than most the difference between education (of which he had little) and knowledge (of which he had much). He was incredibly gregarious, could always find something to talk about -- at length -- with absolutely anyone and in conversation with him, you always felt as though you were the absolute center of his universe right then. Dad had a story about everyone, and I never met anyone who knew him who didn't have five or ten about him.
There's a quote by Mark Twain, something along the lines of "You should endeavor to live your life such that when you die, even the undertaker will be sorry." The procession of cars at my dad's funeral stretched out four miles and, yes, the usually stoic funeral director cried. I should be so lucky. "
-Brad Graham, May 2001
Via Neale's interview with him. RIP Brad.
Brad Graham, RIP
Old-school blogger Brad Graham was recently found dead at his home. More at MetaFilter, where a commenter says that he'd been ill for some time.
Tags: Brad Graham obituaries
links for 2010-01-04
Blog all kindle-clipped… umm… LOCATIONS!: The Diamond Age.
“I purchased a Kindle in late spring, and I think this has much to do with how this activity has petered out for me. Specifically, the Kindle and its good friend Instapaper have largely eaten my nonfiction reading, which means that there are no longer any pages to dog-ear. The counterintuitive part is that Kindle actually has an incredibly easy way to mark and save passages, with everything you highlight using the little joystick being dumped to a plaintext file called “My Clippings”. In theory this should make the activity much easier, but since the medium is the message and all that blah, I’m now reading entirely different stuff than I used to. I read fewer non-fiction books and more non-fiction long-form online writings, the kind of stuff that fits into Instapaper. I’m not unhappy with this change in my intake, but I do like to be a little more demonstrative with the things I’m interested in, so I’m unhappy the change in my output. If there was a way to make the Kindle pump the clippings file back out on some schedule, that would be good. Having to plug it into a computer does not cut it.”
He’s right that it could be way-more simple and seamless, But it sort of does work. Apart from the rather absurdly-specific-and-yet-hopelessly-abstract “locations” references.
I re-read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, while working on the Mag+ concept project, and so I notice my clippings somehow reflect my preoccupations at the time…
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 129-35 | Added on Monday, November 09, 2009, 08:08 PMThree people were waiting. Bud took a seat and skimmed a mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty, wrinkled, blank sheet of paper.“ ‘Annals of Self-Protection,’ ” he said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The logo of his favourite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics, mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid. Bud scanned through them until he found the one that denoted a comparison of a bunch of different stuff, and snapped at it with his fingernail. New mediaglyphics appeared, surrounding larger cine panes in which Annals staff tested several models of skull guns against live and dead targets. Bud frisbeed the mediatron back onto the table; this was the same review he’d been poring over for the last day, they hadn’t updated it, his decision was still valid.
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 302-3 | Added on Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 07:32 PMIt reminded him of pouring a jet of heavy cream into coffee, watching it rebound from the bottom of the cup in a turbulent fractal bloom that solidified just as it dashed against the surface.
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 691-95 | Added on Thursday, November 12, 2009, 08:59 AMA gentleman of higher rank and more far-reaching responsibilities would probably get different information written in a different way, and the top stratum of New Chusan actually got the Times on paper, printed out by a big antique press that did a run of a hundred or so, every morning at about three a.m. That the highest levels of the society received news written with ink on paper said much about the steps New Atlantis had taken to distinguish itself from other pnyles.
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 733-36 | Added on Thursday, November 12, 2009, 09:03 AMThe Judge’s other gofer was a tiny little Amerasian woman wearing glasses. Hardly anyone used glasses anymore to correct their vision, and so it was a likely bet that this was actually some kind of phantascope, which let you see things that weren’t there, such as ractives. Although, when people used them for purposes other than entertainment, they used a fancier word: phenomenoscope.
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 964-72 | Added on Thursday, November 12, 2009, 08:11 PM“Is this the smart makeup?” Hackworth said, nodding at the screen. “The next step beyond,” Cotton said. “Remote-control.” “Controlled how? Yuvree?” Hackworth said, meaning Universal Voice Recognition Interface. “A specialised variant thereof, yes sir,” Cotton said. Then, lowering his voice, “Word has it they considered makeup with nanoreceptors for galvanic skin response, pulse, respiration, and so on, so that it would respond to the wearer’s emotional state. This superficial, need I say it, cosmetic issue concealed an undertow that pulled them out into deep and turbulent philosophical waters—” “What? Philosophy of makeup?” “Think about it, Mr. Hackworth—is the function of makeup to respond to one’s emotions—or precisely not to do so?” “These waters are already over my head,” Hackworth admitted.
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 1162-66 | Added on Sunday, November 15, 2009, 02:41 PMThe universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organised anomalies. Hackworth had once taken his family out rowing on the pond in the park, and the ends of the yellow oars spun off compact vortices, and Fiona, who had taught herself the physics of liquids through numerous experimental beverage spills and in the bathtub, demanded an explanation for these holes in water. She leaned over the gunwale, Gwendolyn holding the sash of her dress, and felt those vortices with her hands, wanting to understand them. The rest of the pond, simply water in no particular order, was uninteresting.
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 1166-71 | Added on Sunday, November 15, 2009, 02:41 PMWe ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. “Common as the air” meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving—no, demanding—of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavour of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.
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The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- Highlight Loc. 6435-44 | Added on Monday, November 30, 2009, 08:41 PM“I think I will choose to interpret your question as part of a Socratic dialogue for my edification,” Carl Hollywood said carefully, “and not as an allegation of insincerity on my part. As a matter of fact, just before I encountered you, I was enjoying my cigar, and looking about at London, and thinking about just how well it all suits me.” “It suits you well because you are of a certain age now. You are a successful and established artist. The ragged bohemian life holds no charm for you anymore. But would you have reached your current position if you had not lived that life when you were younger?” “Now that you put it that way,” Carl said, “I agree that we might try to make some provision, in the future, for young bohemians—” “It wouldn’t work,” Finkle-McGraw said. “I’ve been thinking about this for years. I had the same idea: Set up a sort of young artistic bohemian theme park, sprinkled around in all the major cities, where young New Atlantans who were so inclined could congregate and be subversive when they were in the mood. The whole idea was self-contradictory. Mr. Hollywood, I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness.”
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two quick delillo notes
First, Richard Rayner posts an appreciation of White Noise on the occasion of its 25th anniversary.
Perhaps DeLillo came back to America and so soaked up the assault of its teeming everyday, its wondrous and paranoid present, that he couldn't help but enclose the darkness of the future. "White Noise" won the National Book Award in 1985 and quickly became an inspiration and influence. Without it, writers such as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an excellent introduction here) don't happen -- or don't happen in the same way.
And Mark Athitakis has a copy* of the upcoming Point Omega and finds it lacking:
It’s fine if DeLillo chooses to abandon the tone he pioneered in White Noise. What’s disappointing is the loss of sure-footedness that’s come with it.
* Want. If you know any way to get me one, I'd love you forever.
iPhone devsugar: Working with tablet resolutions
Filed under: iPod Family, Developer, iPhone, App Store, SDK
Rumors are hitting the ground hard and strong about exactly what to expect in the upcoming (yeah, yeah, possibly mythical) Apple tablet device. And the most important of those rumors, the fact most consistently cited, is the introduction of extra pixels. You might roll your eyes and say, "of course a tablet means more pixels," but what exactly does that extra resolution mean to you as a developer? After all, we don't know what the pixel count will be or whether the (possibly mythical) tablet will offer widget-mode applications using the current iPhone resolution size or full-screen options. So let's look at some of the challenges having extra screen space might offer up developers.
For example, the (possibly mythical) tablet might run what essentially amounts to iPhone Rosetta -- little virtual iPhone apps running in their own little simulator windows, 20-pixel-high status bar and all (we aren't sure the tablet will run on ARM or not). And those 20 pixels matter. Many iPhone devs have designed their apps for 320-by-460 or 480-by-300 screen geometries, the geometries that have been native to the iPhone and iPod touch throughout the first three generations of devices. (Strictly speaking, the iPhone is in its 2nd generation with the 3GS and the iPod touch is in its 3rd with the latest model unit.)
Take away the status bar, however, and you're dealing with just the first break in the geometry story. Apple doesn't offer specific UIKit-based calls for querying standard items like 44-pixel navigation bar presentations. When moving between an iPhone and a tablet, that's the kind of information that an application should be able to find out for itself.
With an expected (and currently hypothetical) 960-by-1440 minimum resolution, tablet software doesn't just have to change aspect ratios but also deal with magnification. Art that looks terrific at 320x480 may not look so hot at 960x1440. Although Apple has always encouraged developers to design for resolution independence, the fact remains that most iPhone artists have delivered photoshop-quality art at device-level resolution. In my experience, sadly little development has centered on vector-graphic-based art. Consider the image at the top of this post, showing a screen shot from my App Store Draw application at the original resolution (top-left insert) and zoomed in to 960x1440. Simply scaling up art is not an Apple-worthy option. (Do note, however, that vector art can have anti-aliasing issues of its own.)
Apple's current SDK offers little in the way of resolution control or querying. You can ask a shared UIScreen object to report its dimensions and provide an "application frame" to fit your application into, but little more. The calls just aren't there yet -- although hopefully a 4.0 SDK would provide hooks to allow exactly that.
In response to this kind of uncertainty, iPhone developer (and talented High School student) Jacob Bandes-Storch has been developing the open source ResKit project at github. ResKit offers "a library for testing resolution-independent iPhone OS applications". You can establish it to run with a simulated screen size of 800x600 for example, to see how your application works at that given size. The screen shot to the right shows ResKit in action, displaying its virtual screen.
And while pixels are important, they won't provide the only developer challenge for migrating iPhone OS applications. Because when the touch screen dimensions change, so does the way a user's hand can interact with that screen. A larger screen means more hand lifting and movement. Imagine a standard landscape game running in a standard 480-by-300 window floating in the middle of a 7- or 10-inch tablet.
Now imagine trying to thumb-control any touch-based buttons at the bottom-left and -right of that floating window. Not going to happen, at least with a window in the middle of the screen for normal-sized hands. It's time to start designing for a one-hand-to-hold-and-one-hand-to-manipulate reality. Because any applications that are not full-screen will have to deal with a floating ocean of space when presenting their GUIs.
And even if you scale up, and move your game into a full-screen total resolution mode, consider the simple physical weight of a tablet device. If your users are going to hold it in such a way that their thumbs can manipulate buttons at the bottom of the screen, think about what the simple weight of the device will do to their interactivity. To get a sense of this, pick up any standard DVD movie case. Hold it in landscape position and manipulate it as if you were manipulating a thumb-based tablet game. The tipping backwards you'll experience from just a lightweight plastic case gives only a hint of what a more solid device will do when grasped in a similar fashion.
There's the accelerometer to consider as well. Because accelerometer readings simply may not make sense for any application that is not centered on the screen. Think about it: what does tipping a device to the left mean to an off-centered floating widget application, let alone one that doesn't have the current focus (assuming a multi-application environment as the tablet would likely support).
These are just a few big issues: resolution, geometry, widget-based windows, touch/grasp limitations, device manipulation differences, and physical device limitations Between these, a lot of App Store offerings may need to re-think, re-design, and re-engineer their offerings.
A January SDK refresh would go a long way towards allowing developers a head start for addressing these issues. If Apple follows previous years, however, the SDK launch may lag months behind the product announcement. So developers are warned to really think through each of the issues I've mentioned and start planning now how they can keep their applications current and device-appropriate.
Expect Apple as well to repeat the 3.0 migration experience. Remember how apps were tested for 3.0? I wouldn't be surprised to see "Tested for Tablet" certifications to start appearing in App Store, especially if there is a processor shift away from ARM. Certifying apps would give a better idea to consumers as to which items will run smoothly on their new systems. As, iPhone developer John Fricker points out, " I think we can safely assume that Feb will be known as 'Refactor Hell Month' if the tablet runs iPhone OS."
Thanks Landon Fuller, Scott Lawrence, Avi, John Fricker, tehbaut
(p.s. As a side note, a front-mounted camera might make the cameraViewTransform property of the UIImagePickerController class finally make sense.)TUAWiPhone devsugar: Working with tablet resolutions originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Is a GM Gap Behind the AL/NL Disparity?
The American League’s current superiority (as a whole) to the National League is well-established. Here is one brief illustration of the gap. In short: if someone asks why you think the AL is better than the NL, ask them why they think a 90-win team is better than a 70-win team.
The more interesting issue is source of the disparity. One can imagine various explanations with different degrees of credibility: money, the DH, luck, and so on. It’s likely a combination of a number of different factors. I won’t pretend to have any sort of well-researched answer. I would suggest that the relative quality of front offices (represented here by general managers) plays a major role.
Rather than going through every team, I’ll avoid the illusion of being definitive and pick whom I see as the five best and five worst current general managers. I know that every choice is debatable, but I’ll try to be relatively uncontroversial. It is also worth looking back at the “Front Office” sections of Dave Cameron’s organizational rankings from last off-season, although the judgments presented here are my own. Keep in mind that this is merely a brief reflection. These are not rankings, but merely groupings the five best and the five worst GMs in baseball.
The best: Andrew Friedman (TBA) and Theo Epstein (BOS) work in very different situations, but would be on anyone’s short list for “Best GM” given the numerous ways in which their organizations excel. Billy Beane (OAK) is still one of the top GMs in the game, despite the current rebuild. It’s easy to forget just how good the As were from 1999-2006 on a shoestring budget. It’s only been one full season and less than two off-seasons, but Jack “Jack Z.” Zduriencik (SEA) has vaulted himself into this conversation. As for a fifth member in this group… well, that’s tough. I’d like to put Brian Cashman (NYY) here, given his metamorphosis the last few years from the Yankees’ Tom Hagen into their Michael Corleone, but I’m trying to avoid too much controversy and people always get hung up on the budget. Mark Shapiro (CLE) would also be a good choice, but given Cleveland’s recently struggles, I can understand why some would object. Josh Byrnes (ARI) would be another good candidate, but if Shapiro doesn’t make it, neither should Byrnes. For #5 I’ll go with Doug Melvin (MIL), who does a good job of blending traditional and contemporary methods, but any of the other guys could make it. In no particular order: Friedman, Epstein, Beane, Zduriencik, and Melvin.
Best GMs Tally: AL 4, NL 1
The Worst: Oh boy… This was surprisingly (and depressingly) easy. In no particular order, the Frightful Five are: Dayton Moore (KCA), Omar Minaya (NYM), Ed Wade (HOU), Ned Colletti (LAN), and Brian Sabean (SFN). Seeing those names together gives “Murderer’s Row” a new meaning. I’ll pursue the increasingly uncanny Moore/Minaya dynamic at length some other time. Suffice it to say, no one would blink an eye if tomorrow Minaya lectured Mets fans about “trusting the process” while Dayton Moore held a press conference at which he accused Joe Posnanski of gunning for a player development position with the Royals. Ed Wade’s Brandon Lyon contract aside, his organization is sort of like the Royals except older and without the glimmers of hope in the minor leagues. Some may feel it is unfair to put Colletti on this list given his team’s success, but look at the cash he has (or, more accurately, had) at his disposal relative to his divisional rivals. Then there’s Colletti’s mentor, Brian Sabean… That I’m so impressed that he’s restrained himself from resigning Bengie Molina sort of says it all.
Worst GMs Tally: AL 1, NL 4
The NL only has one of the best GMs (and again, there were other candidates in the AL that could have taken his place), and all but one of the worst. One or two changes would not alter the overall point: front office excellence seems slant heavily toward the American League, and the opposite of excellence toward the National League. Neither the selections nor the “method” employed are definitive, but I do think there is something here.
skiff reader
the skiff reader is a new ereader device that aims to attract attention not for its feature set, but its size.
the device is ultra thin and has an 11.5 inch touch screen display that dwarfs even its biggest competitors.
the design is ideally suited for magazine and newspaper content that was truncated to fit the screens of
smaller devices. however the skiff has a lot going for it besides its screen size, it also has 4 gb of storage,
wifi and 3g capability. the device can also be used to listen to music or audiobooks and comes with a
sleek magnesium casing. the skiff_s newspaper capability comes as no surprise since the device and its
accompanying service is partly being developed by the newspaper publisher hearst. the company plans
to use it to sell digital subscriptions to newspapers and magazines.
http://www.skiff.com
via engadget
My Favorite Blog Of 2009
Shared by mathowie
This was my vote to Rex a few weeks ago when he was scaring up recommendations for his top 30 list (The Awl was of course my #1 as well)My favorite blog of 2009 is Chris Dixon's. If you're in Tech you have to be reading this blog.
Around the office.
Cho: Choire [#2]
I don’t even know who Gilbert Arenas is.
Me: hahahaha
Me: he wouldn’t
Cho: he’s not joking!
Me: “I stopped following the Bullets when Jordan drafted Kwame Brown. WHAT THE FUCK was he thinking?”
Cho: who said that
Me: Choire, just now.
Cho: bull
Cho: fucking
Cho: shit
Me: Okay, but it would have been pretty funny, right?
Cho: hahaha
Friedman Considering Tin Pan Alley Bar for Ace Hotel?
The next slice of awesomeness to hit the Ace Hotel? Realistically, it's the previously mentioned Sub Shop from the owners of No. 7 in Fort Greene and newly reported location of Opening Ceremony. But check out this killer idea from Ken Friedman in January's Flatiron newsletter: "Friedman is now thinking of installing a bar in the basement that might be themed around Tin Pan Alley, that century-old mecca to music that was exactly one block south of the Ace." An old timey piano bar from Ken Friedman? Maybe with some vaudeville thrown in? Yes, please. No one tell that mosque across the street.
· January Flatiron Newsletter [Flatiron BID]
Tina Brown: Stop saying that newspapers are dying because of the Internet
The Daily Beast
"American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long a whole generation gave up on them," writes Tina Brown. "They needed to innovate back in the Fax Age of the 1980s but were too self-important and making too much money with their monopolies to acknowledge it."
My Favorite Blog Of 2009
My favorite blog of 2009 is Chris Dixon's. If you're in Tech you have to be reading this blog.
Easing the Park Slope Parking Crunch? There’s No App for That
All About Fifth, the blog of Park Slope's Fifth Avenue BID, posted a plug today for Roadify, one of several emerging applications that hope to help drivers find parking through the use of mobile devices.
"Roadify is still in its infancy," reads AAF, "but any idea that will help to ease parking and traffic (caused by people driving around in circles looking for a spot) is welcomed."
Setting aside the dubious notion of encouraging drivers to keep watch on their cellphones while careening through the neighborhood, if the Fifth Ave BID is serious about parking relief, it should stop grasping at straws and get behind reality-based methods like performance parking, which are designed to increase turnover by implementing variable meter rates. DOT is already experimenting with its PARK Smart program in the Slope -- over the strenuous objection of the BID -- with plans to expand in the coming year.
Of course, who wants to waste time weighing actual solutions when it's so easy to condemn the nearest bike lane.
30 Best Blogs
Screw the other lists. This is truly the 30 Best Blogs right now.
I Want Your Barbie
Lady Gaga had quite the year -- the fashion, music and entertainment worlds just could not get enough of her in '09. Her popularity certainly hasn't dwindled with the start of a new year. In fact, it's gone to the dolls! (And it was only a matter of time, really.)
The good people at Refinery29 point us to this genius discovery. Veik, a Beijing-based designer who loves to play with dolls, has recreated some of his favorite Gaga looks in mini form.
He made the bunny ears, the hair bow, the Kermit coat and even the Alexander McQueen S/S10 shoes. And the designs are spot on -- we're just so glad to see he did her (well, the clothes actually) some justice.
We only wish we had clothes like these to play with when we were growing up. See the impeccable shoes for yourselves after the jump.
WebFinger
I was thrilled to see work begin on WebFinger, particularly caught by the very simple premise of John Panzer in his description of the problem:
The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
He breaks it down further by noting that the email address is a powerful personal identifier. That strikes me as the core of what is needed, that is, a way to go from an email address to an HTTP URI. Once you get to a resource on the web all the good infrastruture in place kicks in, and you get hypertext, caching, redirects, etags, etc. all 'for free' once you make that jump.
Since then work has progressed on the WebFinger mailing list and I stopped paying attention. My attention was brought back to it recently because of a conversation on atom-protocol.
For something with such a very simple premise, what exists now under the name WebFinger strikes me as very large and complex solution with a lot of moving parts. The current proposed solution now involves URI Templates, the XRD format (which involves signatures and thus Canonical XML), the .well-known URI space, a new URI scheme: 'acct', and maybe even some DNS records.
I believe the solution can be much simpler:
- Parse the email address into local-part and domain.
- Use the domain from the email address to construct the finger URI:
http://<domain>/.well-known/finger- GET the JSON document at the finger URI. The body of the response will be a JSON object:
The object has a key of 'finger', and the value at the key 'finger' is a string, a URI Template with a single variable: 'local'.{ "finger": "http://example.org/{local}" }- Substitue the local-name part of the email address for the {local} part of the URI Template and expand the URI Template.
- Do a GET on the generated URI to retrieve a JSON document, a dictionary:
{ "OpenID": "http://...", "blog" : "http://bitworking.org", ... }You will note that there are no special DNS records used, no XRD, no new URI scheme, and no Canonical XML. All the representations involved are JSON. I don't see any reason to restrict what the values are for the second dictionary, so the value of 'blog' could just as easily be an array of strings if there was more than one:
{ "OpenID": "http://...", "blog" : ["http://bitworking.org", "http://wellformedweb.org"] ... }Now the one thing you might point out is that there could be conflicts over key names in the dictionary, but that could be easily resolved by having a simple wiki-based registration for keys, just like is done for 'rel' extensions in HTML5. That same registry could also document what the values for the key are expected to be. For example, the entry for 'blog' could explain that the value is a list of strings, where the strings are URIs.
Even though this is extremely simple there are still two points of extensibiliity: adding new 'key' values to each of the two JSON objects returned along the way.
Ideas are fine, but code is better, so I started with DeWitt's previous working code and modified it to follow the above algorithm. The web interface is running at http://webfingerclient-jcgregorio.appspot.com/ and the code, a branch of DeWitt's code, is available as http://code.google.com/r/joegregorio-webfingerclient/. Kudos to DeWitt, it was his very clean code that make creating this demo easy. The only address that supports the above algorithm right now is
joe@bitworking.org.Note: This was also posted to the WebFinger Mailing List, but it doesn't seem to have cleared the moderation queue yet.
Best Players In Baseball
Well, my Hall of Fame ballot should be up at Sports Illustrated Tuesday … just in case you want to read 5,000 more words about the Hall of Fame from me.
In the meantime … this project was a lot of fun. I don’t know if it MEANS anything, but it was fun. I was doing my usual investigative mayhem to get a better feel for the Hall of Fame ballot, and I thought it would be worthwhile to come up with the best players in baseball since, say, 1970. I don’t mean the overall best players — I mean, who were the best players in baseball at any given time.
I think this should play a pretty big role in the Hall of Fame arguments. You will hear, quite often, something like this: “Well, Don Mattingly or Dale Murphy or Dave Parker or Andre Dawson or Jim Rice or Tim Raines may not have the career statistics or whatever, but for a time he was the best player in baseball.”
But is it true? Were these guys the best in baseball? Were they close to the best? Were they in the discussion?
So, here’s what I did: Using Bill James’ Win Shares — I suppose you could use some other statistic, if you like, but I like Win Shares — I added up the best players in baseball for every five year window from 1970 to now. Every window. That is, I added up from 1970-1974, from 1971-1975, from 1972-1976, etc. Why five years? Well, to be honest, it’s arbitrary. It could have been longer. If you want to do the same experiment for seven years or 10 years, you are welcome. I thought five was a pretty good number.
Generally, here is what I found (there will be plenty of specifics later, if you want them):
1. By Win Shares, there have been 11 players who qualify as the best players in baseball. Most of these will ring true to anyone — Bonds, Schmidt, Pujols, etc. — but there are a couple of surprises in the bag.
2. Beyond those 11, there are others players who I call “Close” or, in rare circumstances, “Very close.” These are players who were not the five-year Win Shares leader but were close enough to have a legitimate argument as the best player in baseball — after all, even Bill James doesn’t claim that Win Shares are ultra-precise. For instance, Alex Rodriguez never quite made it as the best player — thank you Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols — but he was close seven times. I think you could make a pretty strong argument that A-Rod was, at times, the best player in baseball.
You will notice that some years, nobody was close to the best player in baseball.
3. And beyond those who were close, I list off a bunch of players who did not lead in Win Shares and were not especially close. But I think they were “in the discussion.” That is: These were really good players who put up big Win Shares numbers. They might not be quite the best in baseball but they were good enough to spice up the conversation.
Fun, right? Here then, by my Win Shares calculations, were the best players in baseball the last 30 years … and the players who they beat out:
1970-74: Joe Morgan
Close: Pete Rose, Johnny Bench.
In the discussion: Bobby Murcer, Willie Stargell, Bobby Bonds.Comment: You may ask yourself, how could the Cincinnati Reds have the three best players in baseball from 1970-74 and not win a World Series? Well, you know the answer to that: They did it so that this book could be written.
Notice Bobby Bonds on there — he was, by my calculations, close to the best player in the period just before I started this thing, from 1969-74. Pete Rose was the best player, Morgan second, Bonds third. So Bobby Bonds has a Hall of Fame peak case, I think. And his career case? I don’t know. He didn’t play 2,000 games and as such didn’t manage 2,000 hits.
But … you know Andre Dawson fans like to point out (as they should) that he is one of only three players to hit 400 homers and steal three bases — Dawson, Barry Bonds, Willie Mays. Well, Bobby Bonds is one of only TWO players to steal 400 bases and hit 300 homers — Bobby Bonds and Barry Bonds.
1971-75: Joe Morgan
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Rose, Stargell, Jackson, Bench, Murcer.Comment: Even moderate Joe Morgan fans probably do not appreciate just how good he was from 1970-78. He was the best player in baseball all five periods, and nobody was especially most of those years. Notice Bobby Murcer is on the list again — he’s one of the more underrated players in baseball history.
1972-76: Joe Morgan
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Rose, Bench, Bobby Grich, Jackson, Rod Carew, Cesar Cedeno.Comment: Morgan had 43 more Win Shares in those five years than anyone else in baseball — a truly stunning number. By Win Shares, Morgan from 1972-76 was better than anyone else the last 30 years … except Barry Bonds. You will, of course, notice Bobby Grich up there, speaking of underrated players.
1973-77: Joe Morgan
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Carew, Rose, Mike Schmidt, Jackson.Comment: Schmidt makes his first appearance on the list — he’s will soon be dominating.
I was just curious — you probably know that Joe Morgan was elected to the Hall of Fame first ballot. You may not know (I didn’t) that he only got 80.8% of the vote. I mean, “only” is probably the wrong word — 81% of the Hall of Fame vote is a lot. But I do think that maybe Morgan was better than that. I think that’s probably why I think Morgan is underrated — everyone seems to know he was a great player. But he was more than a great player. He was a legendary player. Funny thing is: I’m not sure even Joe himself knows how good he really was.
1974-78: Joe Morgan
Close: Mike Schmidt, Carew.
In the discussion: Rose, Ken Singleton.Comment: Well, we are, about to hit one of our first big surprises — just how good a player Ken Singleton really was. Shocked the heck out of me. I suspected he was wildly underrated. I know he walked a ton and hit for power. But, I never thought he was in the discussion for best player in baseball. And yet …
1975-79: Ken Singleton
Very Close: Schmidt, Dave Parker.
In the discussion: Morgan, George Brett, Rose.Comment: There he is — Ken Singleton, best player in baseball. Wow. Now, to be fair, he’s only one WIn Share ahead of Schmidt and three ahead of Parker — so really it’s about a three way tie.
Still, he is ahead. He is our official best player in baseball. This is why I really believe it’s important, as baseball fans, to look back at players with a fresh eye and new approaches. Because Ken Singleton was wildly under-appreciated. He punched up a 152 OPS+ from 1975-79 — second only to George Foster. But he got about 200 more plate appearances than Foster, and his on-base percentage was about 50 points higher.
If you had told people in 1979 that Ken Singleton was better — markedly better in many cases — than Parker or Jim Rice or Dave Winfield or Steve Garvey, they would have called you nuts. Many of them still would call you nuts. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Ken Singleton played in a low-scoring era and in a bad hitters ballpark. And he did the things that win games — he got on base, which leads to scoring runs, which leads to winning games. It was that way 1912, and in 1958 and in 1979 and today.
1976-80: Mike Schmidt
Close: Brett
In the discussion: Singleton, Parker, Dave Winfield, George Foster.Comment: The best two players in baseball — third basemen. That’s probably the only time that has happened in baseball history. But with Alex Rodriguez entrenched and Evan Longoria, Ryan Zimmerman, Pablo Sandoval and David Wright entering their primes, it will probably happen again.
1977-81: Mike Schmidt
Close: Singleton.
In the discussion: Brett, George Foster.Comment: Singleton is still one of the best players in baseball — I do think about how long a player has to be either the best or in the discussion to be considered a Hall of Famer. I don’t know the answer … but Singleton has been at or near the top for eight seasons — 1974-81. I think that’s sort of a magic number — seven or eight years at or near the top, to me, makes for a compelling Hall of Fame argument.
1978-82: Mike Schmidt
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Brett, Eddie Murray, Gary Carter.Comment: I have tried in the past as — as a loyal Kansas Citian and as someone who has spent a lot of time with George Brett — to make the argument that George Brett was better than Mike Schmidt. That argument is built around …
1. Brett consistent ability to rise to the occasion. We all know that the “ability” to hit in the clutch is a controversial topic, but it is simply fact that Brett, in his career: (A) Hit the three-run homer that tied the game in ‘76 — leading to Chris Chambliss’ theatrics; (B) Hit three homers in a playoff game; (C) Hit the massive home run off of Goose Gossage which sent the Royals to their first World Series; (D) Had one of the greatest playoff games in baseball history against Toronto in 1985 — four-for-four, two homers, double, remarkable defensive play; (E) Hit home run that gave Royals the lead against Toronto in decisive game; (F) Hit .375 and .370 in his two World Series. That’s pretty good.
2. Brett was the emotional leader of the Royals, everyone understood that. Schmidt was not an emotional leader.
3. Brett played in a crummy home run park so his numbers did not always pop like Schmidt’s did. But for a career, Brett hit 1,119 extra base hits to Schmidt’s 1,115. Brett was the most balanced hitter of his era, one of the most balanced of all time.
But I can see now … Schmidt was better. My arguments are mostly based on emotion. And, sure, emotion is a part of things. But Schmidt was the superior fielder, and he walked so much that he got on base more that Brett despite the difference in their batting averages. His consistency is staggering. And here’s the big difference: Schmidt just PLAYED a lot more than Brett. Schmidt played 150 games ten times in his career, and was close to 150 three other times. Brett played 150 only five times. He was constantly fighting injuries, especially in the later years of his career. At his best — in 1979, 1980, 1985 — I say he was Schmidt’s equal. But Schmidt was at his best more often.
1979-83: Mike Schmidt
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Brett, Murray, Andre Dawson, Robin Yount, Rickey Henderson.Here is Andre Dawson’s one year in the best player in baseball discussion. In these five years, he twice finished second in the MVP voting, won Gold Gloves in center field four of the five years and hit .around .300 four of the five years as well. He really was some kind of player … one of his Hall of Fame issues for me is that he was not a great player after 1983. His knees gave out, and he was moved to right field. He more or less stopped stealing bases. His power numbers dwindled too until he resurged at Wrigley Field in 1987, led the league in homers and RBIs and won the MVP award. I don’t think he was a great player that year, though — he only had 20 Win Shares and did not get on base much. Anyway, I have a more in-depth Hall of Fame thought coming on Dawson …
1980-84: Mike Schmidt
Close: Henderson
In the discussion: Yount, Murray, Dale Murphy, Carter.And Dale Murphy makes his first of four appearances on our list.
1981-85: Mike Schmidt
Very close: Rickey Henderson.
Close: Murray, Murphy.
In the discussion: Tim Raines, Yount, Carter, Pedro Guerrero.Just three Win Shares separated Schmidt and Henderson.
1982-86: Mike Schmidt
Close: Henderson, Murphy, Raines
In the discussion: Cal Ripken, Wade Boggs.Mike Schmidt had 155 Win Shares over those five years — and Henderson, Murphy and Raines all had 150. I think you could make a viable argument for any of the four as best player in baseball. I would make an argument for Dale Murphy as the best … more on that in the Hall of Fame story.
1983-87: Tim Raines
Very Close: Wade Boggs
Close: Murphy
In the discussion: Ripken, Schmidt, Henderson, Keith Hernandez.One win share separated Raines from Boggs … Keith Hernandez was a great player in the mid-1980s.
1984-88: Wade Boggs
Close: Raines
In the discussion: Don Mattingly, Henderson, Tony Gwynn.There’s Don Mattingly — lots of people remember Mattingly as the best player in baseball over that time period. He was great. But did you know that Darryl Strawberry had a better OPS+ during those five years? Sixteen players had a better on-base percentage. Mattingly was a stud … a high-average slugger who played a slick first base. I think he’s in the discussion for best player of the late 1980s, absolutely, but he didn’t walk and he did play the easiest defensive position on the field. I’ll just say, I think he was Top 5.
1985-89: Wade Boggs
Close: Raines.
In the discussion: Mattingly, Henderson, Puckett, Gwynn.What was Wade Boggs greatest season? Was it the year he hit .368 and led the league with 240 hits? Was it the year he hit .363 and led the league in OPS+? Was it the year he hit .366 and led the league in runs scored? Was it the year he hit .357 and also led the league in walks? Hard to pick.
Interesting tidbit: Boggs in his career hit .354 at home … .302 on the road.
1986-90: Wade Boggs
Close: Will Clark, Henderson.
In the discussion: Kirby Puckett, Yount.We’re about to enter our second surprise … or anyway a surprise to me. Was Will Clark the best player in baseball?
1987-91: Will Clark
Close: Barry Bonds.
In the discussion: Henderson, Boggs, Ryne Sandberg.The thing I like about OPS+ is that, at a glance, it gives you a little perspective about the time and place of the player. For instance — pick an OPS. Any OPS. How about .793?
OK, Pete Rose had a .793 OPS in 1971. George Brett had a .793 OPS in 1989. Curt Flood had the .793 OPS in 1967, Al Kaline in 1969, Homer Summa in 1923, Jermaine Dye in 2004 and again in 2009, Juan Pierre in 2001, Cleon Jones in 1968, Charlie Grimm, 1925. Were these seasons the same? Of course not. Were these seasons SIMILAR? Of course not.
Cleon Jones, 1968: 136 OPS+
Pete Rose, 1971: 130 OPS+
Curt Flood, 1967: 128 OPS+
Al Kaline, 1969: 116 OPS+
Homer Summa, 1923: 108 OPS+
Jermaine Dye, 2004: 105 OPS+
Jermaine Dye, 2009: 103 OPS+
Charlie Grimm, 1925: 100 OPS+
Juan Pierre, 2001: 89 OPS+So Cleon Jones in ‘68 had a huge year. Juan Pierre in 2001 was well below average. Curt Flood was an MVP candidate in 1967, Jermaine Dye was just about league average. OPS+ has its flaws, of course — several flaws — but if you just want to tell how good a season someone had based on a quick glance, it is pretty effective I think.
What does this have to do with Will Clark? Well, here are Will Clark’s traditional numbers from 1987-91:
1987: .308, 35 HRs, 91 RBIs, 89 runs.
1988: .282, 29, 109 RBIs, 102 runs
1989: .333, 23, 111 RBIs, 104 runs
1990: .295, 19, 95 RBIs, 91 runs
1991: .301, 29, 116 RBIs, 84 runsSo what do you think? Good numbers, right? I mean, they don’t pop your eyes out or anything — if you were judging Clark’s Hall of Fame case, those numbers would probably register as being good but nothing historically special.
So how is it that those numbers made Clark the best player in baseball for those five years? Well, for one thing, he played half his games in awful hitting Candlestick Park. For another, it was a low-scoring time — those 109 RBIs in 1988 led the league as did those 104 runs he scored in 1989.
Then, you add that he did a lot of things that are not reflected in the traditional stats. He walked quite often — led the league in walks in 1988. Twice in the five-year stretch, he led the league in times on base and in runs created. He led the league in equivalent average in 1988, was second in 1989 and third in 1991. He was an above average defensive first baseman.
People often talk about how it can be unfair to judge previous players by today’s standards. But I think it’s unfair that some of the players who did the things that helped teams win baseball games were so under-appreciated. Will Clark had baseball’s best OPS+ from 1987-91 too.
1988-92: Will Clark
Close: Barry Bonds
In the discussion: Sandberg, HendersonOne more year on top for Clark … four Win Shares ahead of Barry. But Barry will dominate the next decade and a half.
1989-93: Barry Bonds
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Clark, Sandberg, Henderson.Young Barry was 40 Win Shares better than any player in baseball.
1990-94: Barry Bonds
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Frank Thomas, Ken Griffey Jr.And Young Barry was 50 Win Shares better that anyone … it’s funny because I distinctly remember that at the time most people would have said that Ken Griffey was the best player in baseball. In retrospect, Griffey was obviously a great player — and he played center field. But Bonds did everything a little bit better (except throw).
1991-95: Barry Bonds
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Thomas, Craig Biggio, Greg Maddux.Pitchers are rarely in the discussion for best player in baseball simply because they just don’t get the innings. Even Pedro Martinez, who was as dominant as any pitcher ever, did not get the innings to get a lot of Win Shares. Now, Old Hoss Radbourn — he got the innings. In 1884, he put up 89 Win Shares. Just that one year. That will happen when you throw 678 innings.
1992-96: Barry Bonds
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Thomas, Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Greg Maddux.All Barry, all the time.
You know, I guess I never really considered that Houston from 1991 to 2000 had two of the four or five best players in baseball — the only two players, as you will see, who take the top spot away from Barry Bonds — and yet the Astros never even made it to the NLCS. And the Astros had good pitching much of the decade.
1993-97: Barry Bonds
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Thomas, Biggio, Mike Piazza, Bagwell, Maddux, Albert Belle.Every so often I hear someone ask: “Is Frank Thomas a Hall of Famer?” Are you kidding? Frank Thomas’ first full seven years — .330/.452/.604 with OPS+ of 182. I want to repeat that — an OPS+ of ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY TWO. Just as an example …
First seven full years:
Frank Thomas: 182
Mickey Mantle: 181
Albert Pujols: 167
Willie Mays: 164
Barry Bonds: 160
Joe DiMaggio: 159To give you an idea, Roberto Clemente, Al Kaline, Hank Greenberg, and a 100 other Hall of Famers never ONCE had an OPS+ of 182 in a season. Frank Thomas is one of the best hitters in baseball history.
1994-98: Barry Bonds
Close: Biggio
In the discussion: Piazza, Bagwell, Thomas, Belle.It’s interesting watching Bonds career — he was very clearly the best player in baseball in the ten year period from 1989-98. I mean if you are being realistic, nobody was even close. And then, right around this time, things shifted. McGwire and Sosa had their home run race. And players like Biggio and Bagwell and Piazza were closing in on Barry’s dominance.
Decisions are always more complicated than we tend to make them, but you could certainly understand Barry right around this time going: “OK, this is ridiculous. I am the best player in baseball. And if people don’t believe me … well, I’ll give them a show they’ll never forget.” And, like him or not, he definitely did that.
1995-99: Craig Biggio
Very Close: Bonds
Close: Bagwell, Piazza, Mark McGwire.
In the discussion: Belle, Bernie Williams, Thomas.I’ve mentioned this before: I love Biggio’s 1997 season. He played every game. He hit .309. He walked 84 times. He led the league in getting hit by pitch (34 times!). He stole 47 bases. He slugged .500. He led the league in times on base and runs scored. And he did not hit into a single double play.
1996-00: Jeff Bagwell
Close: Bonds, Piazza, Griffey Jr.
In the discussion: Biggio, Alex Rodriguez, McGwire, Thomas, Sheffield.For six straight years, Jeff Bagwell walked 100 times, scored 100 runs, drove in 100 RBIs and had 300 total bases. Nobody else ever did that — except Ted Williams, if you count as consecutive the years before and after his service in World War II. And you should count those … so Williams and Bagwell are the only two to ever pull that off six straight years.
1997-01: Barry Bonds
Close: Bagwell
In the discussion: A-Rod, Jason Giambi, Sammy Sosa, Piazza, Biggio, Chipper Jones.A-Rod will be either close to the best or in the discussion every single year until the present. But he will never quite make it to the top.
1998-02: Barry Bonds
Close: Giambi, A-Rod, Sosa.
In the discussion: Chipper, Bagwell, Sheffield, Manny Ramirez, Bernie Williams, Jeff Kent, Derek Jeter.You know, Jason Giambi did not seem to show great plate discipline when he was a young player. He walked a fair amount in the minors, but in his first three years he walked only 134 times in 336 games — which was nothing special. But in 1998, he started to walk and his on-base percentage jumped up 20 points, and apparently he liked it. From 1999-2005, he averaged 107 walks per year — led the league four times — and his on-base percentage was .436.
1999-03: Barry Bonds
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, Sosa, Sheffield, Chipper.Barry Bonds in those five years: .322/.497/.748 with a 223 OPS+.
2000-04: Barry Bonds
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: A-Rod.Even A-Rod is only barely in the discussion. Barry Bonds for these five years: .339/.535/.781 with a 241 OPS+ and 306 intentional walks.
2001-2005: Albert Pujols
Close: Barry Bonds, A-Rod.
In the discussion: Sheffield, Todd Helton, Bobby Abreu, MannyBManny.Bonds only played 14 games in 2005 and he STILL was the clear winner in total Win Shares. But the idea is to get the best player over the five years, and that was Pujols by a length over A-Rod. Pujols takes over now as the best player in baseball.
2002-06: Albert Pujols
Close: Bonds, A-Rod.
In the discussion: MannyBManny, Abreu, Helton, Lance Berkman.Bill James said 30 Win Shares makes for an MVP type season — Pujols has had more than 30 Win Shares every single season from 2002 to present.
2003-2007: Albert Pujols
Close: A-Rod.
In the discussion: Carlos Beltran, Bonds, Helton, Abreu.The most underrated player of our era is, of course, Bobby Abreu. He’s underrated for many of the same reasons that players like Ken Singleton are underrated. He does underrated things. Abreu’s batting averages are good — he has hit .299 for his career — but his on-base percentages are off the charts because he walks 100 times every year. He doesn’t hit a lot of home runs — between 20 and 30 in his prime, less the last few years — but he hits a lot of doubles and led the league in triples one year. He has a reputation as a guy who is afraid of the wall — and he is not an especially good outfielder — but he is the only player in baseball to play 150 or more games every single year since 1998. Attendance is underrated.
He has never put up a huge RBI season, but has put up between 100 and 110 eight times. He has never led the league in runs scored, but he has scored 100 eight times. He is an intensely boring player to watch — foul ball, take a pitch outside, take a pitch inside, foul ball, foul ball — but he’s brutally effective.
2004-2008: Albert Pujols
Close: Nobody
In the discussion: A-Rod, Berkman, Beltran, Miggy Cabrera, Mark Teixeira.Not that this is too important but it’s something I didn’t know it: Lance Berkman has hit more home runs on the road than he has at home. That’s interesting. Of course, it’s interesting how Enron/Minute Maid Field has gone from an extreme hitters park to a neutral park to even something of a pitchers park over the last decade or so.
2005-2009: Albert Pujols
Close: A-Rod, Chase Utley.
In the discussion: David Wright, Cabrera, Joe Mauer.And that brings us up to the present day. Pujols is still very clearly the best player in the game, I think. But Utley and Mauer are definite candidates over the next couple of years, and so is a guy not quite on this list: Hanley Ramirez. In fact, here is the projection for the best player in baseball after the 2010 season.
2006-2010 (Projected): Albert Pujols.
Close: Hanley Ramirez, Chase Utley, Joe Mauer.
In the discussion: Prince Fielder, Lance Berkman, Adrian Gonzalez, Cabrera, Ichiro Suzuki, A-Rod, Wright, Ryan Howard.
New Video and Da Vinci Code: Jay-Z’s “On To The Next One”
The reliably enlightening Vigilant Citizen has some very interesting theories about the new Jay-Z video “On to the Next One.” Apparently, as illustrated by all the crows, blood drinking and ram’s horns in the clip, Jay is deeply involved in an occult conspiracy to put humanity under the control of the goat-headed dark lord Baphomet. This was also illustrated in the “Run This Town” video, and also, presumably, by his taking part in the MTV video awards show in September.“I believe there are two types of ‘Illuminati artists’: the willing participants (I would place Jay-Z and Lady Gaga in this category) and those who are clueless (Rihanna seems like perfect example). Jay-Z, being the smart businessman that he is, knows that controversy sells. It is thus a win-win situation: Jay-Z gets the publicity he is seeking and the Illuminati continue their mass indoctrination. But what will happen when the elites are done using Jay-Z as a vessel for their sinister symbols? Will they say ON TO THE NEXT ONE?”
Hmm. Gaga, too. Definitely answers a lot of questions. Note to Vigilant Citizen: we’re way ahead of you.
Twenty-ten type
The Week in Type
Hoping that everyone is feeling refreshed, invigorated and inspired after Christmas and New Year. That we are now in 2010 is arbitrary, but it is at the same time a marker, the end of something, and the beginning of something else; a kind of armistice, an opportunity to dump all the bad, and begin a anew with the good. Well, that’s quite enough verbiage from me. May I present to you the first week in type of the new decade.
I sometimes forget that not everyone of the world’s 6-point-whatever billion inhabitants is not on Twitter, so I never announced the Font Game here on ILT. For those who haven’t heard:
Thus far, it has received rave reviews. It’s only ¢99, so give it a try. Some astonishingly quick times posted to the Hall of Fame (faster than I can complete the levels — and I chose the fonts!)
This History of the book Flickr set is the beginning of a wonderfully ambitious project hoping to assemble a collection of some 20,000 photos of initials, ornaments and type from Royal Library, The Hague, and the Archive at Alkmaar. Its author, Dr Paul Dijstelberge, is going to be writing about the project here on ILT, so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, enjoy:
This lovely initial from the golden age of French typography:
And one of my favourites from Antonio Miscomini, whose arrival in Florence marked that great city’s ‘sharing in the magic of Renaissance printing.’*
From the sixteenth century back to the twenty-first: I’d read about the development of Scala Scala Sans before, but was inspired anew by seeing Majoor in person in this inspiring lecture from Martin Majoor on the creation of Scala and Scala Sans.
Recorded in 2005, but still a gem. Be sure to take a look at Martin’s own web site too. And while you over at the Typo berlin site be sure to watch Christian Schwartz discuss his work for ‘T’, the New York Times Style Magazine; Jonathan Hoefler & Tobias Frere-Jones on Better Living Through Typography; and Matthew Carter’s Truth to Materials.
I’ve just ordered a copy of Typographic Conundrums by Harry Pierce:
Don’t forget Baseline Magazine. Looking forward to reading the latest issue, ‘Going Dutch’:
Type links
Bulletproof font-face
Designing for the switch
Lost Caslon type
Some type of wonderful
Font of Champions (League)
Typeface Development Bundle for TextMate
Fonts in Time and Space
‘The End’ title stills from Warner BrosFutura Livefont Motion by Colin Sebestyen
via @naosukebe
In December, the FontFeed devoted a week to Web fonts. One of the highlights is this interview with Christian Schwartz:
And some interesting comments and links in this related Typophile thread, Christian Schwartz on Screen Fonts.
Last year (still feels odd saying that) — and inspired by Tobias Battenberg — I got together with a talented local photographer, Gabomi, and took shots of projected type. Hoping to do another round. Might even sell some of the prints.
A little of Patrick Griffin’s Memoriam:
Rui Abreu’s stunning Orbe
and a little Meta Serif, with thanks to model, Kozue-san (curator at a museum of art by day):
We’ve had ‘fonts’ made from chocolate and eyelashes, even potatoes; and now
Some lovely lettering in these large-scale murals from A love letter for you:
The uppercase, lowercase clock. A wonderful stop motion piece from Rui Abreu of Fountain Type:
Celebrating one of the best magazines ever. Emigre No.70: The Look Back Issue – Celebrating 25 Years in Graphic Design:
Jonathan Barnbrook starts the decade with a bang and a nicely redesigned web site:
Dutch type foundry Bold Monday (Paul van der Laan and Pieter van Rosmalen) has a nice new site too:
Nice to see H&FJ’s Sentinel in use at Digital Podge:
New fonts
FF Yoga & FF Yoga Sans from Xavier Dupré:
P22 Civilite, the work of three designers: Colin Kahn, Richard Kegler and Milo Kowalski. And a beautiful specimen by Joe Newton:
Two fonts from Ale Paul and Angel Koziupa. First up is Biographer
second is Bravissima:
ITC Chino in five weights:
Coming up
Up next is my list of personal favourites from 2009 — scripts, serifs, and sans. I’ll try limiting it to about 30, and will resist calling it ‘30 gutbustingly amazing fonts every designer must have on pain of death.’
Have a great week.
NOTES:
* A short history of the printed word — Chappell & Bringhurst, p. 80
Visit the Font Game web site.
Twenty-ten type
Edgar’s Jack Morris Moment
Based on early returns of published Hall Of Fame ballots, Jack Morris is getting support from about half of the voters who elect players to Cooperstown. Let’s be entirely honest – Morris’ has no case if you eliminate Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. His reputation is heavily dependent on that classic performance, a 10 inning shutout that gave the Twins the championship.
From that performance, the legend of what Morris was has grown. He was a bulldog, an ace, a true winner, and the kind of talent who shines when the spotlight is brightest. Or, at least, so his supporters will tell you. That game drastically altered the perception of what Morris was. As a human watching the game, it’s almost impossible not to get wrapped up in that kind of fairy tale performance. When his team needed him the most, he delivered.
One shining moment of greatness in October is a huge part of Morris’ candidacy. Yet, for these same writers, the performance of Edgar Martinez in the 1995 ALDS is not even considered. And I’m here to suggest that Martinez’s performance may have been even more impressive.
In Game One, the Yankees beat the Mariners 9-6, but it wasn’t for Edgar’s lack of effort. He reached base in four of his five trips to the plate, going 3 for 4 with a walk, a run scored, and an RBI.
In Game Two, the Yankees would again prevail, winning 6-5 in 15 innings. Martinez went 3 for 6 with a double and a walk. Despite his hitting, the Mariners were on the verge of getting swept out of their first ever playoff appearance.
In Game Three, the Yankees decided to stop pitching to him. He was 0 for 1 with 3 walks, scoring a couple of runs as the Mariners would win 7-4 and push the series on.
In Game Four, he had his Jack Morris performance. The Mariners won 11-8, and it was almost entirely due to Martinez. He went 3 for 4 with 2 home runs, the first a three run shot and the latter a grand slam in the bottom of the 8th inning that proved to be the decisive blow. John Wetteland, one of the elite closers in the game, couldn’t keep Martinez from extending the series to a final fifth game.
In Game Five, Martinez went 3 for 6 with a pair of doubles, the last of which ended the series in the 11th inning. In Seattle, it is simply known as “The Double”, and it will stand for eternity as one of the most dramatic hits in baseball history.
For the series, Martinez came to the plate 27 times and reached 18 of them. He was 12 for 21 with 3 doubles, 2 home runs, 10 RBIs, 6 runs scored, and 6 walks. He hit .571/.667/1.000 for the series. He had the three most important hits of the series, carrying the team to victory in Game Four and then coming up with the clutch hit to end it.
In 5 games, two of which went into extra innings, he made a grand total of 9 outs. He destroyed Yankee pitching and was the reason the team knocked off the Bronx Bombers in 1995.
Morris Game 7 performance may have come on a bigger stage, but Martinez’s 1995 performance was every bit as incredibly clutch. With the whole world watching, Martinez proved that he was a dominant offensive force.
So, Morris voters who do not elect Edgar, please call MLB and get a DVD of the 1995 ALDS. Watch that series again. Experience post-season greatness in a form other than a memorable Game 7 start. Pitchers don’t have a stranglehold on amazing October performances, and you’re doing the Hall Of Fame a disservice by not using the same standard for Morris and Martinez.
Best Baseball Books Of 2009
The spring of 2009 flooded us with books on steroid users in various stages of outing. Roger Clemens had already fallen to earth. Alex Rodriguez was taken down, thanks in part to Selena Roberts' book. Manny Ramirez hadn't yet joined them when "Becoming Manny" hit the shelves. We even had a title from clubhouse insider/supplier Kirk Radomski. All those books made headlines. None made our list of Best Baseball Books of 2009. In a quieter corner of the baseball bookstore, you will find many well-written, intriguing titles worth your time and money. Some of them may have slipped under the radar, but what they lack in volume they make up for in substance and style. From the College World Series in Omaha to the dusty minor league towns in the Texas League where two families were forever changed—and entwined—by a wicked foul ball, from the 1860s when the catcher emerged as a folk hero to the 1970s when the Big Red Machine roared to back-to-back titles, we've got the best the year had to offer. via www.baseballamerica.com
Paris, 1962
Images from Paris cafes and nightlife in 1962, the same week Yves St. Laurent's runway show vaulted Dior to new heights. Many scenes around Les Halles (which no longer exists as it did then).
From the collection, a photo of some Les Halles butchers enjoying a drink at Au Pied du Cochon:
Tags: Paris photography
Best Blogs of 2009
Best Blogs of 2009:It’s the only thing I do all year that could legitimately be called link bait: Best Blogs of 2009. A few snippets:
The Awl:The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn’t ask, “How the hell will they make money?” But let’s set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, “Why has The Awl become an internet love object?”On Dustin Curtis:Woe, the personal blog. It’s a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo.On Mediaite:Launching another media blog didn’t sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem.
Apple's "renaissance" is under way
Filed under: Switchers, Cult of Mac
A few months ago, I walked into a Paradise Bakery & Café in Phoenix -- a place known for its excellent food and free Wi-Fi. Like a lot of places with free Internet access, there were plenty of laptop users. What stood out to me was that all but one of the computers was either a MacBook or MacBook Pro.
It's not just me looking through at the world with an Apple-tinged bias. The more places I go, the more I see people using Macs, or at least considering them. The Apple stores in Phoenix are still nearly elbow to elbow with people every time I visit, however the lone Microsoft store in Scottsdale was pretty empty the one time I visited.
There's now data to back up these observations. Macsimum News reports that iMacs were the top-selling desktop for the month of October 2009 according to the NPD Group. After the proverbial jaw-dropping moment, there was quickly speculation as to why Macs finally outpaced PCs when it came to desktops. According to The Daily Gleaner, the NPD Group stated that PC sales were down as a result of the impending launch of Windows 7.
Or, it could also be indicative that Windows users are finally getting fed up.
"If Microsoft Windows is seen as a buggier, less-secure product that is slower, harder to use and ultimately raises costs for everybody, that opens up the market for Apple to gain that high-end segment. . . ," Harvard Business School's David Yoffie said in The Daily Gleaner. "If Windows 7 is not seen as more of an improvement (over Vista) then I think you'll see more erosion at the high end."TUAWApple's "renaissance" is under way originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Stadium Deals Drain Cities
We'll kick off 2010 with a post from Streetsblog Network member Hub and Spokes about the perils of subsidizing stadiums in the hope of getting a big economic return:
This seems like a lesson that every city needs to learn for itself: Stop funding private (sport stadiums) with public money. There seems to be a notion that a stadium is for the good of all and will spur economic development in the surrounding areas. This might be true sometimes, but for the most part stadiums drain the city coffers and produce little economic development. The Metrodome in Minneapolis is a great example. It is an island on the eastern edge of downtown. What economic development has it created? A sea of surface parking lots for game days, that is about it.Cincinnati's Paul Brown Stadium turned out to be a raw deal for taxpayers. (Photo: wallyg via Flickr)
Hub and Spokes's author, Matthew Ides, goes on to cite a December 24 New York Times article that may have escaped your notice in the holiday rush. It reports on how taxpayer-financed stadium deals around the country are blowing up in the faces of the municipal officials who pushed for them, focusing on the particularly egregious example of Cincinnati's Paul Brown Stadium.
In New York, local businesses in the Bronx have complained they're being hurt rather than helped by the new Yankee Stadium, which is designed to encourage fans to spend all of their game-day dollars within the ballpark walls. Meanwhile, Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards project, which centers on a stadium for the NBA's Nets, grinds forward, with one of the last property owners holding out on the site reportedly considering moving out. Both the Nets and the Yankees deals earned a place on our 2009 Streetsie roll of shame.
More from around the network: The National Journal's Transportation Expert Blog wants to know what the three top transpo developments of 2009 were. Orphan Road writes about the perceived right to free parking. And Human Transit writes about how geographic chokepoints incentivize transit use in Seattle.
Andre Dawson
In a couple days the results of the 2010 Hall of Fame ballot will be announced. It’s a compelling ballot, filled with a host of interesting newcomers and long-suffering ballot near-misses such as Bert Blyleven and the player shown here in a card I must have left in my pants pocket for a trip through the washer and drier.
Where are those pants now? I was thirteen and had graduated from Toughskins to Levis by then, I think. I remember how much I revered Levis as a talisman of cool. My brother and I even had Levis posters on our wall, crowding the older posters of Hank Aaron, Jim Rice, and David Thompson. The posters featured worlds made entirely out of Levis. The one on my side of the room was of a Mississippi River scene. The river, the dock, the steamboat paddles: everything was made out of Levis. The coming of Levis into my life coincided with the exit of baseball cards from my life, with a bit of a cross-over between the two eras in 1981, when I purchased a few packs. Some things were cool and some things weren’t, and Toughskins and baseball cards were receding to the latter category. This 1981 Andre Dawson card probably resisted my efforts to push it away. He was the star of my second-favorite team at that time, the exciting and seemingly up-and-coming Expos. They had contended for a division title in 1979 and 1980, and in 1981 when I got this card they would finally claim that title before falling to the Dodgers in the National league Championship Series.
That would, it turned out, be as close as they ever got to a World Series title, and now they’re fading from memory altogether, like a card that keeps going through the wash. I have a winter cap with the Expos “M” (or “ELB”) on the crown, and every once in a while it gets a quizzical look, which I take comfort in since it suggests that the person looking is not, like most, completely unaware of the defunct franchise but is instead wondering what kind of a clown would be walking around Chicago in an Expos tuque. I’ll be sad when the quizzical looks disappear, and that’s one reason why I’ll be happy if Andre Dawson gets a plaque in Cooperstown: The more enbronzed fellows with that M/ELB on their cap in the Hall, the better. (Right now there is only one: Gary Carter.)
Which brings us back to the ballot. Aside from helping keep alive the memory of Les Expos, does Dawson deserve mention on the required 75% of ballots? Rather than approach this question by naming my own hypothetical ballot and then asking for yours, I’m going to try coming at the enjoyable yearly quandary from a different perspective: a pre-draft list. If you could have any player to build a team around, whom would you choose? You will get them for their whole career, for their peak and their decline and even for all their various on- and off-field controversies. For example, say you are considering Mark McGwire for your list. His statistical credentials are monstrous. He would also bring you, as a fan of the team, a summer that would seem as it happened to be a once-in-a-lifetime joy. But then you’d also have to live through the diminishing complication of that joy, if not a feeling that the whole thing had been a lie. Knowing all that, would you put him at the top of your list?
Below is my own top ten pre-draft list, with some notes. If I had to make out a HoF ballot, I’d probably go with the first five names.
1. Bert Blyleven. A bona fide top-of-the-rotation ace who stayed productive for 22 years? Not a bad start to build a team around, I say.
2. Roberto Alomar. My preferred hypothetical team-building strategy is to start from the middle out, first finding guys who can field the crucial middle infield and centerfield positions well while hitting as productively as corner players. I actually had Alomar ranked first, but the incident in which he spit on an umpire sours the idea of him as my franchise player just enough for Blyleven to sneak by him into first.
3. Tim Raines. Around this time last year, I took a stab at advocating for Tim Raines. More recently, much brighter baseball analysts (namely, Neyer and Posnanski) have weighed in on arguably the second-best leadoff hitter of all-time and the man most deserving of joining Gary Carter as an enshrined Expo.
4. Alan Trammell
5. Barry Larkin. Bill James has Barry Larkin ranked ahead of Alan Trammell in his Historical Abstract (Trammell is ninth and Larkin is sixth—behind only Honus Wagner, Arky Vaughan, Cal Ripken, Robin Yount, and Ernie Banks and just ahead of Ozzie Smith). I went with Trammell ahead of Larkin here because of my impression that Larkin fairly frequently limped through parts of a given season. For my team, I’d rather be able to know with some certainty that I’d be looking out every game at the ninth best shortstop of all time than having to hope from game to game that the sixth best shortstop would make his way out there. (But both deserve to be in the Hall, I think; I also think that only Larkin will make it on the strength of the writers’ vote, which may be another reason why I ranked Trammell higher.)
6. Edgar Martinez. Hit like Joe Dimaggio, fielded like a fire hydrant until, early on, the Mariners took the glove out of his hand altogether. If you were building a hypothetical team around him, you’d have to be an American League team, I guess. But man could he rake.
7. Andre Dawson
8. Dale Murphy. Bill James ranks Murphy as the eleventh-best centerfielder in history and ranks Andre Dawson as the nineteenth best right-fielder. I’m still going with Dawson over Murphy, though, mostly because of his longevity. Murphy had a higher peak, but Dawson’s peak wasn’t too shabby, and he remained productive for considerably longer.
9. Jack Morris. He’s a distant second to Blyleven among the pitchers, but second nonetheless. I think a solid starter who showed an ability to rise to the big occasion is worth inclusion on my list.
10. Dave Parker. Like Alan Trammell, Parker seems to be on the brink of fading out of sight altogether in the yearly balloting. He deserves better. When I was a kid, in the late 1970s, Parker looked like a sure Hall of Famer in the making, and while he stumbled a little after his late 1970s peak, he came back and had a few more very good years.
So who’s on your top-ten list? If I get enough lists I’ll tally them up by assigning ten points to the number one pick, nine points to the number two pick, and so on, and see who gets the most points. (Here’s a link to the 2010 ballot again.)
Errol Morris: Interviews
A new book of conversations with Errol Morris done throughout his career. The tables have turned!
Tags: books Errol Morris
Explaining Metropolitan Diary
“Sometimes when I read Metropolitan Diary items on Mondays, I don’t necessarily ‘get it’ because they involve people I don’t have anything in common with and don’t feel like understanding,” writes someone today, who has chosen to spend the morning grappling with meaning in this most-aged of newspaper columns. “I’ve read it six times now and can’t make any sense of it. And I love sarcasm!” Actually, we can help!
The item goes like this.
“DEAR DIARY:Recently on a beautiful day, I was walking south on Fifth Avenue. The street was very crowded, and while we were waiting for the light to change at 49th Street, the woman behind me said in a distinctly British accent, “I wonder where the diamond district is.”
I thought I would be helpful, and turned around and said, “Oh, that’s on 47th Street.”
Her male companion replied in an equally distinctive British accent, dripping with sarcasm, “Well, thanks a lot.”
J. J. Levine”Even a careful reader will have to slow down and visit this item a few times to discover why it is “charming” or “humorous.” The joke, you see, lies in the understated presence of gender.
The woman, you see, is wondering where the diamond district is. Why does she wonder this? Because she enjoys diamonds, as all members of her sex do, and would most likely prefer to own some and/or more of them.
She is traveling with a male companion, who, in his statement to the writer, reveals implicitly that he is not just her traveling companion but most likely her spouse or at least lover. There are two implications in this:
1. At the very least, he will now be forced to spend his afternoon accompanying her as she looks at diamonds, which is beneath him, or irritating to him, or simply boring to him.
2. Most likely, however, the implication is that he will be forced or persuaded or manipulating into the purchase of diamonds by his female partner. Because women do not have money of their own, and are dependent upon the income of men, and because they also frequently withhold sex in exchange for goods, he has been put in a difficult position by the revelation of the location of the diamond district.
This is very very humorous! Most likely because presumably the deeper joke is that the woman’s dowry was not extensive enough to provide for the purchase of very many diamonds. She is not worth as much in diamonds as her father paid the man to marry her! Unfortunately, the writer is not inquisitive enough to convey how much cattle the woman was worth at the time of her marrying-off. But, yes, like I said: very humorous!
Politico's Revenue Will Be Over $20 Million For 2009
Politico will earn a solid operating profit on over $20 million in revenue for 2009, according to SEC filings dug up by Rafat Ali at Paid Content.
Politico's operating revenues were $19 million through the first nine months of the year, according to the filings. Operating profit was $901,000. The company should have its revenue well above $20 million for the full year. (Full spreadsheet is here.)
See Also:
- I Just Absolutely Can't Wait To Buy An Apple Tablet... It's Going To Save Print!
- The Summer's Best Print Ads
- Politico Owner Tries To Completely Kill The Washington Post
James Cameron’s Pocahontas Avatar
I probably should give a SPOILERS warning but the movie is so predictable that this really shouldn’t spoil anything. (Seriously, the movie is about the amazing visuals and the plot is just enough to not get in the way.)
From Buzzfeed.
Faith For People Who Don't Like To Think
Brit Hume, with all the inane earnestness he can muster, advising Tiger Woods:"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith," Hume said. "He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."Perhaps Tiger Woods and Brit Hume are great friends. But if they are, it seems that this is the sort of advice you deliver in private, not before an audience of millions. Thus assuming that they are not great friends, I don't know how anyone of actual sincere faith takes to television to revel in this kind of blank-minded idoltry.
Here is religion as chauvinism, and some will argue that all it ever is. I don't know. Nor do I know much about Buddhism, and I would bet the same about Hume. He should stick to his area of expertise, whatever that might be. Televangelist to the stars does not suit him. He lacks the allure. He lacks the luster.
Best of Zorn: Faces
Here's something I feel comfortable saying: I will never, as long as I live, cover another coach who makes as many funny faces during his press conferences as Jim Zorn. Now, does the ability to make funny faces qualify one to serve as an NFL head coach? Heck no. But it sure did keep things interesting around Redskins Park, and made me LOL on more than one occasion. Joe Gibbs never made me LOL. Then again, he went to the playoffs twice in four years. Anyhow, I have no idea whether these are truly the Best of Zorn, but here are 14 faces I'll never forget.
Keynote Bingo redux
It's an ultra-portable tablet running a thin-client version of Leopard (like the iPhone), syncing through an iPod dock connector (the only port on the device) to a 30GB "NAND drive" which shares documents over wifi using Apple's new Google-backed .Mac service and sports a multi-touch 10" screen as it's primary interface. This rumor is objectively perfect, the superset of all Apple rumors ever. via hello.typepad.com This is more or less exactly what I still think the maclet will be, just three years later than expected. It's reminiscent of Apple replacing the nano with the mini, which was Apple's #1 selling product when it was killed. Now it's the trusty MacBook's time to go, so the familiar product matrix will remain intact. It's going to come in at the $800-$1000 range and will not represent a quantum leap in industrial engineering -everything is made by Foxconn anyway.
Seattle’s Championship Banner
I have never toured the confines of Safeco Field. I watch a few Mariners games throughout a given season, mostly when the Rays visit the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve never asked anyone who would know, but I do not believe the Mariners have a flag flying or pennant hung commemorating their 116 win season. Though I wish they did.
Ask most baseball fans: what is the ultimate team goal in any given season?
The responses will be something along the lines of ‘World Series’, ‘winning the title’, ‘championship’, or a synonym thereof. Fair enough. That goal is certainly shared throughout the league itself and it’s probably the correct answer. I pose this question to Mariner fans: would you trade that 116 win season for a World Series title? And to fans of the Phillies: would you trade your world title for a 116 win season? Both sides likely reply no. In part because familiarity breeds comfort and most people hate change.
Let’s try something different with the next set of questions. Which is more impressive? Which is more valuable? Which should be more respected?
Consider this: winning 116 of 162 games means the team won 72% of their games. Winning the 11 games required to become World Series champions in the post-season could mean the team won 58% of their post-season games if each series went the distance. We expect that as sample size increases, the true talent levels will be unveiled in more clarity. Compared to 19 games, 162 is a large sample. 162 is a pretty small sample compared to what we would want if our goal was true talent levels throughout.
A 162 game schedule also represents more time in which injuries could occur, but there’s also the ability to add additional players throughout a regular season. In the post-season, what you have is what you can use. Also in the playoffs, the team quality in which you play against rises – or at least it should – and the amount of home games is decreased. Although, that might be a wiling sacrifice for teams who in turn get to use their top three or four starters instead of starting a so-so-option every fifth day.
None of this is groundbreaking and some may call it obvious. There is a large sector of college football fans – casual and diehard – who very much want a playoff. A real playoff, they say. It makes sense, depending on how you weigh the BCS with the potential selection committee. The idea is a bit odd though. Why is it that we need a post-season tournament to tell us which team is the best? Is that not what the regular season is for? In the case of two or more teams that seem equally qualified, then the means of additional play as a way to give conclusion to the crown seems adequate, but if a team wins 116 games, they were A) incredibly lucky and B) incredibly good.
So I’m torn. It seems the majority place unfair significance on the victor of the final game rather than the 160 before. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong and I’m not even sure there is a right or wrong. I do hope Seattle has a ‘116’ flag though.
Some questions for discussion:
1. Is the ultimate goal to win, or to win the title?
2. What amount of regular season wins would you trade a World Series title for? What about the lowest amount of regular season victories with a World Series title for 116 regular season wins?
david levine 1926 - 2009
portrait of david levine in his brooklyn heights studio
image by gasper tringale
illustrator and artist, david levine, passed away on december 29th, 2009 at the age of 83,
after suffering from prostate cancer and other illnesses. he was known for creating literary
caricatures for the pages of the new york review of books(NYRB) for more than 50 years,
defining the look of the magazine with memorable comic illustrations of such figures as
william shakespeare and john updike - one of the artist's most frequent subjects.
born in brooklyn, david levine studied at the brooklyn museum of art, pratt institute,
the tyler school of art at temple university in philadelphia and the eighth street school of new york
with hans hoffman.
besides his work for the NYBR, levine's work has also appeared in such publications as
esquire, the new york times, the new yorker, rolling stone, sports illustrated, the washington post
and more.
a gallery of levine's works for the NYRB, dating back to 1963, can be seen in an
online archive here.
l: george w. bush, originally appeared with the the new york review of books' 'mirage of the empire'
january 12th, 2006, volume 53, no. 1
r: george w. bush, originally appeared with the the new york review of books' 'are we safer?'
march 9th, 2006, volume 53, no. 4
l: john updike, originally appeared with the new york review of books' 'easy come, easy go'
november 19th, 1981, volume 28, no. 18
r: john updike, originally appeared with the new york review of books' 'cock-a-doodle-doo'
april 11th, 1968, volume 10, no. 7
l: che guevara, originally appeared with the new york review of books' 'goodbye to all that'
july 17th, 1997, volume 44, no. 12
r: margaret atwood, originally appeared with the new york review of books' 'mystery women'
april 27th, 1989, volume 36, no. 7
david levine, self-portrait, 1968
Happy New Year!
Since I don't drink alcohol, don't care at all about college football (sorry Sis), and eat black-eyed peas about once a week anyway, New Year's is ALL about the resolutions for me. And this blog (and my related sewing habit) will not escape unscathed from the resolution juggernaut, oh, no no no.
First of all, if you scroll allllll the way down and look at the right-hand column, you'll see that I started this blog in May of 2005. 2005, people! That's like two decades in blog years. This current blog layout is the internet equivalent of a 1998 Toyota Tercel. Sure, it'll get you where you need to go, but very slowly, and you can't plug your iPod into the radio. So I'm hoping to do a refresh of this blog's "look" before the fifth anniversary. (I'd also like to be better about responding to blog comments/email, even if I only manage to do so once a week ...)
Sewing-wise, I have two resolutions: to set aside a specific time every week to sew (right now, early Sunday morning is looking good) and to sew three things from my fabric/pattern stash for every item that requires new fabric or a new pattern. (See that pic up above? That's about 80% of my current fabric hoard.)
I've resolved, too, to be a better sewing planner -- no more using up precious sewing time running out to JoAnn's because I don't have the right zipper. I'm going to make regular online orders of zippers and thread and other necessary notions, and if I don't have the right color of whatever, well, that project will just have to wait until I do.
I want to be more diligent about adding my project pictures to the Vintage Pattern Wiki and writing things up on Pattern Review -- I hope that's a resolution you all share, too!
It would be great if I could say that I'm going to turn overnight into a more careful sewist -- that all my patterns are going to match at the seams, that I'm never again going to press something into submission instead of unpicking it and doing it over, and that I'll always take my time and make a muslin first. But if I did, I'd be setting myself up for failure ... that's just not gonna happen in 2010.
What are your sewing resolutions? And more to the point, how are you going to keep yourself on track with them? (I need hints!) Leave them in the comments.
Nuthin' but a G thang
Dr Petra has an excellent write-up of the new study which has been widely reported as showing there is 'no genetic evidence for the g spot', but in fact indicates that there is 'no genetic evidence for thinking you have a g spot', which is quite a different thing and doesn't bear particularly well on whether this famed point of sexual ecstasy really exists.
The research is a twin study, which looks at the differences in how human traits vary between identical twins, who are genetically identical, and regular twins who share, on average, only 50% of their genetic information. The differences between how the trait varies between the two types of twins indicates how closely controlled the trait is by genetics in that sample.
The rationale behind the research is that if the g spot is a genuine fixed anatomical feature, then it should be more likely to be influenced by genetics, as other such features are.
However, this study didn't measure anything anatomical, it just asked the women whether they thought they had a g spot or not with a single question: “Do you believe you have a so called G spot, a small areas the size of a 20p coin on the front wall of your vagina that is sensitive to deep pressure?”.
This is a bit of an odd strategy because we're not necessarily the best guides to our own internal anatomy.
This was demonstrated in 1998 when a study by surgeon Helen O'Connell and colleagues dissected several dead bodies and found that the clitoris was much larger than had been thought for thousands of years and in fact had nerves and blood vessels that extend deep within the body.
Crucially, the sexual experiences of women throughout history had not provided a reliable guide to the anatomy of the clitoris and it took a detailed look at the body's structures to work this out. This suggests that asking people whether they think they have a particular feature may not be a reliable guide to whether they do.
Dr Petra's write-up gives an excellent account of the history of 'g spot' concept and discusses how this study fits into the bigger picture.
Link to 'Where have all the g spots gone?'
January 3, 2010
Some Thoughts for the New Year
This past week, while a lot of us were on hiatus, there was a good bit of discussion going on in the blogosphere about the role stats played in baseball. This eventually led to “The Mike Silva Chronicles” posts over at insidethebook.com, in which Mike Silva asked 10 questions and Tangotiger answered them. They’re without a doubt worth reading.
One of these posts in particular had to do with “Stats Saturation” in which Mike Silva asked:
Do you believe the advanced metric community is saturating the market with stats, to the point where progress that was initially made with the evolution of traditional stats is now minimal at best. Wouldn’t it be wiser to allow some of the current metrics to gain acceptance before you “advance the current advanced metrics” (corny phrase so to speak).
FanGraphs has been around for almost 5 years and this is a question which is frequently on my mind.
For the most part, FanGraphs does not create new statistics. It’s more of an aggregation of what I consider the best publicly available sabermetric work on the internet from the minds of people like Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, Dan Szymborski, Dave Studeman, Sean Smith, with contributions from many others including our own staff.
There are certainly a lot of stats available on FanGraphs. By my count there are well over 100 different metrics available for batters and pitchers, which are generally broken into logical sections which make them a bit easier to handle. Some of these stats have caught on more in the mainstream, while others I’m sure will continue to only be used among the sabermetric crowd.
With so many stats, I can certainly understand the mentality of why bothering with additional stats. The truth of the matter is that there really are different categories of stats and even those who are not particularly interested in sabermetrics are very much interested in scouting statistics.
Four of the stats sections on FanGraphs are devoted entirely to scouting statistics. These include the Pitch Types, Plate Discipline, and Batted Ball sections. The data in these sections is based literally off what Baseball Info Solutions scouts see. There are no fancy calculations and everything is fairly intuitive. Was the ball in the strike zone or out of the strike zone? How fast was the pitch and what type of pitch was it? Is there room for some disagreement on these? Of course. There’s always going to be some disagreement between scouts, but you really can’t blame the formulas.
Which brings us to the stats which are based on formulas. Many of the metrics on FanGraphs are rooted in “linear weights”. wOBA, wRC, wRAA, wRC+, FIP, and the Batting component of our Value section are all entirely linear weight based. These all use linear weights to measure different things, or in some instances the same thing expressed in a different way. But at their heart they’re all measuring bucketed stats in runs.
Now neither scouting stats nor linear weight based stats are in my mind particularly controversial. There are however controversies on how linear weights are adjusted, such as by park or by league. And then when scouting stats and linear weights are combined, it seems to be a particularly hot button issue. UZR for instance relies on both scouting data (where the ball landed, how hard it was hit, its trajectory) and turns that data into linear weights depending on how the ball was classified and then adjustments are also applied.
UZR and the Pitch Type values are really statistical scouting. They’re all about putting a value on what you see.
So getting back to Mike Silva’s question of if it’s better to wait for acceptance before introducing new stats, I’ll say it depends. The standard linear weight based stats on FanGraphs aren’t going anywhere. I really don’t think it’s worth introducing an entirely new named set of statistics for what might be a very small increase in accuracy. The current ones may from time to time be tweaked slightly but they’ll remain under the same familiar names and will represent the same things.
Though when it comes to stats that really do bring a new point of view, whether it be with new scouting data, or drastically different models then I’ll say they’re welcome at FanGraphs. The other type of stat that I’m not opposed to adding is one that makes an existing model more accessible, which I felt was the case with wRC+.
With all that said, I’d just like to throw out a quick reminder for the new year about thinking. Please take the time to understand the stat you’re using before you use it in an argument and before you criticize it. It’s best when the stats available on this site are used in thoughtful, open minded discussions that enhance your knowledge and most importantly your enjoyment of the game of baseball.
30 Best Blogs of 2009
While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?
Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson's death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous.
Sigh.
But frankly, I've got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn't tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.
With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn't we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?
So it's time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title "Best Blogs" from this annual list and change it to "Most Notable" blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year's list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.
So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:
[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]
30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It's a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it's remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis' personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Marie puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X. (See also: Topher Chris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn't be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.28) Gotcha Media
Every year it seems like a site should emerge to take the video aggregator trophy, but the space is still a hodgepodge of sporadically embedded YouTube clips. Gotcha Media was the closest to the quintessential destination for finding video events we remembered through the year, whether that be Kanye crying on Leno or Michele Bachmann leading a anti-health care prayercast. (See also: Gawker TV and Mag.ma.)27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online. (See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to "Best Twitterers of the Year," a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: "Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn't invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that."25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what it is not. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene. (See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)24) Best of Wikipedia
...Coprolalia, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Stendhal Syndrome, Dude, Mopery, Sokushinbutsu, Tyvek, Shm-reduplication, Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, Pica, Kayfabe... (See also: Double Tongued.)23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn't start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetics. (See also: NYT Opinionator.)22) Script Shadow
"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process," said Tim Robbins' cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word. (See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn't enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do "something interesting" with the medium for a couple months, but there's still nothing to show for it.) It's tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture. (See also: Today Show Tumblr.)20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known "members of a group can make fun of that group and you can't" rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose. (See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You're Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH's book deal.18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff's Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, "ironic quote-heavy" txt-speak. Many people suspected that "Carles" was actually Tao Lin, since Carles' writing was so similar to Lin's affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.17) Reddit
There's a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internet comment thread, I would have said, "Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40." But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it. (See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)15) Information Is Beautiful
Is it? Yes, but only in the hands of those who know its power. (See also: Infosthetics, Data Blog, and NYT Bits Blog.)14) Snarkmarket
It looks like a conspiracy that Snarkmarket has made this list a few times now, but unlike most blogs that become sedentary in their success, it just keeps innovating. This year, Robin Sloan quit his job at Current TV to become (among other things) a fiction writer -- and one of the most fascinating ones on the scene in some time. Matt Thompson had been gigging at the Knight Foundation, but recently hopped to a new gig at NPR. With them being so busy, Tim Carmody settled in as the new scribe of ideas. If they let me give it a tagline, it would be "The BoingBoing it's okay to like." (See also: Hey, It's Noah and Waxy.)13) Nieman Journalism Lab
Where were these guys when we needed them? Sure, it's another think tank, but Nieman Journalism Lab has been putting its not-for-profit money where its mouth is by also breaking news, such as the item about Google developing a micropayments sytem, the crack-ass idea from the Associated Press to game search, and little factoids like NYT's most frequently looked-up words. It also happens to be the only place still hiring journalists. (See also: Reflections of a Newsosaur and Newspaper Death Watch.)12) Anil Dash
At some point during the year, I asked Anil for an explanation in the upsurge of blog posts on his site. He said it was merely recognizing an opening: there are so few people writing intelligently about technology today. True! Daring Fireball may have the links, and TechCrunch may have the coverage, but there are scant intellectuals left in the space. When it was announced last month that he was leaving Six Apart to work for a new government tech startup within the Obama administration, the techno-pragmatism all made sense. (See also: Obama Foodorama.)11) Slaughterhouse 90210
Slaughterhouse 90210 combined lowbrow TV screencaps with highbrow literary quotes, making it kind of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of Tumblr blogs. Another comparison: an intellectual I Can Has Cheezburger. Seeing a quote from, say, The Bell Jar underneath a Friends screencap is pleasantly shocking -- especially after you realize the quote fits the show perfectly -- and a reassurance that it's okay for smart people to like stupid things. Could be a good candidate for a book deal, if it weren't for those pesky copyright issues. (See also: The G Maniestoand Fuck Yeah Subtitles.)10) Letters of Note
We've known for a while that the best blogs are dedicated to a precise nano-topic, but there is also a new thread emerging: the blog dedicated to disappearing technologies. The tagline of Letters of Note, "Correspondence deserving a wider audience," says it all. There's Hunter S. Thompson starting a screed "Okay you lazy bitch," there's Kurt Vonnegut writing his family from Slaughterhouse Five, there's the letter from Mick Jagger asking Andy Warhol to design album cover art, and there's J. D. Salinger's hand-written note aggressively yet delightfully shooting down a producer who wants to turn Catcher in the Rye into a novel. (See also: Significant Objects, Iconic Photos, and Unconsumption.)9) Mediaite
Launching another media blog didn't sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem. But not even six months after launching, Mediaite was already on the Technorati 100, eventually landing somewhere around #30 on a list of players who have been there for years. Sure, it can go a little bananas with the seo/pageview bait, but it's also one of the few entities in the whole bastardly New York Media Scene to actually have the will to take on Gawker (or its pseudo-sibling, The Awl). (See also: Web Newser and Politics Daily.)8) Clay Shirky
There were only, what, a dozen or so essay on his blog this year? But one of them, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, caused such a little earthquake in the industry that tremors were still echoing months later. Shirky is the only guy in the whole space who doesn't sound like he has an agenda, who doesn't have a consulting agency on the side that he's pumping his half-baked theories into. (See also: Umair Haque and The Technium.)7) OK Cupid: OK Trends
Even the breeders in the crowd will be fascinated by the data porn on display here. (See also: Music Machinery.)6) Harper's Studio
The book industry is about to go through the same disruptive changes that the music industry set upon a decade ago -- this, it seems, almost everyone agrees upon. But just as with the previous natural cultural disaster, no one is sure how to prepare for the earthquake. The editors at the new Harper Studio are the most likely candidates for turning all the theory behind "the future of books" into actual functional products. An impressive list of inventive works on the horizon hints at their agenda, but the blog, which is something of a clearing house for discussing everything that has to do with the future of publishing, is like an R&D lab for print. (See also: Omnivoracious, The Second Pass, The Penguin Blog, and Tomorrow Museum.)5) Eat Me Daily
As one competing food blogger put it to me, Eat Me Daily is the Kottke of food blogs. Which, if you want to follow that obtuse metaphor, makes Eater the genre's Gawker and Serious Eats its Engadget. And which, if you understand any of that at all, means that this blurb can end now. (See also: Eater and Serious Eats.)4) Mad Men Footnotes
As I wrote earlier, Mad Men Footnotes revived the moribund genre known as tv recaps.3) TV Tropes
If you don't know TV Tropes, it's too bad, because I probably just ruined your life. If you've ever recognized a hackneyed plot device on a tv show and thought "I wonder if anyone else has thought of this," the answer is: yes, a lot. I don't even know where to suggest starting in this labyrinth, but try entries like Butterfly of Doom or Chekhov's Gunman or Bitch In Sheep's Clothing -- or just hit the random item generator. My dream is to have Tarantino spend a month here and come out with his Twin Peaks. (See also: Television Without Pity and Urban Dictionary.)2) The Awl
The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn't ask, "How the hell will they make money?" But let's set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, "Why has The Awl become an internet love object?" I've done the math, and I have a theory, involving at least two factors: 1) It winks at all the sad internet conventions while both debunking and adopting them at the same time (Listicles Without Commentary and those Tom Scoccha chats are the best example). And 2) it is willing to go to bat for the unexpected without sounding like one of those intentionally counter-intuitive Slate essays (Avatar and Garrison Keillor are two good recent examples). In short, it's just less dumb than everything else. Even Nick Denton joked about it at launch, and I don't know how they'll survive either, but The Awl already exists in an admirable pantheon that includes Spy and Suck. (See also: Kottke and Katie Bakes.)1) 4chan
Go ahead, scoff. But I will tell you this: no site in the past year has better personified the internet in all its complex contradictions than 4chan. Blisteringly violent yet irrepressibly creative, vociferously political yet erratic in agenda, 4chan was the multi-headed monster that got you off, got you pissed off, and maybe got you knocked out. When I interviewed moot in February, I discovered a smart kid who had seen more by the age of 16 than someone who actually lived inside all six Saw movies. People tend to think of 4chan as pure id, but there are highly formalized rules (written and unwritten) within the community. Inside all the blustery fury of the /b/tards, there is more going on psychologically than we are equipped to understand yet. (See also: Uncyclopedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Know Your Meme.)Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Matt Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.
The Real Problem: NYT Lets Freelancer David Pogue Bend Ethics Rules. It's Time To Either Enforce The Rules Equally, Or Change Them.
In a comment on our website several minutes ago, NYT technology columnist David Pogue vehemently defended himself against accusations of NYT ethics rules violations.
But Pogue not only got the rules wrong, he didn't both mention the other rules the NYT has that govern public speaking -- most of which he has gotten around, without any consequence, by getting the NYT's approval.
Here's the real problem: While the NYT has fired talented young freelancers like Mike Albo for technical infractions of its byzantine rules, it has chosen not to enforce those same rules on Pogue, simply because he's too valuable to discipline, or to fire.
In fact -- despite his continued insistence that he follows all the NYT's ethics rules -- Pogue has a speaking engagement lined up at MacWorld next month that yet again breaks them. But, as usual, the NYT will look the other way.
Here's part of what Pogue declared in his most recent comment to The NYTPicker:
Edward (and other commenters) miss a key point here: the Times DOES NOT prohibit staffers from speaking to corporations in general!
The rule is this: "Staff members should be sensitive to the appearance of partiality when they address groups *that might figure in their coverage.*"
In other words, you can't accept payment for speaking at a company I MIGHT WRITE ABOUT (or its competitors). So Raytheon is fine--I have never written about Raytheon, and never will.
But it is, in fact, Pogue who has missed a key point here. Here is what the NYT rule Pogue cites says in full:
Speaking before community audiences or educational groups can benefit our company by helping the public understand what we do. But before appearing before an outside group, we must be sure we are not likely to create an actual or apparent conflict of interest or undermine public trust in the impartiality of our journalism.
In other words, the rule Pogue cites as justification? It has only to do with speaking before "community audiences and educational groups." And the NYT even restricts those sorts of appearances, in the next paragraph of the rules:
Staff members should be sensitive to the appearance of partiality when they address groups that might figure in their coverage, especially if the setting might suggest a close relationship to the sponsoring group. Before accepting such an invitation, a staff member must consult with newsroom management. Generally, for example, an editor who deals with political campaigns might comfortably address a library gathering but not appear before a civic group that endorses issues or candidates. An environmental reporter can appropriately speak to a horticultural society but not to conservation groups known for their efforts to influence public policy.
Still, Pogue says that his appearances in front of for-profit corporations -- transportation and accommodations provided at the company's expense -- don't go against NYT rules.
"Raytheon is fine," Pogue declares.
But while the NYT rules allow speaking to profit-making institutions with the paper's permission, they state that the NYT -- not the company -- must pay the speaker's expenses.
To avoid an appearance of undue closeness, staff members may not accept invitations to speak before a single company (for example, at a corporate executive retreat) or an industry assembly (such as organized baseball's winter meeting) unless newsroom management agrees that the appearance is useful and does not undermine our reputation for impartiality. In such a case, our company should pay any expenses; no speaker's fee should be accepted.
In other words, NYT rules would allow Pogue to speak at a Raytheon retreat, as he did in November at Disney World, with the paper's permission -- but only if the NYT pays his travel and accommodation expenses.
Anyone want to bet whether the NYT paid for Pogue's trip to Disney World?
As for Pogue's forthcoming speech at MacWorld in San Francisco next month -- well, here's the rule that should theoretically keep Pogue from appearing:
Staff members should not accept invitations from outside our company to speak where their function is to attract customers to an event primarily intended as profit-making.
MacWorld is, of course, a for-profit annual trade show that charges large admission fees to people and companies that follow products made by Apple. Pogue has been a frequent speaker at the annual event. The NYT rule directly prohibits such speeches.
The NYT is surely well aware that Pogue's MacWorld appearances goes against the rules, but has apparently made a decision to turn a blind eye to his trade-show work.
When The NYTPicker reported on a Pogue appearance at a Consumer Electronics Association trade show last June, then-NYT spokeswoman Catherine Mathis issued a statement that gently chastised Pogue for his appearance, but acknowledged it would do nothing to discipline him:
David Pogue is not a Times staff member, but that, as the Ethical Journalism policy says, freelancers are held to the extent possible to the same standards as staffers when they are on Times assignments. This speech was not a Times assignment, but Mr. Pogue has been reminded of the policy provisions barring acceptance of speaking fees or travel expenses from all but educational or other non-profit organizations that do not have lobbying or political activity as a major focus.
It's true that the vast majority of Pogue's appearances play by the NYT rules, such as speeches to libraries, educational conferences, and so forth. Those are the speeches that dominate his schedule.
It's when Pogue's appearances go against the point of the NYT rules (such as the Raytheon talk, and the forthcoming MacWorld speech) that the NYT's double standard becomes clear. The NYT will ignore Pogue's activities, while policing the behavior of other NYT contributors to the point of firing them for a single infraction -- or even just the prospect of one.
This past week, according to Public Editor Clark Hoyt, the NYT "parted company" with freelancer Joshua Robinson because of a suggestion that he was attempting to get free airline tickets from an airline magazine to do travel stories. Nowhere in Hoyt's account of what happened was there any suggestion that Robinson ever received a free ticket from anyone. While he may have broken NYT rules, there doesn't appear to be a significant ethical lapse in his behavior.
Meanwhile, the NYT permits all of Pogue's outside activities for one reason: he is hugely popular with readers and with advertisers, at a time when the NYT is struggling to survive. Pogue's power to attract readers to the NYT website is virtually unmatched by any of his peers.
There's no question, as several commentators have suggested this week, that the NYT's ethics rules need adjustment in its new, freelance-driven universe. "The system is not working well," Clark Hoyt conceded in today's column.
In fact, the system is broken. It's clearly unfair to make outside contributors (even ones as successful as Pogue) conform to the same strict regulations that govern staffers who get all their expenses paid by the NYT -- not to mention their union salaries and health-insurance premiums.
But as long as the current rules are in force, the NYT will apparently continue to let Pogue keep bending them with its permission. It needs to either enforce the rules equally on all contributors, or change them. We vote for a change.
Book Review: The Book of Basketball
When I was a kid, I wore glasses (and looked something like this (second photo)), and when I played sports, I wore goggles. And when we put up a basketball hoop in my backyard, my friends and I prentended to be the Lakers (local team), and because I wore goggles, I pretended to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (with skyhooks and everything). Which is a little strange for a 10-or-so year-old white kid of average height, but there you go. (Somewhere in my life I have an autographed photo of Kareem, sky-hooking over Wilt. It’s awesome.)
As a child, basketball was my favorite sport to watch. I drifted away from sports when I went to college (I in fact could get quite self-righteous about how professional sports is a tool for narcotizing masses). About 4 or so years ago, I got back into watching sports. I tried out football for a season, but it didn’t really take. Basketball has, and, for better or worse, I root for the Warriors (local team).
One of the sad truths of my current life is that I don’t believe any of my friends are basketball devotees. Football, yes, even baseball, but the graceful game is lost on my companions. So, I’ve turned to the internet to get my fix when it comes to basketball discourse, and as part of that, I’ve become quite a follower of Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, whose columns are the most reliably funny writing since vintage Dave Barry. It turns out that while Simmons follows all sports (including, it seems hockey and even a little international soccer), basketball stokes his passion most, and his latest tome, the 700-page The Book of Basketball, is his love letter to the NBA.
Though I’ve completed the book, I’ll admit I read about 80 or so percent of it. It’s crammed with stuff, including exegeses on players and teams from so long ago that I had trouble caring. But the bulk of the book engages, is funny, and informative. You do have to look past his Boston homer-ism (and his strange antipathy for Kareem, even though as a kid, Simmons wanted to change his name to Jabaal Abdul-Simmons), his needless porn, stripper, and Vegas references, and his inscrutable support for Allen Iverson, a player who violates pretty much everyone of his tenets for great basketball, and ranks extremely high in his Pyramid (Simmons’ suggestion for a new Hall of Fame). If you do, you’ll learn a lot about basketball, it’s history (pre-ABA, during ABA, and post-merger with the ABA), what players and coaches themselves have said about one another, and why, when you study it closely enough, Russell is simply better than Wilt. You’ll also laugh, as Simmons is nothing if not funny.
There’s no way I can recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t love basketball. Those who do have likely already heard about it. I don’t know if it’s worth the full price, but if you do check it out from a library, be prepared to renew it at least once if you plan to get through it all.
Why I Don’t Like “Mad Men”
I’ve already documented the horrible destructive powers I have over popular entertainment. I can bring about the end — not just abrupt cancellation, but slow, painful decline — of bands, TV series, and movie or book series just by liking them. To date I’m responsible for the break ups of The Pogues, the Pixies, and Soul Coughing, as well as the downfall of “Alias” and “Battlestar Galactica.” I suspect I had something to do with “Lost”’s weak second season as well. So it was with some trepidation that I recently started to watch the first season of “Mad Men”, after hearing people rave about it for the past few years.It turns out that I didn’t need to worry, because I watched the first three episodes last night, and I just can’t get into it. Now, fans of the show should be thrilled, since I’ve just guaranteed it’ll run as long as “Desperate Housewives,” “Gray’s Anatomy,” “American Idol,” and “Survivor,” just to name a few other long-running series that have managed to avoid my Galactus-like gaze. But you can’t tell someone “I don’t like that thing you’re a fan of” without its coming across as a challenge or an insult, so I feel obliged to explain.
I don’t care about any of the characters
The first episode is very well-structured, so by the end of it I felt that I knew what the situation was and what all the characters were about. I just didn’t care at all about what happened to them. Contrast it with “The Sopranos,” another series about a bunch of deeply flawed characters with no obvious “good guy:” I could see what the characters’ problems were, but I was intrigued about how deep the problems went and how they were going to resolve them. And I gave up on that series when the characters became more annoying than intriguing; why watch a show about people who just keep doing stupid or downright awful things and never learn from them?Hello, My Name Is Sexually Manipulative Office Woman
Just after the first 45 minutes, I could make a fairly reasonable prediction of what each character’s story arc was going to be — and after checking out the Wikipedia version, I could see that my predictions were depressingly accurate. (To be fair, there’s been a good bit of cultural diffusion going on as well; even without watching a show this popular, I knew going in that infidelities and secret identities and babies were going to come into play, and that one of the characters grows a beard).It’s not as bad as something like American Beauty, where each of the characters seems to be a cliche whose depth turns out to be a different but just as shallow cliche. But the characters still have their one note that they keep hitting, from Painfully Good-Looking Ad Exec Who’s Conflicted And Has a Mysterious Past, to Mousy Girl From the Steno Pool Who Doesn’t Want to Be Limited In Her Life Choices Just Because She’s a Woman, to Young Asshole and Closeted Gay Guy.
The Epcot Effect
Disney parks, especially Epcot Center, are my ideal vacation, but whenever I mention this to anyone I get the reaction “I’d rather go some place real.” I can see where they’re coming from, and the reasons I disagree would fill a whole other post. But I get the same feeling from “Mad Men.” The set design, costumes, and music choices are all just about perfect. But it’s not as if the 60s aren’t well-documented. If I want to watch a show about ad men in the 60s, why don’t I just watch “Bewitched”? If I want to see demeaning attitudes towards women, why not “I Dream of Jeannie?” If I want to see excessive smoking, there’s “The Twilight Zone.”At least in those series, you get a better idea of what people really put an emphasis on. “Mad Men” feels to me like everything incidental about the 60s crammed together and made the focus. The pavilions in Epcot’s World Showcase aren’t really the countries, they’re the first thing that someone in America thinks of when he thinks of those countries, all crammed together in one small place. And “Mad Men” isn’t really the 60s, it’s how people in 2007 imagine the 60s: “hmm, people were sexist and racist and smoked a lot, and the clothes and the cars were really cool.”
Did I mention I’m casually racist?
And I don’t want to imply that the series is all just about the incidental stuff — clothes and cars and architecture and cigarettes. But when they deal with the deeper aspects of America in the 60s, it’s given the same treatment. Scenes feel to me like a TV biopic, where the screenwriter is desperately trying to cram a chapter’s worth of thematic material into one scene. The end result is that the ideas that would have resonated with me if they’d been mentioned casually or incidentally, I instead feel like I’ve been bludgeoned with. The characters don’t just smoke; the plot of the pilot episode is about selling cigarettes while knowing about the health risks. A woman can’t just be subtly reminded of the double standard of sexual promiscuity between men and woman; we have to see a Cronenberg-like scene with a leering gynecologist whose every single line of dialogue repeats the point. Closeted Gay Guy is completely established as such in his first scene, but we still have to see him in a strip club leering at other men in case anybody didn’t catch on. Again, kudos to them for not going with the most obvious cliches, but I still felt myself, in scene after scene, yelling at the screen “OKAY YES I GET IT LET’S MOVE ON.”I’m still a 14-year-old boy in a 38-year-old man’s body
And yeah, it’s got to be acknowledged: I like plot-heavy stuff, and have never been a big fan of character studies. I’ve jokingly said that a show’s got to have robots, spaceships, time travel, or magic to hold my interest (and Tony Soprano’s dreams were just supernatural enough to keep me occupied), but what I really want is something that keeps everything moving. Again, all of the stuff in the first few episodes of “Mad Men” felt like incidental stuff made focus: these characters’ quirks might interest me if they were doing something more interesting than being 60s people.So I can definitely understand what other people see in the series. Like I said, the music and the costumes and the production design are just outstanding. And I’ll gladly watch an hour of “The Clone Wars” no matter how weak the story, just as an excuse to see cool sets and costumes. (And a huge part of why “Lost” is such a big deal for me is that whole early 70s aesthetic that they get just right). There’s just not much else there for someone like me. So all of you “Mad Men” fans can breathe a sigh of relief; it’s probably going to run for a decade at least.
Google AJAX Search API Example Python Code
Shared by BudFor whatever reason, there aren’t many examples on the net of Python code that can be used with the Google AJAX Search API. I’m not really sure why this is and perhaps I’m missing something, but for future reference here’s some sample python code.
A simple example of how to use the google ajax search api in python
dothebestyoucananddontlookback: Stop! playing with my delirium
dothebestyoucananddontlookback:
Stop! playing with my delirium
The Lost Decade for the Economy
From The Washington Post:
The U.S. economy has expanded at a healthy clip for most of the last 70 years, but by a wide range of measures, it stagnated in the first decade of the new millennium. Job growth was essentially zero, as modest job creation from 2003 to 2007 wasn’t enough to make up for two recessions in the decade. Rises in the nation’s economic output, as measured by gross domestic product, was weak. And household net worth, when adjusted for inflation, fell as stock prices stagnated, home prices declined in the second half of the decade and consumer debt skyrocketed.
The next big thing will start out looking like a toy
One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago. It wasn’t as if those former top companies were complacent – most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced.
The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.
Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype. (Christensen has many more examples in his books).
This does not mean every product that looks like a toy will turn out to be the next big thing. To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes. Obviously, products get better inasmuch as the designer adds features, but this is a relatively weak force. Much more powerful are external forces: microchips getting cheaper, bandwidth becoming ubiquitous, mobile devices getting smarter, etc. For a product to be disruptive it needs to be designed to ride these changes up the utility curve.
Social software is an interesting special case where the strongest forces of improvement are users’ actions. As Clay Shirky explains in his latest book, Wikipedia is literally a process – every day it is edited by spammers, vandals, wackos etc., yet every day the good guys make it better at a faster rate. If you had gone back to 2001 and analyzed Wikipedia as a static product it would have looked very much like a toy. The reason Wikipedia works so brilliantly are subtle design features that sculpt the torrent of user edits such that they yield a net improvement over time. Since users’ needs for encyclopedic information remains relatively steady, as long as Wikipedia got steadily better, it would eventually meet and surpass user needs.
A product doesn’t have to be disruptive to be valuable. There are plenty of products that are useful from day one and continue being useful long term. These are what Christensen calls sustaining technologies. When startups build useful sustaining technologies, they are often quickly acquired or copied by incumbents. If your timing and execution is right, you can create a very successful business on the back of a sustaining technology.
But startups with sustaining technologies are very unlikely to be the new ones we see on top lists in 2020. Those will be disruptive technologies – the ones that sneak by because people dismiss them as toys.
AOUON Mystery Posters
Archivist Lincoln Cushing has been doing the painstaking work of combing through and cataloging the All Of Us Or None Poster Archive, and we'll all be the better off for it when we have access to this massive and impressive collection of left political posters. He's been hitting a couple stumbling blocks along the way in terms of sussing out the origins of some of the posters, and hit on the smart idea of calling on our collective braintrust to fill in some of the blanks. He's put up a page of "mystery posters" on his website, which you can check out HERE, both to see cool posters, but also offer help in deciphering the origins of these images. Bookmark the page, as Lincoln will be adding posters as he needs help figuring them out.The poster shown here has cool artwork by cartoonist Spain Rodriguez, but does anyone know what the "May 5th Legal Defense" was for?
blog all oft-played tracks
These are a few of the tracks I added to iTunes in 2009 and listened to the most. Not all of the music is new, but it's all got a date-added between 2009-01-01 and 2009-12-31 and a fairly high number of plays, so that's good enough for me. This post would be a one-line perl script if I used last.fm.
(Here are the MP3s below as an .m3u playlist)
1. Pet Shop Boys: Love Etc.
Shawn makes no apologies for hating the Pet Shop Boys, but this is the new track I listened to the most this year, so there you go. They've been a favorite band of mine for about ten years, mostly because I like pop music and I like their lyrics. This track is also a stand-in for Lady GaGa's Poker Face which I don't actually own, but find completely fascinating. Pop music!
2. Zomby: Where Were U In 92?
This track is an amazing signpost to the hardcore rave music of the early 1990's, but it's entirely modern and produced by someone too young to have had firsthand experience of that scene. I found it via k-punk, who has this to say:
That's why, whatever its intentions, whatever its official status as a side-project, Zomby's Where Were U In 92 amounts to a refreshingly honest libidinal confession, an admission that British dance music is still haunted by the hardcore continuum. Think about why it's impossible to have imagined a Jungle producer in 92 do Where Were U in 76: it isn't only that 92 had so broken with the whole frame of reference of sixteen years before, it's that the headlong rush into the future precluded such retrospection.3. Moderat: A New Error
This is one of those tracks that Shawn brings to the office that makes me have to put down whatever it is I'm doing for about ten minutes. The bass here, heard over a good pair of speakers, is deep like the best of Sleeparchive.
4. Laurent Garnier: Wake Up
I include this because it's part of the two-disc Logic Trance 2 compilation, something from 1994 that I finally reacquired this year. Most of the collection is loaded with floating, detached trance music that hadn't in all cases found a dancefloor yet. It's all deeply nostalgic for me, found through my roommate Paul who helped form a lot of my musical tastes as I was hitting escape velocity from industrial music. The whole compilation is a classic, this track from Laurent Garnier is a taste.
5. Depeche Mode: Wrong
The video for Wrong is like a terrifying bad dream. The song is some of the darkest anything I've heard come out of Depeche Mode, incredibly abrasive and confrontational.
6. Venetian Snares: Sajtban
I saw Venetian Snares play perform in Oakland with Otto Von Schirach, and loved the performance. Again, abrasive and confrontational, but also fast and squiggly.
7. Slayer: Angel Of Death
Another one of those memories dredged up from my youth, this one from Brian, the slightly white-trashy headbanger dude who lived up the street from me in San Jose when I was 14. Other bands I got from Brian include Obituary, Death, Godflesh, and Entombed. He also owned all the Iron Maiden EPs that were just Nicko McBrain funny-talking apropos of nothing. I've started pulling out some of this old metal lately, fixating on some of the more experimental or weird bits that fit cleanly with my later electronic tastes. Angel Of Death pretty much just rocks the fuck out.
8. Sam Cooke: Chain Gang
On a completely different trajectory, Sam Cooke is amazing. The ooh-hah beat of Chain Gang is astonishing.
9. Birdy Nam Nam: The Parachute Ending
I don't recall where I found the video for this, but it's a lovely piece of very French-seeming animation that instantly reminded me of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. It didn't even register that the "Birdy Nam Nam" in the video title was the name of a band or that this was a music video, and I wondered why the music wasn't included in the credits. Dur. Excellent techno track though.
10. Blaqstarr: Hustress (snippet) feat. Rye-Rye
I'm not sure why this is here. I got interested in Blaqstarr tangentially through bingeing on The Wire for a few months, and this short slice of omnious hip-hop sound collage is incredibly interesting.
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