randomwalks/dj

Nicolas Lampert Big Bill Haywood (orange paper) $20 William (Big Bill) Haywood (1869-1928) was a renowned labor leader whose personality and dedication to working class people were matched by his towering physical stature. Haywood was committed to industrial unionism, direct action, strikes, and socialism. He was a leader of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America. He organized workers during the Colorado labor wars, the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912), and the Paterson Silk Workers Strike (1913.) Haywood, along with many other IWW members, was imprisoned under the Espionage Act for speaking out against war and for posing a threat to capitalism. He escaped from jail and fled to Russia, where he lived until his death. one color screenprint 19"x25" medium stock, acid free paper (orange color) signed

Originally posted by Nicolas Lampert from Just Seeds, on January 16, 2010 10:26 PM

It turns out not only is the FBI good for counter-terrorism, domestic law enforcement and various other stuff. They're also good at national comic relief.

Remember a few days ago the State Department released a photograph of what Osama bin Laden might look like today, having aged several years since we saw him last? I kind of figured they'd churned it out of some super-expensive, high-tech photo-age-o-matic device we've been spending homeland security dollars on.

Well, 'fraid not.

It turns out the technician who produced the picture did so by combining bin Laden's features with a photograph of another 52 year old guy he found using Google image search. Said FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman: "The forensic artist was unable to find suitable features among the reference photographs and obtained those features, in part, from a photograph he found on the internet."

And it gets better.

It wasn't just any random 52 year old on the web. It was a prominent left-wing Spanish politician named Gaspar Llamazares.

After the FBI's admission the US Department of State has withdrawn the image.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 16, 2010 8:12 PM

Kindle fans punish publisher for delaying ebook releases by giving books one-star reviews.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Justin Blanton, on January 16, 2010 8:16 AM

From Recipes

[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]

There are certain foods that go hand-in-hand—that are so permanently paired, that if you've had one, you can't have helped but have had the other. Peanut butter and jelly, bread and butter, oil and vinegar. And because cheese is my very favorite food, it was only a matter of time before I was exposed to the jelly to cheese's peanut butter: dulce de membrillo, or membrillo for short.

Membrillo is that dark apricot-colored, jam-textured paste made from quince and served with cheese, especially Manchego. One sees it most often in Spain, but also Portugal, Italy, and some South American countries. The quince fruit is related to the apple and pear, and indeed, it tastes like a marriage of the two, although unlike its cousins, it is too hard to be eaten raw.

Quince paste tastes to me like a combination of dried apples, sweet pears, and honey—there is something definitively floral about it, though its only ingredients are quince, sugar, and water. Its texture is more firm than a jam; in fact, you could serve a slice or cube of it and it would stay intact, reminiscent of the jellied fruit squares you find in French patisseries.

Membrillo is a usual suspect on a cheese board, next to the crackers, just beyond the walnuts, and nudging up against a wedge of uninterested Camembert. This is the only place I had ever seen it. But I decided to buy it, stick a spoon in it, taste it, and then go from there.

This first recipe is a delight, and inspired by another traditional use of membrillo: pastries, where it is used in a similar manner as guava paste. It is an apple and pear turnover, spiced with membrillo, so that the floral spicy-sweetness of that honey accent perfumes the entire filling. It is subtle, but definitely present: a perfect secret ingredient. I use bought puff pastry so the recipe is easy. Absolutely perfect for breakfast.

Apple and Pear Membrillo Turnovers

-makes 2 turnovers, enough for 2 to 4 people-

Ingredients

1 tablespoon butter
1 Golden Delicious apple, diced small
1 Red d'Anjou pear, diced small
2 tablespoons membrillo
1 tablespoon sugar
pinch salt
1 tablespoon flour
2 sheets frozen puff pastry, thawed and very cold
1 egg and a splash of milk, whisked together for egg wash

Procedure

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. In a sauté pan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the apple and pear, and sauté for two minutes, until they start to soften.

3. Next, add the membrillo, sugar, and salt, and sauté another three minutes on low heat. The fruit should start to be quite soft.

4. Add in the flour and sauté on low for another minute or two, until the mixture has a pie-filling look to it. Set aside to cool.

5. Take the puff pastry out of the fridge, and unfold it. Brush all four edges of both pieces of pastry with the egg wash. Spoon half of the fruit mixture into the center of each puff pastry, arranging it so that it makes a diagonal line across the pastry. Fold one corner over the line of fruit to the opposite corner, and press down to eliminate any air trapped within the turnover. Press the sides together, and then use the tines of a fork, or a ravioli cutter, to seal the edges. Place the pastries on a Silpat-lined baking sheet, brush lightly with egg wash, dust lightly with sugar, and bake 35 to 40 minutes, until puffy, golden, and steaming hot within.

About the author: Kerry Saretsky is the creator of French Revolution Food, where she reinvents her family's classic French recipes in a fresh, chic, modern way. She also writes the French in a Flash series for Serious Eats.

Originally posted by Kerry Saretsky from Serious Eats, on January 16, 2010 8:00 AM

This will be my last post before MR get’s back home, but it’s been a lot of fun and certainly won’t be the last time, so let me know what you’d like to see in the future.

I’ll try to answer any dangling questions left from the week and am leaving you with a weekend project. Watch the video, read the recipe below, call some friends, and have a Spring Roll Party. These go well with every thing from Green Tea to Martinis, and they’re addictive, so plan on at least four per person.

Thanks again to MR and all of you. Have fun – MP

BBQ PORK AND SHRIMP SPRING ROLLS

Yield: 25 rolls

Filling:
Napa Cabbage, chiffonade	1/2 #
Carrot, Jullienne	1/2 #
Scallions, sliced thin	1 cup
Ginger, minced	3 TBSP
Chinese BBQ Pork, cooked,julienne	1/2 #
Shrimp, poached, peeled, deveined	1 #
Seasonning mixture:
Oyster sauce	1/4 cup
Hot Bean Paste	1/4 cup
Hoisin Sauce	1/4 cup
Rice vinegar	1 TBSP
Forming:
Spring Roll Wrappers	1 pack 25 ea.
Eggs, cracked and whisked for wash	4 ea.

Mise en Place
1. Poach, shock, peel and devein shrimp, chop into chunks
2. Prepare other filling ingredients as described above
3. Make seasoning mixture
4. Combine filling ingredients with seasoning mixture

Assembly
1. See accompanying demonstration for assembly

Frying
1. Heat oil in pan deep enough to accommodate 2-3 times the volume of oil until 350F and cover rolls by at least 1”.
2. Drop several rolls at a time in to hot oil and cook for 2-3 minutes, turning with a metal spoon or spatula to ensure even browning.
3. When rolls are golden brown and crisp, remove from oil and drain on absorbent paper towels to remove excess oil. Serve immediately with dipping sauce of your choice.

Originally posted by mpardus from Ruhlman.com, on January 16, 2010 7:44 AM

Originally posted by Will from A Test Of Will, on January 16, 2010 7:44 AM

while most laptops and computers tow the line of standard styling, asus has teamed up with the danish
design house bang & olufsen to create a sleek aluminium design. the design goes beyond mere aesthetics
and implements some of b&o trademark interaction touches, like the dual touchpads. this feature allows
the user to essentially control the computer through multi-touch with both hands working simultaneously.
the laptop has a large 18.4 inch screen that makes it ideally suited for moving from room to room, rather
than from home to the office. the screen is flanked by b&o speakers that complement the advanced video
hardware within.

http://asus.com
http://www.bang-olufsen.com

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on January 16, 2010 7:43 AM

A class hierarchy of expression nodes: it's so much the prototypical use case for run-time method polymorphism that it's almost a cliché. One can close one's eyes and picture the way parts of the expression tree interact in rich, complex ways, shaped by the very types of the nodes themselves, in a dynamic dance of late bindings and virtual methods. Switch statmement, get thee behind me. Et cetera.

I'm building one. And I'm having almost too much fun doing it. In between trying to use the strengths of Perl 6 and keeping true to the original program I'm porting, I've discovered an important thing: Ovid is right about roles.

Specifically, I'm having trouble picturing how I would cram all the type information into my expression node class hierarchy, were I not using roles. The roles definitely help manage complexity in my case.

Here's a pretty diagram of my class hierarchy.

It's a flat beast. Apart from everything deriving from Exp, I have only one case of old-skool inheritance in the diagram. And even that one is more making a point than actually shortening the code.

Then there's all the colorful dots, representing the roles I'm mixing into my types. Some are for convenience (like the blue ones), others are vital for my program (like the green ones), and the rest are somewhere in between on the convenient/vital scale.

I even have a case of inheritance between two of the roles! Which means, in practice, that those classes with an orange dot also act as if they had a red dot. Very handy.

During the infancy of Rakudo, I've gotten used to learning to live without various features. Were I to do what I'm doing here without using roles, I could use two other mechanisms. The first is regular inheritance. The very thought gives me a bit of vertigo; I don't think I'd be able to turn the colored dots into base classes. Definitely not all of them at once; I'd have to choose. And that choice would affect the entire design of the program, probably resulting in loss of clarity.

The second way I could compensate for not having roles would be by using .can a lot. The presence of a given role in a class is isomorphic to the presence of a given method in a class. So that would definitely work, but I don't think I would like it as much. There's something to be said for declaring is and does relationships at the very top of the class declaration.

All in all, I'm very happy about the way things work. I'm wondering whether, had I not read all of Ovid's posts on managing the complexity of class hierarchies with roles, I would have come up with this design myself. Maybe, maybe not. But anyway: thanks, Ovid! This rocks!

A still-open question for me is whether the topmost type, Exp, should be a class or a role. Synopsis 12 has this to say about when to use roles:

Classes are primarily for instance management, not code reuse. Consider using C when you simply want to factor out common code.

I am using Exp for code reuse, and for giving all of the other classes in the hierarchy a common base type. So I guess I could indeed turn it into a role. But it's just that... I don't see a reason to do so, and I still feel instinctively reluctant about it. Maybe I'm a bit hung up about it being a class hierarchy.

This point has come up before on IRC, and I've yet to hear a satisfactory way to resolve it: when faced with making a base type a class or a role, which way should one go?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Planet Perl Six, on January 16, 2010 7:38 AM

The biggest myth about starting a tech company in NYC is that it's difficult to hire top tier programmers. At Hunch, based in New York, we've hired a team of incredible MIT engineers and are constantly interviewing for new talent for the "pipeline" and being on the board of Etsy, I've also help with hiring engineering talent.

The reality is it's hard to hire top tier engineers no matter if you're in CA, NY or Vancouver, where Flickr was based. Good engineers come from all parts of the world -- Cal Henderson was living outside London when he started working on Flickr -- so at some point need to be recruited to move to a startup hub. Those are primarily CA and NY, with some other cities having their own smaller scenes (Boston, Austin, Pittsburgh...)CA has a much larger tech scene and much better weather. NYC is a more exciting, diverse city with a strong tech scene. And there's plenty of back and forth -- John Allspaw just moved out to New York from SF to work on Etsy, joining Chad.

But what NYC is actually missing is not engineers. In NYC you can find lots of great engineers, visual designers, and great publishers and contributors to social media. But in CA I seem to find far more people with multiple skills - engineers who blog and dabble in design, designers who can do great UI but also great UX, etc. These multidisciplinary people are the ones who hack together brilliant new stuff, can innovate across the board, see various avenues of attack, and are indispensable at startups. It is these hybrid people that we are always looking for at Hunch and for whatever reason find them much more often in CA than NYC.

I think the problem in NYC is primarily cultural -- a lot of MIT talent is hardcore eng. and the designers often come out of print (publishing and advertising are huge out here) NY web devs are more than capable of adapting to CA-style, multidisciplinary approach. At Hunch, we want everyone to embrace the social and technical tools that they are using and building -- blogging, tweeting, contributing to open source. This is what I think what NYC needs more of.

(BTW -- we're hiring a Front End developer/designer at Hunch -- multidisciplinary of course!!)

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on January 16, 2010 6:52 AM

It's time to protect those oddballs again. Last time, I discussed a storage and display option for one of Allen & Ginter's boxtoppers, the Cabinet card  This time, let's do the same for the other boxtopper, the N43. The term N43 refers to the American Card Catalog designation for the original 1889 Allen & Ginter The World's Champions large sized card set. These cards are slightly larger than your standard baseball card a 2 7/8 by 3 1/4 inches in size. Since these cards are just about the only ones in tis size there isn't a card page designed for them. I've found that the four-pocket 3 1/2 x 5 1/4 pages work well with this set:



Ok, so there's a whole lot of empty space up there in those pages. I don't mind all that much because the 3 1/2 inch width keeps the cards fairly snug in the page and at 4 per page you can fit a 15 card set into 4 pages. While I have taken an Xacto knife to plastic sheets before to customize them, I don't recommend doing it for this set. This is why:


The pockets just aren't big enough to fit two N43s in them , the top one pokes out of the sleeve and covers up the one above it. I suppose if you were adventurous, you could customize a one pocket page into a  six pocket page and get the 15 card set into 3 pages, but that's a lot of work to cut down one page.Take the easy route and just get the 4-pockets.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on January 16, 2010 5:29 AM

Here's a website dedicated to the 1976 Topps Baseball Cards.

I think Felix needs to choke up a little more.  I also think his number should be retired.

Main Mets Police page
Follow us on twitter @metspolice
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send ideas/guest columns to shannon at metspolice.com

Please visit www.metspolice.com and help stop black uniforms.

Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 16, 2010 4:00 AM

Good morning.  Seems quiet in Flushing, and today is supposed to be redesign day (redesign night actually) so once the coffee kicks in and I clear my daddy duties for the day, away we go.

My DVR tells me "Mets Yearbook 1976" is coming soon.  That should be fun.  In the meanintime, here's some material from the films SNY is using to fuel Mets Yearbook.  Let's call this one "Mets Yearbook 1969."


1969 Mets Highlight Reel from Brad S on Vimeo.

Osh41 did send me a ton of pictures from the Mets fans gathering, I will post those and Peter's as soon as we move to the new place.  As a reader, expect that at some point you come to the site this weekend and it looks different.  Other than that, should be smooth sailing.  I'm using a web design company called Minaya-Wilpon and supposedly they are the best.

Main Mets Police page
Subscribe to The Mets Police by Email
Get Mets Police via reader/RSS
Follow us on twitter @metspolice
Facebook page
Contact: shannon at metspolice.com (Guest posts welcome!)
Share Photos: pictures at metspolice.com

Please visit www.metspolice.com and help stop black uniforms.

Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 16, 2010 3:13 AM

The one residual effect from Moneyball that I admire the most about Billy Beane is how significant he remains in baseball pop culture. Anytime he makes a signing, trade, or draft selection, everyone – even his grandmother – takes two looks at the transaction. That notion is in overdrive with his latest move.

As recently as 24 hours ago, the Athletics’ third base depth chart featured: the always-injured Eric Chavez; the more-than-svelte Tommy Everidge (now Mariners’ property); and not-really-a-third-baseman-at-all Jake Fox. Tonight the order looks a bit different as the A’s acquired Kevin Kouzmanoff and Eric Sogard from the Padres for Scott Hairston and Aaron Cunningham.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Kouzmanoff is everything that the Moneyball caricature of Beane disliked. He rarely walks (4.9% career) and expands his strike zone often. A raw offensive line of .261/.308/.435 causes him to appear as a below average batter, although our park adjustments have him in the black over the last three seasons combined. Kouzmanoff’s offensive game is more pop-based than a 13-year-old’s diet. The park he’s moving from isn’t much friendlier than the one he’s frantically fleeing and he’s moving to the American League. Don’t expect too much of an upswing. Kouzmanoff’s value comes from his position and ability to defend the position better than the average. Give him credit for consistent WAR values, if nothing else, as he’s been worth 2.7 or 2.8 WAR for each of the past three seasons. He’ll probably be worth 2.5-3 wins next year as well and has three seasons of team control remaining.

Sogard, on the other hand, walks like crazy. He turns 24 in May and plays second base while batting lefty. In 2008 he walked in nearly 13% of the time in High-A and 11% in 2009 at Double-A. He’s not a power hitter and Marc Hulet pegged him as the left-handed part of a platoon or future utility player.

In exchange, the Athletics give up two seasons of Hairston and six of Cunningham. Both are right-handed outfielders with Hairston holding the ability to play a Major League quality center right away. Hairston was acquired from the Padres just last July and his run with Oakland can’t be described much kinder than “awful”. Hairston held a .279 wOBA in 248 plate appearances with the A’s, which was probably in the 1% percentile of unlikely results given his .390 wOBA in 216 plate trips with San Diego.

The A’s have a loaded outfield already: Coco Crisp, Ryan Sweeney, Rajai Davis, and Travis Buck. Clearly they have the means to go with a three-centerfielder outfield already, and Hairston was not going to DH with Jack Cust returning. This leads to Cunningham. His status as the most desirable outfield prospect within the system was in danger with Michael Taylor sitting near. Cunningham turns 24 years old in just three months and he has nothing to prove at the Triple-A level anymore (an .899 OPS through nearly 460 plate appearances).

Acquired in the Dan Haren trade, Cunningham was blocked by Matt Holiday last year and seemingly lacked opportunity to break into the Athletics’ lineup this season as well. It’s silly to say that Beane sold high on Cunningham. Instead, it seems he sold before Cunningham lost too much of his previous luster. Whether the A’s simply held low evaluations of Cunningham nowadays or he was lost in a numbers game is a mystery.

This move improves the Athletics in 2010, but not enough to make a serious push for the division. Kouzmanoff for Hairston is fine, it’s the other two pieces that I’m unsure of. Unless I’m missing something or too optimistic on Cunningham, I think the edge has to go to San Diego here.

Originally posted by R.J. Anderson from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 15, 2010 4:07 PM

At Serious Eats we like our football just like everyone else. But we can't help it. We do add our own competitive wrinkle, namely—you guessed it—food. We'll let the players settle football bragging rights on the field. But we can judge which city reigns supreme when it comes to serious vittles. So without further adieu, here's the NFL playoffs, Serious Eats style.

Arizona Cardinals vs. New Orleans Saints

Muffaletta. [Flickr: Mr TGT]

Yes, the Cardinals win the pizza battle—no contest, really. Phoenix has Pizzeria Bianco, New Orleans has...well, no pizza worth speaking of. But football fans cannot live by pizza alone, and in every other food category New Orleans stomps Arizona. Long live muffalettas, po'boys, barbecued shrimp, roast oysters, gumbo, etouffe—ahh, I could go on forever. New Orleans is moving on.

Baltimore Ravens vs. Indianapolis Colts

Steamed crabs. [Flickr: cogdogblog]

On the face of it this is a toss-up, food-wise. Baltimore has steamed crabs, pit beef, chef Cindy Wolf, good corned beef at Attmann's, and some fine breakfast spots. Indianapolis might have better corned beef, good cafeterias, solid barbecue, and fried chicken. I think the Ravens are the winners here by a heritage pig's nose.

Dallas Cowboys vs. Minnesota Vikings

Fried chicken and chicken-fried steak from Babe's Chicken Dinner House. [Photograph: Ed Levine]

I must admit I am not all that objective when it comes to this particular contest: I hate the Cowboys. But I am going to try to be objective here and make the contest all about the food. Dallas (and its sister city Fort Worth) has fine barbecue, Tex-Mex worth a detour, a thriving chef and restaurant scene with talented folks like Dean Fearing and Sharon Hage, excellent burgers, chicken-fried steak, and fine soul food. Minneapolis, its sister city St. Paul, and the rest of Minnesota have excellent breakfast places like Al's, exemplary sticky buns, good Juicy Lucys, a decent new American restaurant culture, reasonably good pizza at Punch, fried walleye and pike, and lots of good pie. But in the end the Vikings are done in by lutefisk and hot dish. As much as it kills me, the Cowboys win rather handily.

New York Jets and San Diego Chargers

Pizza from Motorino in NYC. [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

New York has, well, just about everything you could ask for in a food city: pastrami, pizza, bakeries, not to mention a chef and restaurant culture that keeps getting better. The Chargers have fish tacos, Mexican food, Hodad's for burgers, and—well, actually, that's it. The Jets may have a rookie quarterback, but Mark Sanchez just has too many food weapons in his arsenal or at his disposal. The Jets simply turn the Chargers into table scraps when it comes to food.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on January 15, 2010 2:30 PM

Shared by Eve
seriously?

In case there was any prior doubt, Craig Newmark has attained a significant degree of prestige in the tech world.

The latest sign: When the Obama administration wants to chat with industry leaders about ways to use technology to improve things like education, immigration and the census, Newmark is on its short list.

"Governments have budget constraints that provide plenty of motivation to cut costs and create efficiencies," said Time Warner chief executive Jeffrey L. Bewkes in the Washington Post. "They need to have access to the new best practices developed through competition by industry. That is the idea here and what industry can offer the public sector."

(As for what the government can offer itself, look no farther than the fact that the 2010 census will be conducted on paper, despite the $600 million spent by the Census Bureau to insure that wouldn't happen.)

Aside from Newmark, other attendees are expected to include Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes (no word why Mark Zuckerberg wasn't invited -- or if he was and turned it down), Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer and top brass from Sprint Nextel and Pepsico. They'll work together and present their ideas to representatives of the administration.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from mediabistro.com: BayNewser, on January 15, 2010 1:25 PM

So funny and yet so wrong.

(If you feel bad about this post, click here and follow instructions.)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on January 15, 2010 1:00 PM

The Wall Street Journal broke down exactly how much game action there is in the average telecast. Want to guess? Not even close. Guess again. Nope, less.

Out of the typical 2 hours and 54 minutes of the average NFL broadcast, a whole 11 minutes actually feature live game action. So next time you want to call out soccer or baseball fans for following a sport where nothing happens, you might want to tend to your own garden.

The lion's share of camera time, about 75 minutes worth, is devoted to players standing around on the field. Getting up after a tackle. Jogging back to the line of scrimmage (loping if you're Randy Moss). Huddling up before the next play. When you watch football, this is what you're mostly watching.

An unsurprising second is commercial breaks, making up about an hour of the broadcast. This might sound high, but just think of all the score-commercial-kickoff-commercial sequences, and we're thankful it's only an hour.

Heck, even replays get a larger slice of the pie than actual game action; 17 minutes or so. For every live play, expect the replays to last half as much again.

Isos on coaches get half as much airtime as gameplay; shots of players on the sideline get roughly a third; closeups on the referee about a fourth.

And, from the good things/bad things department, the two elements that get the least TV time? Sideline reporters and cheerleaders.

It's a fascinating study, and I urge you to read the whole thing, but I can't imagine a better advertisement for DVR.

UPDATE: I'm informed Wired did a simplfied, informal version of this study last year.

11 Minutes of Action [WSJ]

Originally posted by Barry Petchesky from Deadspin, on January 15, 2010 11:30 AM

Yes it is true I have not been posting much. I had knee surgery but neglected to tell the Mets. Oh wait I did tell the Mets. Oops screwed that up.

That's not the point. The twelve of us Loge13 castaways have still not renewed our seats. We're waiting to get a call back from the Mets. Hey Mets - here's your chance to secure 12 plan holders. We are waiting to give you money.

Meanwhile, check out what you get when you get a PARTIAL plan with the Orioles:

With the Orange Carpet Program and its special, exclusive benefits offered to all Full and Partial Season Plan Holders, being an Orioles Season Plan Holder has its privileges:

• All '10 Full and Partial Season Plan Holders will receive an exclusive Brooks Robinson figurine, complete with 14 karat gold coating on Brooks' glove.
• Enjoy significant savings on all prime seat locations.
• Never pay per ticket fees.
• Get up close for batting practice.
• Be guaranteed access to Opening Day tickets!

Not bad...I've never been close to batting practice at Citi Field.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on January 15, 2010 11:13 AM

Remember Rhizome's reBlog? From 2006-2008, a geographically dispersed team of volunteer editors would reblog posts to the front page using software developed by Eyebeam's R&D Lab. We phased it out in 2008, but in case you were interested, all our previous reBlog posts are now available for browsing.

Click here to access Rhizome's reBlog Archive.

Originally posted by Ceci Moss from Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest, on January 15, 2010 11:00 AM

Shirts for your co-workers.

I think these are supposed to be given as gifts without irony.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on January 15, 2010 10:05 AM

So funny and yet so wrong.

(If you feel bad about this post, click here and follow instructions.)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form

Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj, on January 15, 2010 8:00 AM

Fresh Faced: Jessica Biel's on the cover of Vogue's February issue (for Valentine's Day? Really?). We can't wait to read "The Tale of an Almost Adultress." Sounds almost interesting...{BryanBoy}

Ford's Crush: A Single Man star Nicholas Hoult's in Tom Ford's spring 2010 eyewear campaign with a very naked Carolyn Murphy. {Fashionologie}

Talk of the Town: Jean-Paul Gaultier's Target lookbook leaked today. It looked better in yesterday's blurry Elle editorial. {Refinery29}

Diet Talk: Speaking of hot male fashion designers, Yigal Azrouël kept a journal of his eating habits for New York Magazine's food blog. He cooks Moroccan food for six, makes omelets and English muffins in the morning, and whips up papaya smoothies on demand. {Vulture}

Loved: Giles presented his pre-fall collection in Florence yesterday underneath paper clip hats and above crunched plates. We're thrilled colored hair isn't going anywhere. {LOVE}

Valentine's Day - Tom Ford - Nicholas Hoult - Single Man - Jean-Paul Gaultier

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on January 15, 2010 7:49 AM

The new survey of Nevada by Public Policy Polling (D) has a startling result about Republican Sen. John Ensign: Despite the sex scandal that obliterated his presidential ambitions last year, and has raised questions about payments made by Ensign's parents to the family of his ex-mistress, Ensign could still get reelected in 2012.

Only 38% of Nevada voters approve of Ensign's job performance, with 44% disapproving. However, he still leads three Democrats in hypothetical match-ups. He leads Rep. Shelly Berkley by 49%-40%. He leads Secretary of State Ross Miller by 47%-36%. And he edges out Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman by 43%-41%, within the ±3.6% margin of error.

"John Ensign may not be dead in the water for reelection," said PPP president Dean Debnam, in the polling memo. "In this political climate voters appear more concerned about how Ensign votes than they are about his marital infidelity. Whether that will still be the case two years from now remains to be seen but for now it appears he could be reelected."

PPP communications director Tom Jensen is a bit more blunt, noting the similarities between Ensign's political success in Nevada and Sen. David Vitter's in Louisiana: "Cheating on your wife is a deal breaker for Republican voters- but only if you're a Democrat."

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on January 15, 2010 7:35 AM

Call it overrated if you'd like, but Ssam Bar is still the only place in NYC (or perhaps the world) where you can eat, using chopsticks, German-inspired cuisine served to you by a native Spanish speaker while drinking a glass of sparkling red wine and listening to 90s hip-hop in a restaurant conceived by an American junior golf champion from Virginia whose parents were from Korea.

Tags: food   NYC   restaurants   ssambar

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 15, 2010 4:26 AM

So first: I wish there was a way to capture the front page of the nytimes where the 'teaser' interactive holds on to your mouse as you slide back and forth. And second: damn these kids are good. And third: jesus hell.

 Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by stamen to haiti nytimes matthewbloch - More about this bookmark

Originally posted by stamen from Delicious/stamen, on January 14, 2010 9:36 PM

When I watch documentaries about the Vietnam War era in the United States, (tonight’s, ★★☆), I’m filled with both wonder and hopelessness: wonder at the sheer scale of the protests, civic disobedience, and government criminality of the time, but hopelessness that we still have all of the same problems today, systemically unable to prevent repeating the same mistakes in every generation.

We have new presidents executing new wars against new enemies. Our right-wing zealots condemn new protests as unpatriotic, and they discriminate against a new group of people on the basis of a different quality they were born with.

During this generation, these wars are likely to end in effective stalemates and this persecuted class of people is likely to gain equal legal rights and gradual acceptance by many of those formerly ignorant and hateful toward them. The wars will be seen as tremendous historical blunders in retrospect, and the memories of the intolerance will be a permanent embarrassment of our society.

It’s the same old bullshit.

And in another 20 years, the next generation will create their own war profiteering and intolerance, having learned nothing from us.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on January 14, 2010 5:18 PM

Mets OF Carlos Beltran issued a statement tonight, through his agent, Scott Boras, in response to today’s conference call with reporters, in which he said:

“I am totally surprised by the reaction to my recent knee surgery.  Any accusations that I ignored or defied the team’s wishes are simply false.  I also spoke to Omar Minaya about the surgery on Tuesday.  He did not ask me to wait, or to get another doctor’s opinion.  He just wished me well. No one from team raised any issue until Wednesday, after I was already in surgery.  I do not know what else I could have done. The most important thing here is that the surgery was a total success and I expect to be back on the field playing the game I love sooner rather than later.”

…i am totally lost… i really have no idea what is going on… what i do know is, this is not good… more important, whomever dropped the ball has GOT TO BE held accountable… i mean, the Mets now seem to basically be in a he-said-she-said argument about the health and future of their best player… which is not good, for a whole host of reasons, the least of which is they need him in the lineup to win games…

…that said, i like beltran’s attittude, i trust he knows what is best for his body, and his career, and i really, really hope he gets back on the field, like he said, sooner than later…

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on January 14, 2010 3:45 PM

Rocketboom’s Ella Morton learns about ConEdison’s sponsored construction of the Harlem River Tunnel that will bring more electricity into Manhattan.

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on January 14, 2010 1:28 PM

Pants on the ground

Pants on the ground

Lookin' like a fool with your pants on the ground

With the gold in your mouth

Hat turned sideways

Pants hit the ground

Call yourself a cool cat

Lookin' like a fool

Walkin' downtown with your pants on the ground

Hey, get your pants off the ground!

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on January 14, 2010 1:15 PM

I was thrilled to get an email this week from Akiko Stehrenberger, the designer of my favorite movie poster of the last decade. She had been told by friends about her chart-topping appearance and agreed to do an interview for this column. Akiko is an illustrator and art director who lives in L.A. and has been designing movie posters since 2004.

***

ADRIAN CURRY: First of all, the one thing I've always found most alluring about the Funny Games poster is that I’ve never been quite sure whether it’s an illustration or a photograph.

AKIKO STEHRENBERGER: You are correct in not being sure. It is a digital illustration with a ton of noise on it to roughen it up. Warner Independent expressed interest in a certain scene from the film. We had such an incredibly limited budget that there were no resources to get a hi-res film grab. I literally sat at my personal computer and, in slow motion, chose a frame from the movie I thought would work best. I worked off a very tiny dvd screenshot, maybe 4"x4" and 72 dpi at best and used it as the base. With a background in illustration, and a stubborness for painting tangibly for many years, it was the first time I had decided to illustrate digitally, but I felt it was appropriate.

CURRY: Did you want people to think it was an illustration or a photograph, or was that deliberately unclear? It always reminded me of a Photorealist painting, like an early Chuck Close.

STEHRENBERGER: It sort of spontaneously took a life of its own. It was clear from the get go that the DVD screen grab was unusable as is. The client mentioned that we may eventually have access to a hi-res film pull, but I knew if I wanted it to have a chance, especially while being presented with a plethora of other polished posters by other designers, I knew I was going to have to put some serious magic into it. At first I was just going to try to retouch the screen grab blown up to a poster size, but clearly it was impossible. Next thing I knew, I became obsessed with digitally painting it, and it became what you see today. The look is what drew people to it. And while the client could have used the digital illustration as a place holder until there was eventual access to the film grab, it's the look the client ended up taking and running with.

 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Auteurs Notebook, on January 14, 2010 1:00 PM

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Hardware, Rumors, iPhone

With Apple's rumored media event only two weeks away, people are hopeful that it'll bring an announcement of the tablet. Could it be that the next iPhone OS update is also waiting for that event?

iPodNN quotes a source who suggests that the next version of the iPhone OS is laden with references to its forthcoming sibling, and therefore must wait until the tablet is made public. Last month, The Boy Genius Report pointed out alleged evidence of iPhone firmware 3.1.3 and 4.0 in private testing, which is likely, but these builds have not yet been made available to developers or the public.

Just this week, Boy Genius suggested that the tablet is a sort of "iPhone on steroids," that is to say, a larger and more tricked-out version of the little guy. At the same time, John Gruber relayed one of those "friend-of-a-friend" tales suggesting that the iPhone is actually a by-product of the device they originally intended to build. Only now has the technology caught up to allow for the tablet's existence.

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

TUAWRumor: Tablet delays iPhone updates originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Dave Caolo from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 14, 2010 12:30 PM

Here’s Wes Anderson’s acceptance speech at the National Board of Review on January 11, 2010. I found this highly entertaining. The same goes for the film itself. Loved it.

UPDATE: Someone had their cellphone ready and shot the speech as it played at the event:

---

Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Animation, Fantastic Mr. Fox, film, stop motion, Wes Anderson

Originally posted by Ward Jenkins from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on January 14, 2010 10:12 AM

And this is what I sometimes worry about: do I put them back on top of the stack? Do I put the bowls back in the empty front spot on the shelf? Because if I do that, then guess which dishes are going to get reached for the next time? That's right, the same ones.

I think about this every time I put our dishes back in the cupboard. I assumed it was just me and that I was crazy.

Tags: Greg Allen

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 14, 2010 10:10 AM

"Weddings are a celebration of love. They’re also a very serious ceremony, one of the few we have left. We wear traditional clothing because it shows that we care about this commitment we’re making. It’s a commitment not just to your partner, but also to your family and community. Wearing traditional clothing demonstrates respect both for the person you’re about to marry and for the community of friends and family that will support you in marriage."

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on January 14, 2010 9:55 AM

via www.papermag.com After numerous high-level, heated internal meetings here at PAPERMAG HQ, we have reached the unanimous decision to resurrect our blog column Pets on PAPER. This blog series, which ran from June to October of 2007, featured reader-submitted photos of their pets sitting on top of, reading, playing with and generally doing their thing with a copy of PAPER Magazine.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 14, 2010 9:17 AM

Two days after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck beneath Port-au-Prince, Haiti, some of the massive damage is becoming more apparent. Rescue teams are arriving, aid groups are trying their best to battle huge logistical challenges, bodies are being identified, and some medical care is being given. Rescue teams from all over the world have joined the recovery effort, as the United States pledged $100 million in relief efforts. The Red Cross ventured an estimate of up to 50,000 deaths, as bodies at the local morgues overflowed into the streets. Collected here are some more scenes from this devastated region - see yesterday's entry as well. (33 photos total)

Residents watch as heavy machinery razes a destroyed building after a major earthquake hit the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, January 14, 2010. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on January 14, 2010 8:19 AM

I'd like to welcome motherfuckers to the back of the mind of Bill
See I'm for real...
--Billy Danze

That's the first line from MOP's "Cold As Ice." I always thought it captured the essence of that particular id-venting hip-hop that we discussed yesterday. I've heard that heavy metal offers a good parallel, but I don't know the music well enough to endorse that view. Anyway, I love that line because that's exactly what that kind of rap is, it's the venting of the "back of the mind," the recesses of the soul, and all those nasty, animalistic fantasies that we keep pinned up.

This is the sense in which so many rappers stress the "real" or as Bill says "I'm for real." It's the idea that this is the soul unmasked and unvarnished, all the things you think at night. Now, there are real problems with that, problems that we've discussed before that I'm not really interested in rehashing. But I do think that for the elder who doesn't quite get all the "bitch," "fuck," and "I'm gonna kill you" talk littered throughout the music, it may help to understand that you're hearing a kind of macho temper tantrum, not a coherent ideology.



I think it helps to understand how this kind of hip-hop struck us kids, because that's the point where we were really imprinted. Teenagers in our society are, necessarily, repressed. There are all sorts of awful thoughts that run through your mind as your body changes, and you move into adulthood, and yet, in the company of adults, you're expected to not express them. All of that is multiplied when you're talking about young black boys in urban America--it's the standard macho angst of young boys everywhere, but with this extra layer of race, class and geography. A particular strain of hip-hop is an outlet for all of that. It feels good to say, as Nas did, "Whenever frustrated I'ma hijack Delta."

Awhile back, I had the pleasure of interviewing the writer Tracy Sharpley-Whiting. She took a moment to discuss her favorite DMX song "What These Bitches Want From A Nigger." And she talked about how guilty she felt saying that, but in point of fact, there were days when she woke up. and put up on DMX because, indeed, walking out the house she felt like, as she put it, "What ya'll bitches want from a nigger!" I don't say that to invalidate the important work Tracy has done on gender, or to invalidate charges of misogyny, so much as to discuss how an ugly sentiment may actually capture something we actually feel.


I generally don't give much truck to hip-hop as politics, or the argument that it should be more
"positive." Public Enemy embraced black nationalism, but what fuels It Takes A Nation Of Millions is virtually the same angst that would later fuel gangsta rap. The music is often angry, because we're often angry.

And despite hip-hop's rather limited (to say the least) take on gender, the feeling sometimes crosses gender lines. The first time I heard MOP on Jay-Z's remix of "You Don't Know," I thought to myself, "Kenyatta's gonna love this." Now you have to understand. Kenyatta is about the sweetest person you'll ever meet. Exceedingly kind and generous. She's the sort of person who, literally, volunteers on behalf of battered women. But inside of her, like all of us, is a kind of smoldering rage that hip-hop often speaks to, and MOP does a great job at venting.



What's weird is how some of it sticks to you even as you grow old. I can't take Straight Outta Compton anymore. But when I walk through Harlem, I'm frequently rocking Smoothe Da Hustler's "Fuck What You Heard." It's pretty ignorant, but whenever I hear this part:

Your title don't concern me, You learn in order to burn me,
You gotta get open, cause I close deals like A&Rs and attorneys.
Without the delay, no replay
In rap divisions, I hold more records than my DJ.
No relays, I'm running marathons
Put Jerry Lewis with the clique, now he sell tapes at his telethon.
Bring your illest niggers, your realest niggers, your fieldest niggers,
And I'll send 'em back to his Bruce Willis niggers,
saying  "We got to kill this nigger."

Ewww. Sends a chill right through you. And yet, you can find me, on my best days, repeating that verse to myself, all ego-ed out, mocking my opponents to myself, and mumbling ("I'll send em back to his Bruce Willis niggers, saying "We got to kill this nigger.")

How wrong is that? The self-aggrandizement, the violence, the trash-talking...I don't know what to say to make that right. It's a part of me, and it's how I sometimes feel. This is my pact with Satan...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ta-Nehisi Coates, on January 14, 2010 8:00 AM

Jay-Z just topped Forbes list of “Hollywood’s Top-Earning Couples,” pulling in a cool $122 million with wife Beyonce from June 2008 to June 2009. He so totally sold his soul to the devil!

Actually, the vigilant citizens at Rap Radar have collected denials from the principals involved with the video, for Jay’s new single “On To the Next One,” that got all those crazy Illuminati theories buzzing.

First, the video’s director Ron Brown, from an interview with Vibe:

I’m aware of the stir the video has caused and what people are saying. I think when you’re dealing in abstract imagery people are going to want to draw lines between things and make sense of it. However, I’ve always felt that the viewing public was, in general, extremely visually literate. They don’t always want or need things to be spelt out for them. One of the great things about music videos are they can be enjoyed purely visually—it doesn’t need to mean anything or make any sense. Conspiracy theory is another thing entirely, and seems to me to be about projecting pre-existing beliefs and desperately looking for things that confirm them. There is imagery in this video that is drawn from all over the place. None of it is owned by any one culture or belief system. You can connect anything if you try hard enough, and make it mean anything you want it to.

Next, the song’s producer, Swizz Beats, on MTV News:

I don’t think about that. I know that’s a billion percent not true. The video displays another level of art and creativity from two great minds: the director and Jay—and myself, bringing the collaboration together. It’s no satanic ways around me and that’s for sure. I’m with Jay—I never see none of that stuff around him unless he’s hiding something, which I doubt. C’mon, man. That’s silly stuff. That stuff you don’t even comment on; we on to the next one.

Lastly, Jay himself, during an interview yesterday with current tour mates Young Jeezy and Trey Songz and Hot 97’s Angie Martinez:

I really think it’s really silly. For the record, I of course believe in God. I believe in one god. If people must know my religious beliefs, I believe in one god. I don’t believe in religions. I don’t believe in Christians or Muslims. I think that separates people. I think its one god, I think it’s all the same god, and I don’t believe in hell. But as far as God, of course I believe in God. Am I a part of some type of sect or cult? That sounds stupid to me. It’s like ignorant to even say. And I guess that’ll be the last time I address that.

Angie: Are there little secret societies?

Yeah, right here. This is The Mob Squad. Roc Nation is the gang. But, I can’t even get in the golf club in Palm Springs. I’m from Marcy Projects. Imagine… Just think about that—

Angie: They wouldn’t let you in the club, you’re saying?

Of course not. How? People that control the world…

Angie: Do you believe that those sort of organizations exist?

I think there’s cliques of friends that control things. I don’t know if it’s a devil worshiping sect. I think that’s a little Tom Hanks. But I believe there’s cliques of people that control the world. Y’know, Jeezy’s my man that got Atlanta, I go down to Atlanta, I got that thing. He come to Brooklyn, I got that thing. Go down to Virginia, y’know. But that’s just natural process. I’m sure Obama has his people that, everything is good.

So there you have it. No secret societies for Jay-Z. Of course, maybe it’s just that now that the Freemasons are so much less exclusive, he wouldn’t even want the company.

Originally posted by Dave Bry from The Awl, on January 14, 2010 5:20 AM

History is Bound to Repeat Itself:

I get secret joy out of watching people speculate about upcoming Apple products. What amuses me is that people have a really hard time innovating themselves, and more importantly, a hard time believing that Apple can innovate.

Great, quick read by Benjamin Stein.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on January 14, 2010 5:05 AM

Claire Messud

When I landed at boarding school in Boston in the fall of 1980—from a public school in Toronto, another world—I assumed the Iranian girls knew the ropes better than I did. Posh New England culture was utterly alien to me; but how much more so must it have been to my fellow boarders lately of Tehran? Aware of the recent revolution—even at fourteen, one couldn’t not be—I nevertheless was unable to relate the girl brushing her teeth beside me in the dorm bathroom to mass demonstrations or the then ongoing hostage crisis half a world away. I never asked the Iranians a single question about their histories: it was tacitly accepted that it was too delicate a subject and, by force of silence, too remote from our placid world of emerald lawns and peeling white columns. What, I now wonder, must the Iranian girls have thought?

As far as I know, they haven’t yet written the novels that might tell us. Others, though, have provided us with powerful reminiscences in the form of memoir: shortly after the turn of the new century, Marjane Satrapi gave us her family’s extraordinary stories of revolutionary times and after, and created, through her iconic graphics, a now-celebrated visual style with which to convey the travails of her native country.

In spite of Satrapi’s triumph and memoirs by other Iranians in exile, not much literary art from within contemporary Iran has yet reached mainstream audiences in the West. The novelist Farnoosh Moshiri’s fictions—including At the Wall of the Almighty and The Bathhouse—have afforded us harrowing accounts of imprisonment and torture under the Islamic regime; but she, older than Satrapi, has also not lived in Iran since the 1980s (she is based in Houston). As we watch Iran’s current political upheavals from afar and try to understand the minds of its citizens today, we might wish for greater literary access: little recent fiction published in Iran is available in translation. The avenues of cultural exchange are not broad.

Early in the last decade, Azar Nafisi’s immensely successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) provided a wide American audience with a picture of post-revolutionary Iranian life; but Nafisi’s book is not a novel. Through her account, you glimpse fascinating facets of quotidian life in Tehran over a decade ago, but she doesn’t presume to provide rounded psychological portraits of her students, nor does she alchemically transform her stories in such a way as to create a work of art. As a reader, you learn enthusiastically from, but do not fully inhabit, Nafisi’s world.

Fiction and poetry work differently from history or autobiography, opening to us the interior lives, the unrecorded ephemera and minutiae of people and their places. The Iranian-American writer Dalia Sofer’s first novel The Septembers of Shiraz was published in 2007. Its story is fairly simple: Sofer recounts the incarceration in Evin Prison, not long after the revolution, of a Jewish Iranian paterfamilias, while his wife and young daughter struggle to find information about him and to continue their lives. Meanwhile, the couple’s older child, a son, faces his own challenges in New York City. The book is not elaborate in its telling; but Sofer’s eye for detail and her subtle understanding of character (how much more complicated is such a separation when husband and wife have been progressively more emotionally estranged beforehand?) ensure that the novel is both immediate and deeply affecting.

Painting by Riza Abbasi, c. 1625

Like Satrapi, Sofer left Iran as a child and has lived in exile for most of her life. Her novel, then, describes precisely the Iran from which my classmates had fled; and perhaps this is in part why I find it so moving. Others of the young generation have addressed the situation differently: Porochista Khakpour’s Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2007) is the vital and engaging account of a family of Iranian-Americans following the September 11 attacks. Niloufar Talebi has translated and edited a volume of poetry entitled Belonging: New Poetry By Iranians Around the World, a book remarkable in its breadth and diversity, and in the power of its translations. From formalists to experimentalists, from the epic to the lyric, from the political to the erotic, Talebi’s collection offers us a rich sampling of contemporary Iranian poetry from the diaspora.

Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring an Iranian Love Story, published in the United States last year, differs in several ways from these works. For one thing, although Mandanipour has been living in the US since 2006, his literary career has been, until this latest novel, entirely Iranian: this is his first book to appear in English, and while his fiction remained unpublished in Iran for much of the 1990s on account of censorship, he is one of that country’s most celebrated and accomplished contemporary novelists. For another, born in 1957 (and thus a generation older than most of the others), he was an adult when the Islamic Republic was created. He remained in Iran for a quarter century thereafter, and has, consequently, a very different perspective from those who left as children, in the early 1980s.

Mandanipour’s novel is not only directly concerned with contemporary Iran—it’s about a writer trying to write a love story that will satisfy the censors—it is also playfully engaged with Persian literary history, and at the same time, is formally innovative: the influences of Calvino and Kafka are evident in his ironic narrator’s metafictional banter. He both tells us what it is like for his young would-be lovers in Tehran, and, by allusion, by direct conversation with the imagined censor, and by striking out lines and passages of his prose, reveals how much he cannot tell us:

“Sara is studying Iranian literature at Tehran University. However, in compliance with an unwritten law, teaching contemporary Iranian literature is forbidden in Iranian schools and universities…
…when Sara reads a contemporary story, she reads the white between the lines, and wherever a sentence is left incomplete and ends with three dots like this “…,” her mind grows very active and begins to imagine what the eliminated words may be…Sara loves these three dots because they allow her to be a writer too…But she never borrows any contemporary literature from her college library or the central library of Tehran University. Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would find any books by writers such as me.
Ask me why, so that I can explain. [p. 14]

Playfully and yet with utter seriousness, Mandanipour exposes his constraints, and also the devices by which he might hope to convey his matter indirectly: traditional Iranian poetry; cinema. In so doing, Mandanipour expresses the complexity of his culture—not just of the society of the Islamic Republic, but of the underlying Persian traditions that continue to influence it—through the warp and weft of the text itself. This novel doesn’t offer a conventionally realistic narrative, but to read it—and to appreciate that simply on account of its publication, Mandanipour is henceforth unable to return to Iran—is to understand, by inhabiting rather than by being told, what life there now, and the making of art, might actually be like.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The New York Review of Books, on January 14, 2010 4:53 AM

How serious is Harold Ford about becoming New York’s newest official money-launderer? So serious that he’ll actually work the room at Michael’s. This will not end well (for us).

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on January 14, 2010 4:50 AM

Oh, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory... We all know the path of Wonka himself, Gene Wilder. He went on to be an iconic part of Mel Brooks' oeuvre, the a-mazing partner in crime to Richard Pryor, "Letterman" in The Electric Company, and now -- memoir writer and novelist. But what about the kids he tormented with sweets and all things full of nice sugar and spice? Charlie Bucket, Violet Beauregarde, Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, and Mike Teevee? CNN gives a rundown with a group picture from the film's 30th anniversary, which you can see below, and then head to Celebuzz for current shots.

From left to right (below):

• Michael Bollner, or Augustus Gloop, is a tax attorney in Munich.
• Denise Nickerson, or Violet Beauregarde, went on to play a role in Dark Shadows before leaving the biz and becoming an accountant at an engineering plant.
• Paris Themmen, or Mike Teevee, has down a slew of things including commercial casting agent, Disney Imagineer, real estate agent, and autographs-for-sale website owner.
• Julie Dawn Cole, or Veruca Salt, has "a successful career in theater, television, and fitness."
• And finally, Peter Ostrum, or Charlie Buckett. Yes, that's him with the 'stache. He's a large animal vet in upstate New York.

A lot has changed in 40 years, eh? Still, most don't really surprise, except for Ostrum. Where'd the sweet-faced, tow-headed boy go?

Filed under: Fandom, Images

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Monika Bartyzel from Cinematical, on January 14, 2010 4:45 AM

Mr. Mickey is used to be the only member of his family on the boob tube (although MM's brother Scott is a fancy-pants lawyer who has appeared on Court TV and in the Tampa area newspapers). Anyhoo, MM's cousin Michael Gasiorowski has been making some headlines back in the Chicago suburbs. Michael is a student at Fremd High School and the big cheeses there were having trouble finding someone to be the mascot, Victor E. Viking. Enter cousin Michael! You can read the details in an article that appeared in the Daily Herald. MM is proud as a peahen to see another family member getting some press coverage!!! Go Vikings!

Photograph Courtesy of District 211

Originally posted by Mickey Boardman from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 14, 2010 4:44 AM

American Pixels is a project by Joerg Colberg that uses jpeg compression algorithms to create compelling images. From the technical notes:

ajpeg is a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting. As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real - so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible - ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.

Tags: art   Joerg Colberg   photography

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 14, 2010 4:36 AM

Dave Dribin offers a couple really handy tips for modifying the behavior of the “sudo” command-line tool, which allows ordinary admin users to acquire superuser powers for editing files, changing permissions, etc.

Handy Sudo Settings – Dave Dribin’s Blog

I knew about the ability to change the sudo timeout, but have never gotten around to looking into exactly how it’s done. Now, I’ll be annoyed a lot less often when I’m in an “administrative” frame of work.

Dave’s post inspired me to finally do a little more research into sudo and the configuration options. For starters, now that I’ve upped my timeout value to something longer than the default 5 minutes, I might want to occasionally “logout” of my sudo authenticated session. The “kill” option does just this, putting you back in a “password required” state:

% sudo -k

As for the options Dave described, they and many others like them are described in the “sudoers” man page:

% man 5 sudoers

Hmm. What’s this option called insults? I turned it on, but Apple appears to have “cleaned up” this option in Mac OS X. It doesn’t do anything. On the Linux installation that runs red-sweater.com, I turned on the option to see what would happen:

yarn% sudo ls
daniel's password:
... and it used to be so popular...
daniel's password:
You do that again and see what happens...
daniel's password:
It's only your word against mine.
sudo: 3 incorrect password attempts

One of the things I love about UNIX heritage is the sense of humor that pervades most of the software. The Mac used to have much more of this itself. I guess we traded it in for a greater sense of professionalism and solidity, but I still miss the corny humor sometimes.

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on January 14, 2010 4:19 AM

The director of Expert Labs, an initiative that aims to connect government projects with citizens who want to become more involved in the political discussion, discusses the White House's using URL shorteners and working with the government to start apps.

Originally posted by By NICK BILTON from NYT > Technology, on January 14, 2010 4:15 AM

Seoul, Korea studio UnPlug Design came up with this near-genius idea for providing makeshift soccer balls (okay, footballs) to third world children who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them. A wave-like pattern is printed (or perhaps perforated?) on the boxes in which material aid to these countries is often shipped; once the box is empty of its contents, children and aid workers can follow the patterns to break down the cardboard and assemble the ball. More background and pictures here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Subtraction.com, on January 14, 2010 2:46 AM

Here's a really really cool photo gallery of the commissioner's office.  I'm going to share two pics to wet your whistle, then with honor amongst bloggers off you go.

Pretty cool.

Looks like a cool place.  Do they have all this stuff just to impress visitors from Fox?  Who goes up to the commissioner's office?  Anyway very cool gallery here.



Main Mets Police page
Follow us on twitter @metspolice
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send ideas/guest columns to shannon at metspolice.com

Please visit www.metspolice.com and help stop black uniforms.

Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 14, 2010 2:44 AM

I've said this before, if you ever want to start a sports blog, pick
the Mets as your subject.

As the world wakes up we're hearing some version of a story where
Carlos Beltran got knee surgery without the Mets knowing. Oh and
he'll be out for the start of the season. I won't attempt to cover
the news part of the story and I haven't made my news-round yet but
here's the story for this site.

Once again the Mets come away looking like idiots.

Whether any if the "facts" below are accurate, perception is:
- Beltran won't be in the lineup for game 1
- the Mets are injured again
- Beltran didn't tell the Mets.

What do you think WFAN will be like today?

Last night I got on the Mets for not getting the word out about their
good deeds. This morning both WCBS and WFAN reported that the Yankees
have donated $500,000 to Haitian relief. Have the Mets? How would
we know?

I know I'm a dopey blog but guess what, people are reading it! Send
me stuff boys. Enjoy spin control today, I look forward to the easy
content.

Oh, and Media Goon isn't sure if he wants to give you money to see
your Beltran-less team. You probably should have just taken the cash
on one of the 5 times he called. Read below if you don't know what
I'm referring to, I can't link now, here's my train.

Sent from my iPhone

Please visit www.metspolice.com and help stop black uniforms.

Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 14, 2010 2:13 AM

Molly reports on the recent earthquake in Haiti and what you can do to do help. Story links: Haiti, Haitian Creole, Port-au-Prince, About Haiti, Maps of earthquake, Geo search for tweets, Videos on YouTube of Haiti Earthquake, Twitpic Images of Haiti, Archipelago, Haitian Map. How you can help: Unicef Donate, American Red Cross

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on January 13, 2010 7:43 PM

Rudy Fernandez has rejoined the Blazers after six weeks out from surgery on his lower back. "The prodigal son returns," said broadcaster Mike Barrett. I was happy to see from watching the game and reading these tweets that so many people were as excited as I was! 

1. blazersblog 

     

   It took Rudy Fernandez about a minute total to get in the scoring column.about 2 hours ago from web
   • Reply
   • Retweet
2. pdxroundball 
   In all my years of covering the Blazers, the two things I know this crowd LOVES are free chalupas and Rudy.

1. blazersblog 
   Wow, fan favorite would be an understatement for Rudy.about 2 hours ago from web
2. pdxtrailblazers 
   @rudy5fernandez getting ready to check back in to the delight of the Rose Garden. Standing ovationabout 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
3. blazersblog 
   HUGE cheers as Rudy heads to the scorers table to check in.

1. johnhollinger Big cheer as Rudy Fernandez gets up to check in. Either that or they're STOKED about that last Jodie Meeks jumper.about 2 hours ago from mobile web
   • Reply
   • Retweet

2. kpelton These Blazers fans sure do love Rudy Fernandez. That's one of the loudest ovations I've ever heard. Anywhere.

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on January 13, 2010 7:28 PM

In a post to Twitter, Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus said:

“Big news pending for Mets.  Doesn’t sound good.”

…oh, man, and pitchers and catchers is just five weeks away… what’s up, will…

Updated at 9:35 pm:

Joel Sherman of the New York Post says he heard Carlos Beltran had microfracture surgery today without the team’s permission.

Updated at 9:39 pm:

According to Jon Heyman of SI.com, Carlos Beltran had knee surgery today, he is expected to need eight weeks of rehab and will miss the start of the season.

Updated at 9:45 pm:

In a follow-up post, Joel Sherman of the New York Post says a second source believes Carlos Beltran simply had his knee ‘scoped,’ and ‘cleaned up,’ ‘though the Mets are acting like it was more than routine.’

Sherman cites a third source who says this was not microfracture surgery, “but standard scope and Mets team physician Dr. David Altchek and team were OK on this.”

Updated at 9:51 pm:

The Mets issued the following press release a few moments ago:

“Carlos Beltran had worsening of osteoarthritis of the right knee during the offseason.  He had not been experiencing pain following the conclusion of the season and into his early offseason conditioning. The symptoms returned to the point where pre-spring training conditioning became too painful.  He elected to undergo arthroscopic clean out of the arthritic area of his knee by Beltran”s personal physician Dr. Richard Steadman today in Colorado.  He is anticipated to return to baseball activities in 12 weeks.

…i talked with someone close to the team earlier tonight, and they sounded quite distraught… i can’t blame them, that’s how i feel… what a shame, and now what… i mean, how does the team go about replacing beltran for the year, now, with five weeks left before pitchers and catchers, because i really hope they do not freak out and panic… yes, i realize the team says 12 weeks… but, i heard earlier in the day he would be out for the season, and, so, like was the drill last year, until i see him out, running, playing on the field, i’m going to assume the worst… i do think the Mets can hang tight with Angel Pagan, if beltran really is going to be out just through mid-April…

…and b) how is this going to impact the team, who had to deal with injuries all last season, probably thought it put that behind them where they could now start new in March, only to have to face the same questions and concerns before the season even begins… ugh… what a shame…

Updated at 10:10 pm:

…here’s the other thing, if what Kevin Burkhardt said on SNY is true, and the Mets really didn’t know he was having this surgery, despite what sherman said earlier, then does have any implications in terms of his contract,  and what does that say about his relationship with the team’s medical staff, and decision-making process, in that he did this on his own and chose to use his personal physician…

In a post to TedQuarters, SNY’s Ted Berg asks the Mets not to panic.

Updated at 10:22 pm:

Joel Sherman of the New York Post says the Mets are claiming Beltran’s procedure was done ‘without their blessing,’ ‘and are threatening some form of action.’

…i also talked to someone close to the team who does not sound happy…

…from what i can gather, the team might have been aware he was going under for one reason, but then, for some other reason, things changed and beltran might have elected to have a different procedure done… if this is the case, things could get ugly…

Updated at 10:30 pm:

…according to a person high up with the team, the Mets did not make any major changes to their medical staff this off season; but instead added an assistant or two to help facilitate paperwork, and other administrative duties, for Ray Ramirez and Company…

In an on-air report for SNY, Kevin Burkhardt called this a ‘flat-out disaster.’  Later, in a post to Twitter, he said, though the Mets knew about the surgery, they didn’t agree with him having it.

Updated at 10:45 pm:

…also, i get the feeling Scott Boras is going to be called out for this, in some, way, shape or form, before all is said and done… from what i can gather, he and beltran played a big role is convincing Oliver Perez to go to Arizona for off-season training… boras has a heavy hand in his client’s activities… the word last summer had been that beltran was planning on asking the Mets for a contract extension, but then hit the disabled list and that was that… now here we are… something just doesn’t seem right… and, i can’t help and think we might soon see people pointing fingers…

Updated at 11:13 pm:

According to a new report for the New York Post, recapping the night’s events, Joel Sherman says, ‘the Commissioners Office and the Players Association have been alerted ‘the Mets are claiming this was done without clearance and that the Mets are threatening to take some form of action. There is a potential issue out there.’’

However, Sherman believes the Mets were not in the dark on this, and, ‘Mets doctors and trainers were kept abreast of the diagnosis in Colorado, even if the Mets did not agree with the remedy.’

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on January 13, 2010 3:34 PM

Remember last week Mets Police had a few stories of folks who want to give the Mets money?!

These people not only want to renew their seats they asked to upgrade their plans aka give the Mets MORE money.

The word was that the Mets were going to start working on upgrades on Wednesday. That's today! It's 7pm and Media Goon hasn't gotten his call yet. This is after he has called them several times over the past few weeks and been told to wait til today for a call.

Are there really that many upgrades that they didn't get to him today? Did Seaver unretire and turn 30? What are we as fans missing here?

New topic: if you find yourself out at Citi this week at one of these fan things they have been having, bring a camera. We welcome all pictures at pictures@metspolice.com

I'm interested in this Citi Field Kids thing they did today. What was it? Was it a secret? Maybe I stink at what I do but Mets Blog and google don't. They usually catch stuff like this.

If I own a team and I'm doing something nice with kids I would publicize it - even to annoying thorn in my side bloggers. Mets, and by Mets I mean suits, I'd like to be your friend and write about the good things too, but I can't do it if you don't tell me about them.

Another new topic: now that Francesca is safe haven for the Mets, I wonder if the Yankees care that they don't get to have theirbown turn at fluff interview of the week. Especially if you think about the TV version of the show and where it airs.

Mets PR department I'm here if you need me. Just add Shannon@metspolice.com to the distribution list. Oh, and tell someone in tickets to call Media Goon. He'd like to move down.

Sent from my iPhone

Please visit www.metspolice.com and help stop black uniforms.

Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 13, 2010 2:20 PM

Adam on the greatest video game ever made.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 13, 2010 12:02 PM

I'd wear this. I really, really would.

 

(Thank you Dan!)

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on January 13, 2010 11:53 AM

I had forgotten about this 2007 article by The Times’s John Markoff, published the day before the iPhone went on sale, until Rene Ritchie linked to it today. Markoff had such great access to Steve Jobs — I can’t recall any other reporter who got this sort of access to him.

The iPhone could have an effect on the cellphone industry akin to the influence the Macintosh computer from Apple had on the personal computer industry in 1984, Mr. Jobs said. He said he thought that the iPhone’s “multitouch” control system, in which the fingers are used to scroll through data or enlarge photos on the screen, was the biggest shift in a computer’s user interface since the Macintosh was introduced.

“It’s the first thing to come along since the mouse and the bit-mapped display and take things to the next level,” he said.

Mr. Jobs seized on the multitouch technology after Apple product designers proposed it as a “safari pad,” a portable Web surfing appliance. Instead, he saw the technology as something that could be used for a similar purpose in a cellphone, a former Apple employee said.

The whole article is well worth a re-read.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 13, 2010 11:37 AM

To see video of David Wright talking to reporters today in Citi Field, check out Brian Costa’s blog for the Star-Ledger, here.

To read quotes from Mike Pelfrey, read Marty Noble’s report for MLB.com, here.

Original Post at 4:30 pm,
by Michael Baron:

In a report for the Star Ledger, Brian Costa provides quotes from David Wright’s talk with reporters today at Citi Field.

According to Wright, he fussed with his swing too much last year, and will look to keep it more consistent in 2010, adding:

“I think last year, more than any other year, I tinkered with things that probably shouldn’t have been tinkered with… Instead of kind of riding it out and sticking with it and understanding that there’s going to be some ups and downs, when I got into a little slump, I started making minor adjustments, kind of overhauling things, and I think that was a mistake.”

…i think it’s obvious the dimensions of the ballpark got in his head, no matter what he says about the situation, and i can’t say i blame him…i mean, it is a big ballpark and i can see how he might possibly be intimidated by it’s dimensions…not that the size of the ballpark should be used as an excuse, considering visiting players didn’t have a problem hitting home runs there, but David is young, and i believe he will have no problem making this adjustment this season…

Costa says Wright has spent most of his off-season in New York and his home state of Virginia, but spent time in December in Florida working on his swing with hitting coach Howard Johnson.

…i’m looking forward to seeing david in action this spring and the adjustments he has made…he is the least of my concerns right now and i’m confident he will be reverting back to pre-2009 form this coming season…

Originally posted by Michael Baron from MetsBlog.com, on January 13, 2010 11:30 AM

Yesterday, Tangotiger released the 2010 Marcel projections and now they’re available on all the player pages and in the sortable projection pages.

Couple things of note about the Marcel projections.

- “it is the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible. So, that’s the allusion to the monkey. It uses 3 years of MLB data, with the most recent data weighted heavier. It regresses towards the mean. And it has an age factor.”

- The wOBA calculation I’m using for FanGraphs is going to be different than the ones included in the projections. To keep things consistent, I’m including SB and CS and using the 2009 weights, just like all the other projections.

Originally posted by David Appelman from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 13, 2010 11:12 AM

Filed under: Hardware, Rumors, Macbook Pro

Spanish website faq-mac.com had an interesting tidbit this morning. As seen in the screenshot from the site, an Intel Retail Edge program email showed a giveaway for a MacBook Pro. While that's not unusual -- a MacBook Pro makes a great prize for any contest -- the email showed that the MacBook Pros in question were equipped with Intel Core i5 processors. Existing MacBook Pro models use Intel's Core 2 Duo processors.

A loose translation of the pertinent section of the email shown above says:

January prize draw: Win a MacBook Pro

Increase sales this month and have two opportunities to win a MacBook Pro equipped with the accelerated response offered by the Intel Core i5 processor.

A MacBook Pro with a Core i5 processor would have substantially better performance than the Core 2 Duo-based model, while not reducing battery life. While no date has been announced by Apple for the release of a new MacBook Pro, there's a possibility that such a device could be announced at the rumored January 27th media event.

[via The Mac Observer]

TUAWRumor: Intel's Core i5 to show up in MacBook Pros this month originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Steven Sande from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 13, 2010 11:00 AM

It’s not hard, we know, but I still think that my mastery of the art of losing is uniquely impressive.  Whenever I buy or am given any big-ticket item, I lose or break it almost immediately.  With rare exceptions, any big expenditure on my part turns out to be a mistake or a waste, usually for reasons I couldn’t have forseen.  Some recent examples:

*That $98 menorah?  Shattered into a million pieces before the congealed wax from the last night of Hanukkah was even dry.  (I’d left it perched precariously on the edge of the radiator.)

*I just spent $700, a scarily high % of my current net worth, on fancy-pants author glamorshots which my publisher is just not that into — a mercy, but an expensive one.

*The lovely Mac on which I type this needed $800/worth of non-warranty-covered repairs a mere 6 weeks after I bought it, because I stuck it in the same bag as a leaky water-bottle as I napped in a flu-addled daze in the Amsterdam airport circa last New Year’s.

*A few weeks before that happened, I lost the first and only expensive item of jewelry I’ve ever owned — perfect, tiny 12-gauge Lori Leven gold hoop earrings — somewhere in the Pacific ocean.

Less-expensive items aren’t spared, either: I shudder to think of how much money I’ve spent on gloves so far this winter.  Which reminds me:  my perfect blue hat, the one the designer doesn’t make anymore, the one I got compliments on every time I wore it — well, it is hiding out in the lost-things dimension too,  having a party with the earrings and all those gloves and several metric tons of hair-ties.

I don’t think I’m more-than-usually irresponsible.  Well, certainly I’m a little irresponsible, but it’s hard to develop responsible tendencies when things just don’t seem to want to be mine.  I could get philosophical  and adopt the belief the universe is trying to teach me non-attachment, or I could get anarchist and adopt the belief that all property is theft.  Mostly, though, I choose a path of least resistance: trying, consciously and not,  to avoid ever having anything nice, because of the high likelihood that any nice thing I own will get lost or destroyed.

All of that is a long way of saying that I avoid owning designer sunglasses, even though I’ve always wanted them — specifically Ray-Ban Wayfarers, which unfailingly make everyone who wears them look like expensive celebrities.  A few weeks before the holidays I was looking online for things to suggest that my Mom buy me for Hanukkah and I decided to find out whether these sunglasses were too expensive to ask for as a present.  (They are.)  But then I got the bright idea to see if there were any used or vintage ones on Ebay for cheaper.  There were!  There were $25 ones.  The seller was in China.  They were almost certainly fake, I reasoned, but the outside chance that they weren’t seemed worth $25, and also, there was an option that I could Buy them Now, and the seller accepted PayPal, so the entire endeavor took about 2 minutes.   Perhaps I ought to add “money in general” to the list of things I am not good at hanging on to.

They came in the mail yesterday.

They came in a Ray-Ban box, with a Ray-Ban case and a little pamphlet about their provenance (from Ray-Ban! In Italy!) in a bunch of different languages.  A plastic medallion dangled from the bridge of the sunglasses from a red-and-white string; I dimly remembered seeing something similar in a store once.  The sheer surplus of packaging alone made the glasses seem like a real luxury item. But something — well, some things — seemed off.  The case was stiff.  It didn’t seem to be real leather.   The glasses felt wrong, too — there was something strange about weight of the plastic, the more-pronounced ostentation of the logo.  But if they were fake, why go to so much effort to replicate the manufacturer’s packaging?  The knowing buyer of a counterfeit object isn’t looking for the trappings of the real item, probably,  just that the item itself be convincing enough that he or she will be able to pass it off to his or her friends as real in terms of aesthetic value and the status that the object conveys.

I decided that I was overanalyzing the glasses in a college way.  If I thought about it any harder, I was going to have to get into “what is real,” and I was running late.  They said Ray Ban on them; they were sunglasses; how much realer did I need them to be?

I put them on and rode my bike down Dekalb.  It was midday and I was heading West, so the sun would have been blinding if I hadn’t been wearing shades.  I locked up my bike at Flatbush, put the glasses in my pocket and got on the train.  When I came back to Brooklyn, around 10, it was dark and I didn’t need them, so they remained stashed in my pocket, but I patted myself to make sure they were still there.  I had managed to make it through a day without losing them.

This morning I was tidying up the kitchen and noticed the packaging sitting in my salad bowl.  I picked up the case and peered closer at the gold seal on its lefthand side.

“100% UV Proteltion,” it read.

I am very happy to own these glasses now.  They’re worthless, so I know I’ll never lose them.

Originally posted by emily from Emily Magazine, on January 13, 2010 10:26 AM

Responding to the Haiti Earthquake:

There aren’t a lot of natural disasters worse than the earthquake that just struck Haiti. The earthquake is such a disaster that the people who are normally in charge of telling you what a disaster it is are mostly dead or missing.

Earlier, I posted a list of charities that are set up to quickly get relief to those who need it. All of these charities are legitimate and regardless of denominational affiliation are dedicated to providing humanitarian relief. Here’s an updated and expanded list.

Dan’s doing a much better job than I could possibly do on this, so go over there for a better idea of what you can do.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on January 13, 2010 10:24 AM

The new version of TapLynx brings more performance enhancements, and we’re starting to work on the feature requests folks have been asking for.

It’s free to download and try out.

In other TapLynx news, a TapLynx-built app (using an earlier version) has appeared on the iTunes What’s Hot list, which is totally exciting for us.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from ranchero.com, on January 13, 2010 10:07 AM

Guy English on Pop Software.

The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At one time, especially on the Mac, we’d see people chose software based upon how well it suited their requirements to get a job done. This new generation of software consumers isn’t like that – they’re less likely to shop around for something rather they shop around for anything. These are people who want to be entertained as much as they want to have their requirements met. They’ve not bought into a tool they’ve bought, either financially or emotionally, into The Future. The Future is never about the most practical and useful outcome, it’s about flying cars and cute robots who shit talk but will still mix you up a killer G’n'T when you need it. The Future isn’t a service that’ll send you a text message when you’ve been out too late on a work night, The Future will get you laid on a Tuesday and make excuses to the boss the next morning.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 13, 2010 9:36 AM

We don't like it either, and have already requested that it be blocked. Glad our readers aren't lame sexists, too!

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Comments from Alaina Browne, on January 13, 2010 9:24 AM

Apparently Science has determined that there are six basic human emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. The New Statesman has determined that those are not enough, and has proposed five additional FEELINGS that could also join the pantheon: elevation, interest, gratitude, pride, and confusion. To that list I would add the following: self-loathing, ennui, recklessness, unavailability, and badly in need of a drink. Your list may vary slightly.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on January 13, 2010 9:20 AM

Everything in BGR’s brief rumor report jibes with what I’ve been hearing. Except maybe instead of thinking of The Tablet as “an iPhone on steroids”, it might be better to think of the iPhone as a slimmed-down, pocket-sized little sibling to The Tablet. I heard a story this week — friend of a friend knows a guy sort of thing — that The Tablet is what Apple set out to build all along, and the iPhone was an offshoot that shipped first because the technology wasn’t there yet to produce The Tablet. In short, that Apple has had something bigger in mind — both physically and conceptually — from the outset.

Could be bullshit, but it’s a heck of a story.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 13, 2010 9:00 AM

Filed under: Rumors, iPhone

If there's anything consistently consistent about the purported Apple tablet, it's that it's said to be, in essence, a larger iPhone. Expanding on this, Boy Genius Report cites its "close Apple contact" that claims the device is "an iPhone on steroids."

Like its iPhone brethren, the tablet is said to sport an ARM processor, adding the caveat that the processor will be "incredibly fast." Also according to the report, the tablet will support multi-touch gestures that are said to be "out of control." Back in 2005, Apple acquired FingerWorks, a company that specialized in gesture-based computing. According to former Apple engineers, FingerWorks will have its footprint -- er, fingerprints -- on the purported tablet.

The meat behind these potatoes is said to be the iPhone OS kernel. For this reason, there hasn't been an updated build of the iPhone OS out of fears that tablet-related references in the code would leak.

TUAWRumor: Apple tablet said to be "iPhone on steroids" originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Sang Tang from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 13, 2010 9:00 AM

Recommended: today's Fresh Air interview with producer T-Bone Burnett, especially the bit about 45 minutes into the show where Burnett describes the process of recording with Roy Orbison. Orbison wouldn't wear headphones in the studio because he didn't need to hear his own voice in the mix; he had spent so much time on the road without a monitor mix that he didn't need to hear his own voice over the band...he could tell if he was singing on pitch based on the vibrations in his jaw.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 13, 2010 8:45 AM

Many years ago, NBC decided that the guy who came up with the idea of doing concerts on The Today Show would make a great network head. Now they are in last place. Except in jokes, where they are first.

Jeff Zucker is the chairman of NBC Universal. And no one is sure why. He made his name at The Today Show, where he proved really good at attention-grabbing gimmicks. Like: let's have a bunch of yokels with signs right behind the anchors! More of that adorable pixie Katie Couric! Make it three hours long! (And, eventually, four hours long!) That sort of thing. The Today Show was broadcast from a streetside studio in the 1950s, by the way. They also had a chimp for a mascot. Gimmicks always work on morning shows. And any moron can think of them.

But because he made a morning show popular and profitable, Zucker became the head of NBC Entertainment. He took over a network that still had Friends and Frasier and Will & Grace and E.R.. He came up with the brilliant idea of making some of the more popular shows slightly longer, sometimes (during sweeps). (This meant that there was a night, during sweeps week, when popular sitcom Will & Grace aired from 8:40-9:20 p.m. ET. Set your VCRs!) He also came up with the brilliant idea of replacing Friends with Joey, which finally answered the question, "what if the show had just been called Friend?"

NBC's 2005-2006 season was the worst it had seen in decades. So, naturally, when NBC Universal chairman Bob Wright finally resigned the next year, Jeff Zucker got his job! At that point, Zucker had already planted the seeds of this hilarious mess: in 2004, he told Conan he'd give him The Tonight Show in 2009. Leno had been making money for the network for years and showed no signs of stopping, but apparently Zucker thought the guy who still does standup every damn weekend after taping five terrible but very professional shows during the week would be tired of show business after five more years. While some people greeted this news with relief that our long national nightmare of Jay Leno was almost over, it made no sense at all from a network programming standpoint, even at the time. 54-year-old Leno was high-rated and popular and loved his job. 59-year-old Leno was not going to retire. He was going to go to another network.

(Zucker also replaced a fairly successful network programmer with Ben Silverman in 2007, and then refused to fire Ben Silverman for two years, as Ben Silverman basically destroyed the remains of NBC's primetime lineup.)

Jeff Zucker is a failure and an idiot. A child could run a network better than this. Like, for example, a bright child could've predicted that cheaply produced late-night comedy at 10 p.m. would not attract an audience as large as real TV, and that it would destroy the lead-in for local news, piss off affiliates, ruin ratings for everything airing on the network after 10 p.m., and destroy two profitable long-running franchises. That negates the little profit you were hoping to squeeze out by airing actual garbage in prime time. A child also understands that you cannot promise to give the same thing to two different people.

There was a time, a couple years back, when CBS was in the tank, and Letterman spent night after night specifically mocking, by name, CBS President Les Moonves. It was wonderful TV. Letterman is a crank, of course, but once CBS recovered, he stopped. Moonves may be a prick, but CBS is on top. Conan doesn't have Letterman's killer instinct, but the time might be right to switch from the "NBC" jokes to Jeff Zucker jokes. Amusingly, they know each other: when they were at Harvard, Conan was with The Harvard Lampoon and Zucker was the president of The Harvard Crimson.

As a prank, O'Brien's staff stole all the Crimson issues one day before they could be delivered. Zucker called the cops. "My first meeting with Jeff Zucker was in handcuffs, with a Cambridge police officer reading me my rights," says O'Brien.

See? Humorless asshole then, humorless asshole now.

Jeff Zucker did something incredibly dumb: he screwed a comedian. A comedian with a TV show. A comedian that other comedians like. You don't do that unless you really want your dumb decisions ripped to shreds on your own (and everyone else's) network every night. And Zucker did this while attempting to keep his job in the event of a successful Comcast acquisition of NBC Universal.

So: it's time to go, Jeff! It is time to go and be forgotten forever except as a character, hopefully to be played by Bob Balaban, in some future made-for-cable movie about how NBC died.

Originally posted by Pareene from Gawker, on January 13, 2010 8:25 AM

A year ago, the Angels won 97 games and ran away with the AL West, once again defying critics who expected a downturn in performance. For most of the decade, the Angels maintained their excellence despite yearly forecasts that this was the year they were in trouble. It’s a credit to their organization that they have been able to continually plug holes from within, often even upgrading when an established veteran leaves.

This winter, they’ve watched John Lackey, Chone Figgins, and Vladimir Guerrero head elsewhere. All three are big names who have had substantial hands in helping the Angels win, but Los Angeles is confident they can replace those three with Scott Kazmir, Brandon Wood, and Hideki Matsui. And, there’s a pretty decent chance that they’re right about that.

However, it may be that the players the Angels should worry about are the ones that are still in LA. Based on the projections for 2010, it’s the holdovers who may be the problem this year.

Let’s look at Torii Hunter, Kendry Morales, Juan Rivera, and Erick Aybar. A year ago, those four combined for +15.2 wins, one of the main reasons the Angels were able to surge ahead of the rest of the division. These four outperformed every expectation, and created a strong nucleus of talent for an offense that racked up runs in bunches.

The CHONE projections don’t think they can do it again, or even really come close. Here’s their 2009 WAR and 2010 projected WAR by CHONE side by side.

Aybar: +3.8, +1.5
Hunter: +3.8, +2.4
Rivera: +3.4, +1.1
Morales: +4.2, +1.7

Total: +15.2, +6.7

CHONE is projected an 8.5 win drop-off from just those four players. That’s rough. Part of that is playing time, as both Morales and Aybar have lower projected PA totals due to their inconsistent usage before 2009, so you can bump their totals up by half a win or so if you think they’re going to play everyday. But even still, with that adjustment, the regression is huge.

If this is finally the year that the Angels struggle, playing to their projection rather than beating it by 10 games or more, you will hear a lot of stories about how they miss the spark of Figgins at the top of the order, Lackey’s presence in the rotation, or Vlad’s intimidation of opposing pitchers. In reality, though, what they may actually miss the most are the career years of the guys who stuck around.

The threat to the Angels dominance isn’t the guys they lost – it’s the guys they kept. Mike Scioscia better be hoping that those breakouts were real and sustainable, or else there’s going to be some problems in Disneyland this year.

Originally posted by Dave Cameron from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 13, 2010 7:23 AM

The China Syndrome Of all the issues that have tangled and troubled Google, none has the gravity and complexity as the company's relationship with the People's Republic of China. As I write this on the 20th anniversary of the massacre of hundreds of young pro-democracy demonstrators near Tiananmen Square, I am acutely reminded of the recent history of brutality in the world's largest nation state. Also on this day, as I write about Google's relationship with China, the Chinese government has deployed all its technologies of Internet censorship to block people in China from using social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. And it has blocked access to many Google services such as Blogger and YouTube in the days leading up to the 20th anniversary of the events of June 1989. Yet, as a global citizen plugged in to the rapid flows of people, ideas, data, and money, I am optimistically aware of the potential of China to generate many important ideas, technologies, and scientific breakthroughs in the remainder of this century. Mostly, I would be foolish to minimize the importance of 1.3 billion people as a market for labor, products, and services. As I reflect on the duties, obligations, and culpability of Google in such an environment, I can only conclude that critics of the company's approach to China hold it to an unreasonable standard. At the same time, those who assert that Google's presence in China improves transparency or offers aid to those who struggle for basic human rights there are just as misguided. Now, this is not an easy conclusion. Both cases -- that Google is making a bad situation worse in China and that Google is part of the steady liberalization of China -- have persuasive arguments behind them. From the point of view of many human-rights and free-speech advocates, Google is doing business with criminals and is thus morally culpable as part of the structures of oppression. From the point of view of market or techno-fundamentalists, Google is reforming a corrupt system by allowing a little bit of light into an otherwise dark environment - a little Google is better in the long run than none at all. The odd thing about Google in authoritarian parts of the world - as opposed to just about everywhere else - is how little it matters. Google plays no role in actively oppressing the Chinese people. And Google plays almost no role in their potential liberation as well. These two positions - that Google is part of the problem and that Google is part of the solution in China - emerge from a lack of understanding of both the Internet in general and Google's policies and services in China. If The People's Republic of China ever opens itself up to the turmoil of free speech and democratic accountability, it will not be merely because the Internet was free and open or because Google did not help the government limit access to certain sites. Nothing is that simple. The Myth of the "Great Firewall" China is hardly sealed off from the rest of the world. It never really has been, even during the brutal Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Openness is a sliding scale without absolutes. The outside world was shocked to discover, after the fact, that millions of Chinese had starved during the economic "reforms" of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and that Chinese society had been fractured right down to the level of the family during the Cultural Revolution. But there were hints and indications that life in China during these periods was intolerable for many. Only the scale was hidden. In recent decades China has plugged itself into to the world's social, economic, and technological flows. China has more Internet users than any other country, despite the fact that only 16 percent of the population was online regularly as of 2009. Now the standard lines of thought about China vacillate between a rising and dynamic economic giant and a brutal totalitarian society that forces its citizens to curb their associations and imaginations. Neither of these models is accurate. China has a thriving market economy that is still significantly guided from the central state in matters of macroeconomics and large-scale investment. It has a state apparatus that is just as corrupt and incompetent as vicious - although it displays its brutal effectiveness without hesitation when it needs to, as events in Tibet in 2008 demonstrate. China is still authoritarian, tolerating little overt dissent over policies it considers off limits such as treatment of dissident religious groups, pornography, its efforts to destroy Tibetan culture, or the events of June 4, 1989. The style of state censorship in China is complex as well. There is no "Great Firewall," as many of those reporting on China have asserted. China's Internet filtering and blocking policy is not sturdy and impenetrable, like a wall. It's more fluid and situational. It's more like the dystopian model described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than that of George Orwell's 1984 - distraction and consumerism crowd out meaningful dissent and troublesome expression. China has ways of blocking most of the sites and messages to which it objects, however imperfectly. But for the most part, most of the time, for the most people in China, site censorship impacts daily life in China very little. China cranks up the tools of censorship during times of potential social unrest, such as the 2008 Olympics, the 20th anniversary of the June 4 massacre, and protests in Tibet. When it does block access to a site or a service, Chinese censors mask the nature of the disruption by indicating that a connection has failed or has been reset, rather than blocked or forbidden. This subtle tactic serves to frustrate the general user in China without generating clear and targeted resentment against the state. Forbidden material is thus not completely unavailable to Chinese Internet users. It's just a challenge to get it and searching for it puts a user at risk if his usage is being monitored and perhaps abused by state power if such behavior reaches an unclear threshold. Still, those adept at technology may find their way through the cracks in the system by using strong encryption or proxy servers to hide or spoof the government's censoring and surveillance technologies. The Chinese Internet censorship project does not pretend to seal China off from certain sources or ideas. It just hopes to marginalize and track those who are already motivated to seek troublesome sites and association while satisfying the desires and curiosities of the vast majority of Chinese Internet users. The Chinese government has a strong interest in deterring and generating fear among those who would use the Internet to coordinate trouble or dissent. But it has just as strong an interest in ensuring that commerce flowers in China. Global commerce depends on a reliable and malleable communication infrastructure such as the Internet. Commerce also requires tools such as strong encryption and "Virtual Private Networks" to protect sensitive data or trade secrets. So China won't outlaw its use or enforce restrictions on methods of hiding information. As a result, China has built a fascinating and flexible system that simultaneously allows private firms to exploit the Internet with almost as much freedom as American and European companies have, distract the greater population with the prospects of consumption and entertainment, yet encumber political and religious dissidents enough to limit their influence on daily life. That's not to say that China's Internet is "open" or "free" - far from it. Elites, as always, get to buy more freedom than the rest of Chinese society. As journalist James Fallows has explained, the most effective aspect of Chinese Internet policy is its unpredictability. China has harnessed the power of inconvenience as its most effective weapon in stifling political dissent - and even awareness. Yahoo's Big Sin The fact that China's Internet is penetrable by the technologically adept does not mean that doing so is risk-free. Amnesty International reminds us that China has imprisoned more journalists and bloggers than any other state. Chinese officials can use Internet surveillance techniques to crack down on anyone who crosses an invisible line. China's "Internet" is less networked than most places in the world. All traffic flows through three fiber-optic cable nodes and then to the rest of the world. This gives the government significant power to block access to certain sources of data. China also employs several thousand officials who share the duty of policing Internet use, mostly in cafes. The government sponsors several important Internet firms, such as the search-engine company Baidu. And China extracts important provisions and promises from foreign companies that offer Internet services in China. China offers foreign companies vast potential. There is no place in the world with greater opportunities for growth in market share, revenue, and human capital. The lure is irresistible. But, as Yahoo discovered, it can come at a high price. An activist named Wang Xiaoning used his Yahoo email account to distribute on email lists some anonymous writings criticizing the Chinese government for how it handled the events of May and June 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square. In September 2002 Chinese authorities arrested Wang and he began serving a 10-year sentence in 2003. During Wang's trial prosecutors introduced evidence obtained from Yahoo's China branch identifying Wang as the distributor of the incriminating messages. Then, in 2003 Chinese authorities arrested a dissident named Li Zhi and sentenced him to eight years for "inciting subversion." Again, Yahoo supplied the information needed to track Li's messages. Another, more famous case involved a poet and journalist named Shi Tao, who had sent an email revealing a Communist Party directive concerning Tiananmen Square dissidents to someone in the United States. Shi was well known to Chinese authorities for his criticisms of human rights abuses. So when Yahoo revealed his email account information to Chinese authorities they were able to track Shi as the source of the offending email. Shi was sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2005. Once word reached the United States that Yahoo was complicit in the persecution of political dissidents, a furor ensued. Yahoo has faced a lawsuit filed by human rights organizations, widespread criticism among bloggers and activists, shareholder objections, and a grilling by a U.S. Congressional committee examining the roles of American companies such as Yahoo, Cisco (which supplies the servers that facilitate much of the surveillance and site blocking in China), and Google. Yahoo, of course, defends its actions by saying that it may not violate the laws of a country in which it does business, and it cannot be held responsible if its users violate laws as well. Yahoo also claims that its larger, American affiliate owns only 40 percent of Yahoo-China. The majority owner of Yahoo-China is another Chinese search engine and service provider, Alibaba.com. Since 2005, Alibaba.com has assumed complete control over Yahoo in China. In every discussion about the role and responsibilities of Internet companies in China, these dissidents' plight plays a central role. These cases have generated calls for American companies to forge a set of "best practices" or a "code of conduct" that would limit the extent to which they can be used by the Chinese government to violate basic human rights. Many American and European companies signed the Sullivan Principles, which established a code of just conduct, in the 1980s when the South African government practiced brutal oppression against its black majority. So far, foreign companies have failed to outline such provisions for China. The Yahoo saga, however, has cast a shadow onto Google as well, even though Google operates in a very different way in China. Google's Decision Google has not put itself in a position to turn over information about Chinese dissidents' email accounts. The company decided years ago not to host email services or any other service that might require such revelation to the government of the People's Republic of China. So the application of Yahoo's experience to an assessment of Google's role in China is inappropriate and unfair. That's not to absolve Google of any complicity in the censorious policies of China: the company certainly offers a filtered version of its search engine to Chinese users: Google.cn. Before 2006 Google did not have servers or services located in the People's Republic of China. Chinese users could reach Google by connecting to google.com and its servers based in the United States. Of course, this meant that the Chinese censors could block the entire Google service if they decided that something offended or troubled them. This happened often between 2002 and 2006. Generally, having Google's data pass through the three central nodes and filters meant that Google was significantly slower than search engines that had servers based in China itself. Google was facing the prospect of being irrelevant to Chinese users, shut out of the potential to gather revenue from advertising in one of the fastest growing consumer economies in history, and facing irregular and arbitrary blackouts of its service for which the company would most likely be blamed. By late 2002 it became clear that Google was not going to be able to gain purchase in the Chinese market if it wished to retain its public commitment to free expression. "We faced a choice at that point," Google Vice President Elliot Schrage told a Congressional subcommittee in 2006. "Hold fast to our commitment to free speech and risk a long-term cut-off from our Chinese users, or compromise our principles by entering the Chinese market directly and subjecting ourselves to Chinese laws and regulations." So for a while, at least, Google stayed out of China. Then, in 2005 the company began a series of discussions with government and human rights leaders in an effort to construct a model that would allow Google to offer dependable service in China without putting itself or its users in danger. The company launched Google.cn in 2006. The new service is based in China, so it works quickly and is tailored to local needs and search habits. In addition, the search results reveal to users that certain sites have been blocked or removed by the state - there is no mystery and confusion about the source of censorship. Most importantly, Google does not operate any services that could put users in jeopardy. Chinese users of Gmail and Blogger must sign in through the US-based Chinese-language sites of google.com. And search results generated by google.com remain unfiltered and uncensored. As a result, of course, the Chinese government still frequently blocks access to Youtube and Blogger with those mysterious messages that "the connection has timed out." Are Corporations bound by International Human Rights Standards? Google would be foolish to abandon the Chinese market. In fact, it would commit something close to commercial malpractice to avoid or vacate China. Google is not a free-speech engine. It is an advertising company. It is also a publicly traded corporation with a duty to provide returns to its shareholders. And while both the company and its critics in the human rights community profess a shared commitment to free speech, Google can't possible rise to the level of its own rhetoric on such matters. In many areas of speech and in many places in the world, Google compromises in appropriate ways, usually to conform to local laws. In Germany and France Google limits access to sites that promote anti-Semitism. In most of the world Google limits access to images that display significant amounts of human skin. In the United States, Google quickly removes videos from YouTube if a few people flag them as "inappropriate." And because United States copyright law makes it easy to remove a potentially infringing digital file from any Web server, copyright can be an effective tool of censorship as well. Now, it's hardly fair to compare the practice of conforming to decency and copyright laws in relatively liberal nations with the participation in widespread practices of political censorship in places like China. The cases might be similar in design but not in magnitude. But the company invites such a comparison by consistently asserting - no matter the context or issue - that it conforms to local laws and standards in matters of censorship. If you have a problem, the company is saying, take it up with local officials. Still, for some reason, Google officials insist on claiming that the company is committed to the principles of free speech, and that such policies are exceptions rather than widely practiced standards. This contradiction lies at the friction point of Google's public philosophy, what it says and believes about itself and how it negotiates its positions and practices around the world. Certainly, Google is bound to conform to the laws of the countries in which it operates. So if Chinese officials demand that Google remove access to certain sites or subjects, the company claims it must obey. Human rights groups, on the other hand, counter that obeying Chinese law means obeying all of Chinese law, and the constitution of the People's Republic of China guarantees free speech. So Google, they say, is choosing to conform to Chinese laws in a way that causes it the least trouble and inconvenience. This contradiction and the broad and loud public outcry over the Yahoo decision to expose activists to persecution have generated a firm call for a shared "code of conduct" for global Internet corporations that deal with China. Still, it's not clear whether companies face enough pressure in North America and Western Europe to counter the potential revenues that China offers. Holding fast to principle might be easier with a smaller and more oppressive country such as Burma or Saudi Arabia. In recent decades, as global corporations have grown in influence around the world, human rights lawyers and theorists have been working to spread the umbrella of human rights law wide enough to cover corporate actors under the same obligations that bind states. The roles of the diamond industry in the slaughters and civil wars of Central Africa, petroleum companies such as Shell in the support of the totalitarian junta in Burma, and mining companies in the degradation of places like Irian Jaya in Indonesia have sparked strong reaction. The connection between the interests of these companies and the brutality that exists in these places is impossible to deny. So far, this effort has not yielded tangible results. There is scant legal foundation for bringing companies to justice for cooperating with states in the oppression of their own people. In addition, states sign human rights treaties. Companies do not. Still, legal reformers are pushing to expand the reach of laws and jurisdictions to cover such sins and treat them as crimes. The Argument for Engagement During that debate on National Public Radio in November 2008, Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis accused Google of violating its "Don't be Evil" motto by creating Google.cn along the very lines that the Chinese government demanded. "Their choice was, to accept the Chinese ultimatum or to go home. They could have gone home but they didn't. They stated and built the engine as the Chinese wanted it." Lewis concluded, "Google didn't choose the lesser of two evils when faced with the Chinese ultimatum. It chose the more profitable of the two evils." Now, Lewis was making a debater's point because, well, this was a debate. The question before the two panels was not whether Google on balance does more bad than good or good than bad. It was whether Google lived up to its motto. The Chinese deal gives Google critics - and my debating team - an easy shot. Perhaps it's a cheap shot. But that is what debating is all about. Esther Dyson responded to Lewis. Dyson is known as one of the central visionaries of the information age. She has been present at the creation of many of the most important initiatives of the Internet, including the gestation of several search engines. She is one of the brightest and most influential thinkers about digital technologies and their effects on the world. Dyson understandably believes in the transformative, perhaps revolutionary, power of information technology. "The great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power, it sucks power out of the center, and takes it to the periphery, it erodes the power of institutions over people, while giving to individuals the power to run their own lives. Google is part of that. It's one of these things that shines light on everything, it enables people to find stuff out, it enables them to question what their governments are doing, and it's absolutely wonderful," Dyson told the debate crowd in New York City. "Google by its very presence and its operation, even if it's incomplete, creates increasing expectations for transparency, it starts people answering questions. It gets them to expect to be able to find out stuff." As I wrote in Chapter 1, I was sitting at the opposite table to Dyson. I was on Harry Lewis' side of this constructed event. If the question at hand was whether Google violated its motto, I have to come down on Lewis' side, as I was in fact on Lewis' side. But in the real world, debates like this don't matter much. To the people of China, Google's fidelity to its motto doesn't make a bit of difference. In the real world, Dyson has a much stronger point. Google might raise expectations. Google might spark some young person in China to ask one more question about why she can't read this or watch that. Some Google is probably a little better for China than no Google. But in fact, the case that the Internet or Google could change China is about as fantastic a notion as one that asserts Google's absence from China would make a difference to anyone. Let's face it: Google would be stupid, irresponsible, in fact, to leave all that potential Chinese money on the table. Some China is certainly a lot better for Google than no China. At this point, however, it's just potential money, and it's just some China for Google. Google does not matter much in China right now. In 2009 Google controlled less that 21 percent of the China search market (as defined by the share of total searches; Google does much better as a share of search-based advertising revenue with 29.8 percent). That figure was more than two points lower than the last quarter of 2008, so Google's market share was actually falling slightly in China in 2008-2009. Overall, the number of searches within China rose 41.2 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. So even with just 21 percent of the searches, there is a lot of business to be done and money to be made. Nonetheless, Google is hardly the cultural and political factor in China that it is in North America and Europe. China's market leader, Baidu.com, controls more than 74 percent of the search market. There are many reasons for the dominance of Baidu. First and foremost, simply having an early lead in market share gives Baidu more data with which to customize search results and services. While Google holds back from China many of its most attractive services to avoid a Yahoo-like human rights dilemma, Baidu offers a wide array of locally based (and thus fast) services such as area-specific searches (online chat, children's material search, legal searches, government websites). As of mid-2009 Google.cn offered fewer search services and features than Baidu did. Baidu also appeals to the growing nationalistic spirit in China, as many young people are wary of the influence of multinational corporations and proud that a Chinese firm can best one of the most powerful and popular in the world. Baidu also has the advantage of building its code fundamentally and originally to serve searches in simplified Mandarin, while Google had to translate many of its tools and services for Mandarin. Perhaps most importantly, for several years Baidu has allowed its users to find unauthorized audio and video files easily, as China has notoriously lax copyright enforcement. In early 2009 Google announced a deal with major global music companies to offer cost-free authorized music downloads to users in China to compete with Baidu. Still, Google seems to be most popular among the cosmopolitan elite and international business people rather than young and poor people who make up both the vast majority of China in general and - more importantly - the vast majority of the potential growth in the market for Web services and search. With Baidu attracting far more use among far more people in China, there is no reason to believe that Google's market share will grow significantly over the next few years. But with a valuable slice of the market - those who buy and travel more - Google has the potential to continue increasing its revenue and share of total revenue even if its total market share continues to shrink. Of all the ways that the government of the People's Republic of China has to censor, monitor, and oppress its citizens, Web search engines are largely unimportant. Among search engines, Google's lack of market power in China makes its role in the structures of oppression even less important that it might be in other places where it dominates Web search. In mid 2009 the Chinese government announced a new initiative to require the installation of content filtering programs on every personal computer in the country. The "Green Dam" system borrows elements of anti-pornography filtering software to allow for significant external monitoring, blocking, and even remote control of computers by installing serious security vulnerabilities. If the government succeeds in making "Green Dam" part of the standards for computers in China, then its censorship and surveillance plans will have one more powerful tool that renders Google less than relevant. If you consider the wide array of tools that the Chinese government uses for security, surveillance, and censorship on the Internet, and you consider how small a factor Google is in China, then you can't help but conclude that Google does not matter much in matters of commerce, politics, or justice in China. So Esther Dyson is wrong to believe that Google's compromise with Chinese laws and standards can generate any measurable benefit to Chinese dissidents or promoters of religious freedom and democracy. The elites in China, those most likely to find value in using Google, are also most likely to be aware of the global human rights criticism, the technologies of censorship and surveillance, and the fate of the leaders of the uprisings in 1989. For the vast majority of people in China, the commercial and entertainment services that Baidu offers suffice. Just because Google.cn might offer a slice more of the complicating and troublesome political information available in the world does not mean there is sufficient demand for it. Web search, largely because of Google's expertise, now delivers to users almost exactly what they think they want. If they don't want to find trouble, they don't get it. Search is a filter, after all. The key to providing effective and attractive search services is to limit the number of surprises users will encounter. Search, therefore, is inherently conservative. Effective Web search thus inhibits social and political change. Political change in China and elsewhere can only arrive when Chinese public culture demands it and presses the state at its points of greatest weakness. We make a grave mistake by trusting too much in technologies to change societies. Technologies are embedded in societies and cultures. They are not distinct and independent drivers. The Many Voices of Google The story of Google in China may not be a simple one of censorship and the struggle for liberations. After all, China is hardly the only example of a state effectively censoring Internet traffic and thwarting political dissent. As Internet scholar Rebecca MacKinnon wrote during the June 2009 crackdown on Google and other Internet services in China, "The Internet censorship club is expanding and now includes a growing number of democracies. Legislators are under growing pressure from family groups to 'do something' in the face of all the threats sloshing around the Internet, and the risk of overstepping is high." Germany was considering a national censorship system, through which Internet service providers would be required to block a secret list of sites. Australia and the United Kingdom have for a number of years maintained a similar national censorship list. While none of these states censor as pervasively, disruptively, or effectively as China does, it's clear that China has strong partners in efforts to restrict the use of the Internet for both pornography and politics. In each of these countries, Google follows orders from the state carefully and thus actively (albeit tangentially and grudgingly) participates in the censorship of the Internet. Even in the United States, digital copyright laws have forced Google to aid the Church of Scientology in its efforts to squelch Web critics. In addition, the United States has for a decade been requiring libraries and schools to install Web filter software similar to the "Green Dam" mandate in China for the same overt reason: to restrict access to sites suspected of supplying pornography. However, as with Green Dam, such software also restricts material of political significance. Measuring by scale or effect, it's improper to compare the Chinese efforts to restrict the flow of information with that of the United States and other democracies. But it's a mistake to single out China as the only significant place where Web censorship is a matter of policy.

Originally posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan from The Googlization of Everything, on January 13, 2010 6:27 AM

From the Wikipedia page about the .me domain, the top-level domain for Montenegro:

The dot-ME top level domain replaced the dot-YU (Yugoslavia) domain previously used by Serbia and Montenegro. In addition to declaring .me independent of .yu, a new .rs domain was deployed for Serbian use.

Lemme get this straight...when me was subtracted from you, what's left over is ours?

Tags: language

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 13, 2010 6:07 AM

Memo sent by “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” director of animation Richard Williams to his animation department. “Even now (an unbelievable 22 years later) the most hardened critic would have difficulty finding fault with the near-seamless interactions between [Roger Rabbit’s] live-action and animated characters.” [thx JH]

Originally posted by Matt from Signal vs. Noise, on January 13, 2010 6:05 AM

My response to Jeff Jarvis' comments on the Google-China showdown:

This is not Google standing up for free speech. It could have done that years ago. It's about Google standing up against attacks. This is a much more serious issue. I think we would all get a better grasp of what is going on to recognize that the censorship aspect of this conflict is a side show. Google.cn censorship has never mattered -- not because of market share. Anyone who cared could reach Google.com by using proxy servers or VPN. Millions do. Besides, Google had a choice: censor Google.cn or break the law and get out of the largest market in the world. Criticisms of Google for its China policies never made sense to me. They only make sense if you think companies should not be trying to make money. So backing off of the old model will make no difference either. China will just kick Google out of the country if the showdown fails. So Google should be applauded for taking a big risk here. But it's not egalitarian at all. It's about exposing China's nasty cyber attacks, general corporate insecurity (threatening the Cloud move, among many other things), and Google's lack of patience with China's habit of blocking YouTube and Blogger. Google deserves credit for standing up against China's anti-Internet and anti-business policies. It has nothing to do with censorship and human rights.

Originally posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan from The Googlization of Everything, on January 13, 2010 6:03 AM

If there's been a positive to NBC's Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien disaster (other than the end to the awful Leno-in-primetime experiment), it's that it's given all the late night talk show hosts plenty of fodder, and new energy, whether they're directly involved, friends or enemies of someone involved, or entirely out of the fray.

Originally posted by Alan Sepinwall/The Star-Ledger from Alan Sepinwall on TV, on January 13, 2010 5:46 AM

via www.seriouseats.com Caitlin Flanagan's hatchet job in the usually thought-provoking and intelligent Atlantic Monthly on Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard project is so wrongheaded it would be easy to shrug off if it wasn't also so belligerent, so fueled by an animus that is way out of proportion to the terrible crime of Alice Waters's attempts to teach kids about nutrition and gardening. via www.seriouseats.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 13, 2010 4:57 AM

A programmer lists 20 lessons learned in the past 20 years.

5. You are not the best at programming. Live with it. -- I always thought that I knew so much about programming, but there is always someone out there better than you. Always. Learn from them.

(via @h_fj)

Tags: lists   programming

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 13, 2010 4:46 AM

[Horine, 10/19/09]

This morning, Sam Sifton awards one star to Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield's The Breslin, a heavy two and a half month old gastropub in the Ace Hotel. As usual, the Siftonator uses romance as a rubric here. But instead of comparing food to kissing, as he's done in the past, now the Breslin is a date he doesn't want to end. And later, when the pure heaviness of the menu and the 3 AM meat sweats kick in, he wants to see other people:

This is the Breslin on a Thursday night, a warm, crowded and vaguely British barroom off the lobby of the Ace Hotel: a bedlam of gastrotourists and scenemakers. It’s Hogwarts for hipsters. It is also the Breslin on a Saturday night, and on a Tuesday night, whenever you come in the door in darkness and hunger...the restaurant is almost perpetually jammed.

...Nowhere in New York right now is the fetish for pork fat and dairy flavor more on display. April Bloomfield, the chef and an owner, is exhausting gallbladders nightly...There is a marvelous Caesar salad: an herbed-up version with anchovy croutons. And a rich, salty mussel soup with curry butter. It tastes like a date you don’t want to end.

Then come the meat sweats (and possibly...the shits):

The Breslin is the sort of restaurant you end up thinking about a lot, not always pleasantly, staring up at the ceiling at 3 in the morning in cold sweat and mild panic. Yes, the food is good. But it is monochromatically good: it is 10 colors of fat...It would be death to be a regular there.

[NYT]

Meanwhile Ryan Sutton seems enamored with the place, giving it two stars instead of three only because of the three hour wait: "This is courageous, offal-heavy grub for this part of town...A smoked pork belly for two ($50) needs nothing else. It’s a foot long, sweet and caramelized on the outside, and loaded with jiggly, melt-in- your-mouth fat." [Bloomberg]

Given it's a Danny Meyer restaurant, Plattypants expects to be won over by Maialino. And well, he is, giving her a threespot: "Anderer is from Manhattan, not Lazio, but he has a ventriloquist’s knack for soaking up the spare, earthy vocabulary of casual Roman restaurant cooking and reproducing it, more or less exactly, on the plate. At least that was my impression as I spooned in bites of properly funky 'trippa alla Trasteverina'..." [NYM]

In his call to save old timer Gino, Alan Richman compares himself to a child who has abandoned his frail parents, "finally rushing to their side repentantly after learning that they are on their deathbed." His Gino tribute: "Gino is from a time when New York restaurants didn’t try to become either glittery palaces or furtive joints with their names intentionally left off the door. They were just there. Gino is part of the fabric of its neighborhood...Italian-American restaurants offer nostalgia, history, hominess, and pleasure. They deserve a wing in the Smithsonian." [GQ]

THE ELSEWHERE: The Cuozz discovers that Robert, the new restaurant atop the Museum of Arts & Design, has the best views in the city, Robert Sietsema counts himself as another fan of The Breslin, Julia Moskin files a brief on Bar Pleiades and Ardesia, Tables for Two is charmed by Tipsy Parson, but finds the food to be a mixed bag, The Brooklyn Paper fawns over the pastrami brisket sandwich at David's Brisket House, Jay Cheshes gives four out of five stars to The Purple Yam, Sarah DiGregorio finds killer starters and a mixed bag of mains at Scottish newcomer Highlands, and Gael Greene gets high off of Cascabel Taqueria.

THE BLOGS: Immaculate Infatuation thinks Raoul's is the shit, The Pink Pig finds Le Caprice to be a very good British import, The Young and Hungry finds great food at reasonable prices at Po, Eating In Translation finds tasty tacos at Choncho's Tacos, New York Journal eats an overpriced burger at "21" Club, and Ed Levine gives three different grades to Dos Toros.

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on January 13, 2010 4:26 AM

Here's a banner from the Mother Load of Mets Pennants.

I don't know if "Kid Met" was ever official, but there he is.   Looks like Mr. Met (original) used to wear an orange cap.





Is "Kid Met" part of official Mets canon, or is this just something random on a pennant?  We may need Howie Rose to make a ruling.

For more about Mr. Met I and Lady Met, and Mr. Met II and his wife and kids check this out.

Let's see Lady Met at the park this summer fellas!

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Please visit www.metspolice.com and help stop black uniforms.

Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 13, 2010 3:44 AM

A few years ago, when Google announced its decision to agree to censor its China site, it was savaged for selling out. 

The company had violated its own "don't be evil" motto, critics yelled, and it was tacitly supporting the Chinese government's outrageous censorship policy.

The critics were wrong.

Google made the right decision to build a business in China a few years ago.  And it's making the right decision now, by threatening to pull out of the country if China doesn't relax its censorship demands. 

Google's decision to make a big public threat now, when it controls 15%-20% of China's search market and is known to most Chinese Internet users, will put far more pressure on the Chinese government to relax its policies than a boycott of the country five years ago would have.

Google matters in China now.  The announcement that Google was threatening to pull out spawned public support for the company in China.  It got Secretary of State Hillary Clinton into the act.  It forced the Chinese government to respond with a statement.  It has grabbed the attention of investors, as well as the hundreds of other companies that do business in China and are forced to play by Chinese rules.  It will focus more public attention on the reality of China's censorship policies than any boycott ever could have.

In short, by playing ball with China until it had some real leverage, Google has a much better chance of actually forcing the government to change. 

And that's the real goal here--change.  If Google forces any change at all in China, it will have done more for China's 1+ billion citizens than it would have if it had boycotted the country from the beginning.

How will the situation resolve itself?  The parties will likely bluster for a while, negotiate, and then reach a compromise.  There is no way the Chinese government will completely drop its censorship of Google.  And for Google to walk away from $600 million in revenue now, a $10+ billion opportunity long-term, and the ability to exert further pressure will be extraordinarily painful, so the company should be willing to compromise.

So expect both parties to hug and make up and quietly declare victory to their mutual constituencies--while reserving the right to take further action.

But Google has played the overall China situation maturely and brilliantly.  It has not been evil.  It has balanced the interests of its shareholders, employees, and, importantly, Chinese people.  It has also done the most it can to address an appalling and ridiculous injustice in the world's most populous country.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Google's China Exposure: ~$600 Million In Sales This Year, Lots Of Future Growth
• Did The Chinese Government Hack Google?
• Google Threatens To Pull Out Of China Over Free Speech

Originally posted by Henry Blodget from The Business Insider, on January 13, 2010 3:13 AM

Filed under: Enterprise, Software

In the world of Mac email and collaboration servers, there are some big names -- Apple (of course, with Mac OS X Server's mail and calendaring features), Kerio, and Zimbra. Zimbra Collaboration Suite is a popular and powerful email server and shared calendar for Linux and Mac OS X. The features of ZCS rival and in most cases surpass those of Microsoft Exchange, and did I mention that it runs on Macs?

VMWare announced on Tuesday that they are acquiring Zimbra from Yahoo! Inc. The maker of the popular VMWare Fusion virtualization software for Mac OS X, VMWare has been moving in the direction of providing cloud solutions, and the acquisition of Zimbra fits those plans perfectly.

According to Brian Byun, VP and General Manager of Cloud Services for VMware, "Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable 'cloud era' solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud. It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider. We are excited to welcome the Zimbra team and community to the VMware family."

The press releases from both companies note that the free Open Source Edition of Zimbra Collaboration Suite will continue being developed in the future.

TUAWZimbra and VMWare get married, cloud-shaped kids expected originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Steven Sande from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 13, 2010 3:00 AM

I’m as big of a fan-boy as Google has, but this interview is full of statements that David Drummond (Google’s chief legal officer) doesn’t seem to believe. It doesn’t take a memorization of FACS to see the man’s lips and chin clench up in discomfort after some answers (AU17/24), but remain completely relaxed after others. The obvious suspects:

“With what we know now -that there’s been an attack that’s targeted towards Chinese dissidents- we just no longer, in good conscience, can continue to censor ourselves.”

(when asked: you’re saying those conversations [with the Chinese government] are ahead of you, not behind you?) “I think that is correct.”

“Our revenue from the China business are truly immaterial, so it’s not going to have an effect on our core business, one way or the other.”

So Google doesn’t expect there to be many discussions with China moving forward, the idea that they “can no longer censor in good conscience” is crap, and this is going to affect their core business, one way or another. That’s not a big surprise. The more interesting part is this:

“We know that political dissidents and people interested in human rights in China were clearly targeted here.”

“They are companies from a wide range of industries, they were from internet and technology industries, but several others as well. Obviously I’m not at liberty to talk about those other companies, but it seemed to be a broad-spread attack.”

Both are followed by the same tight lips (AU24) and half-smirks (AU12) as before. While these are not lies, yet they aren’t something Drummord is completely comfortable about, either. To understand that discomfort, consider the NYT report of 34 other companies targeted, and the description on the Google Enterprise Blog of “an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical” (emphasis mine).

Attacking chemical and financial companies won’t yield much information about political dissidents in China, so it’s relatively safe to say “dozens of dissidents” are only a minority of those targeted, the minority which fits the bigger PR theme of the current story. You’d imagine at least equivalent value in stealing biochem IP or Obama’s blackberry call logs as finding our some Chinese blogger’s identity, and comparing the tech talent at AT&T and Google, I’d wager the former are easier to get at, as well.

So here are the pertinent questions I see left unanswered:

First, according to the NYT, 34 companies were attacked last week (or mid-December, according to Google). Few, if any, are as technically competent as Google, who is “in the process of notifying them”. How did Google find out the other companies were being targeted? Aside from activists, what other groups were targeted, for what reasons, and what did the attackers achieve? Which, if any, of the 34 companies will step forward, and will they follow in Google’s steps by re-evaluating their involvement in China?

Second, if an attack last week targeted 34 companies, did it also target government institutions? What’s the larger picture here, regarding global politics? Kudlow repeatedly uses phrases like “cyber attacks”, and even “terrorist attacks” in his questions, to which Drummond responds that Google isn’t speculating whether the attacks where “state sponsored”. In the public conscious, there’s one thing to fill “state sponsored ______”, and it ain’t candy. Is there a larger response this PR is leading up to?

All in all, let’s keep in mind that there was a well-coordinated attack on at least 34 companies including major corporations in the finance, technology, media, and chemical industries. Coordinated enough to get at GMail’s internal data store, if only the one with e-mail headers. If that doesn’t scare you, it should. What Google does with their .cn site is relatively minor news.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from _meta, on January 13, 2010 2:38 AM

Note: This post marks the official Serious Eats writing debut of my wife Vicky Bijur. We actually wrote this together. Welcome to the fray, Vicky. —Ed

[Image: The Atlantic Monthly]

Caitlin Flanagan's hatchet job in the usually thought-provoking and intelligent Atlantic Monthly on Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard project is so wrongheaded it would be easy to shrug off if it wasn't also so belligerent, so fueled by an animus that is way out of proportion to the terrible crime of Alice Waters's attempts to teach kids about nutrition and gardening.

Flanagan's jumping off point for the story is this: the Edible Schoolyard curriculum is not only not helpful, it's destructive, counter-productive, racist, paternalistic, and classist.

How is she wrong? Let us count the ways.

Her arguments:

How dare Alice Waters force the sons and daughters of migrant farm workers to toil in the fields (1.5 hours a week in the garden or kitchen) when such work is exactly what their parents would wish for them to avoid.

Huh? As if that's all they do in the Edible Schoolyard curriculum.

Said children should spend less time learning about their food and more time learning about and reading Shakespeare in order for them to escape the shackles of their class and background. Why is it an either/or situation? It's not. She speaks of the "misuse of instructional time" that is used to "cheat kids out of thousands of crucial learning hours."

Edible Schoolyard is a prime example of the colossal failure of the California public school system. (In a system of millions of students, only two schools in California actually have the imprimatur from the Chez Panisse Foundation.) I think Flanagan should be pointing the finger at many other bigger, more powerful forces that are at work destroying the California public school system.

She visits Compton and finds two markets full of fresh fruits and vegetables and concludes there is no basis to the argument that many neighborhoods in other cities might lack fresh food.

She "spent many hours poring over endless research on the positive effects of garden curricula" and finds no proof that "classroom gardens help students meet the state standards for English and math." We don't think Alice Waters should be held responsible for improving math and literacy scores as all-powerful as she is.

She decries over-reaching claims, as she should, but has no trouble portraying the Chez Panisse clientele as "the right-on, 'yes we can,' ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people."

It's one thing to employ a healthy, thoughtful skepticism when it comes to Alice Waters. That, I think, comes with the Saint Alice territory. It's another to engage in character and policy assassination, as Flanagan does in this piece.

To support Alice Waters, she says, is to be "complicit...in an act of theft that will...contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass...." Shame on her and shame on the Atlantic for giving credence to her ridiculously far-fetched arguments. This isn't thought-provoking journalism. It's poorly reasoned mud-slinging.

Alice Waters[Flickr: David Sifry]

And that's not all, serious eaters. Carey sent me this after she re-read Flanagan's piece:

Nothing I've read has disgusted me this much since... well, Cleaving. Inflammatory race-baiting rhetoric aside, my first issue (and there are many) is that her point of departure seems to be the idea that the single purpose of schooling is to equip students to pass state-imposed milestones; to quote, "doing well on the state tests" and "passing Algebra I."

Not the main purpose—of course, schools should prepare their students for higher education—but the only purpose. As if anything not related to exit exams weren't worth teaching. What does this give us? A soulless curriculum of rote learning. For a writer whose work often relates to education, she seems to hold an astoundingly narrow view of its purpose.

Look—out of any classroom of sixth graders, many won't end up in college; it's simple math. But the things you learn in grammar school stick with you.

I went to a California public elementary school in the midst of an aggressive anti-smoking campaign. We started learning about lung cancer in first grade. And all my life, I've had a visceral aversion to cigarettes. They never appealed. Even in high school, no kids I knew smoked them—I may have been in college before I saw someone my own age light up. Classroom lessons resonate with the young. More so than vocabulary words.

Secondly: no one is deploying sixth-graders to backbreaking labor. Please. If you want to complain about the mistreatment of migrant agricultural workers, have at it. (I can't imagine these workers taking the comparison to a sixth-grade class very kindly.) But the stigma Flanagan speaks of is one she herself imposes.

There is no inherent shame in growing food. We all got by that way, once upon a time. Apparently, she believes gardening such a human hardship that one must seek refuge in education, which has "lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt." Belittled therein: any manual labor, any physical enterprise, any work beyond the armchair. God forbid our children learn the value of hard work.

And finally (for this email, at least), this absurd politicalization. Say anything you want about Alice and her occasionally overzealous following—of course, they can be self-righteous—but growing a garden is hardly a radical act. And since when is teaching kids about nutrition a political issue? Every school in America has some kind of health class, and there's no more basic health skill than feeding yourself well.

Flanagan stretches the term "indoctrination" far beyond its borders. Indoctrinating our children with the notion that vegetables are good for you! The horror! She's no better than those Fox News pundits who claimed Obama was "indoctrinating" kindergartners about health care—when he told them to wash their hands. It's all the same inflammatory bullshit.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on January 13, 2010 2:30 AM

I love this photo of Jeff Pendergraph warming up the Blazers for their game with the Cavs.  (Alas, they lost.)  I don't know what's better - the look on Pendergraph's face or the look on everyone else's....

 

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on January 12, 2010 6:57 PM

From Serious Eats: New York

"If this were a burrito episode of Iron Chef, Dos Toros would be the winner."

[Photographs: Robyn Lee]

Dos Toros Taqueria

137 Fourth Avenue, New York NY 10003 (b/n 13th and 14th; map); 212-677-7300; dostorosnyc.com/
Service: Speedy, friendly, strangely efficient
Setting: Walk-up counter with table seating for ten
Compare It To: Chipotle, Calexico
Must-Haves: Any quesadilla in the place, beef burritos, chicken burritos with guacamole
Cost: $3.67 tacos, $7.35 burritos
Grade: A, quesadillas; B+, steak and chicken burritos; B, carnitas anything, tacos

I admit it. Mission-style burrito joint Dos Toros Taqueria is in Serious Eats's wheelhouse, and somehow, we didn't make it over there in the two months they have been open. So we have no excuses—only remorse—for allowing Oliver Strand at the Times to beat us to the punch (or, should we say, the horchata). Strand is younger than this serious eater, which probably explains why he didn't mention Dos Toros's predecessor in New York—the much beloved Kitchen on Eighth Avenue, which regrettably went out of business two years ago.

But I digress. Once we got past the embarassment of being scooped, we picked ourselves up off the ground and hustled down to Dos Toros for a Friday lunch. Its reputation preceded us, so at 12:12 on a Friday afternoon, we found ourselves in line at the cheerful storefront. What did we find when got to the front of the line (which, thanks to some kind of bizarre hipster efficiency, was only ten minutes)?

We basically ordered one of everything on the menu—namely, soft tacos, crispy tacos, burritos, and quesadillas—filled with either pork (carnitas), beef (carne asada), chicken (pollo asado) or no meat, plus rice, your choice of black or pinto beans, pico de gallo, sour cream, hot sauce, and guacamole ($0.92 extra).

Dos Toros uses Tortilleria Nixtamal tortillas from Corona, Queens, and that was the first of many good decisions made by owners Leo and Oliver Kremer—who turn out, generally speaking, to know what good is. The tortillas are thin, flaky, and taste of fresh masa.

The burritos (all $7.35) are plenty hefty, as they are in the Mission in San Francisco, and they are made with considerable care. Most of the bite-sized pieces of pollo asado, grilled chicken thigh, are shockingly moist. Ditto the chunks of skirt steak in the carne asada. Surprisingly to this avowed pork lover, the stringy carnitas is the driest meat in the joint. Some people, like Midtown Lunch's Zach Brooks, who attended our hastily assembled lunch, think it's okay if the protein is dry in a Mission-style burrito because the other wet elements compensate. I respectfully disagree. Dry is dry, when it comes to pork, and it's not acceptable in any form.

The fresh-tasting, mildy seasoned creamy guacamole ($0.92) is a meaningful addition to any chicken or pork item, and the spritely pico de gallo makes anything you order taste better at Dos Toros.

Those delicious tortillas are the housing for both the hard and soft tacos. The soft are steamed and the hard are not deep-fried, but rather griddled, so they are not all that crunchy. These tacos are good but in no way earth-shattering. They're bigger and more filling than what you'd find on a taco truck (as they should be, at $3.67 for one), but the flavors are not as bright as I would have liked. There are better tacos to be had in Jackson Heights and Corona, on Amsterdam Avenue above 100th Street, and, of course, in Sunset Park.

The rice was standard burrito rice, nothing more, nothing less, and neither the underseasoned black nor the dull-tasting pinto beans did much for me, either. Even if you don't care much for hot sauce, you might ask for a taste of the freshly made, fairly mild green serrano and jalapeño hot sauce or salsa, because it really amps up the flavor of the rice and beans.

The stars of the menu at Dos Toros are the quesadillas ($5.97), which were somewhat revelatory. A flour tortilla that has been crisped on the griddle, with lovely golden brown spots, is topped with a slice of jack cheese before it's built with your choice of protein, pico de gallo, and hot sauce. What makes these quesadillas revelatory is the crisped tortilla, the melted jack cheese, and the perfect ratio of tortilla to filling. I want one of these quesadillas now. I don't think there is a better quesadilla to be had in all New York City.

The Head-to-Head Chipotle Test

The question we kept asking ourselves as we munched is whether the burritos were any better than Chipotle Grill's, which, while fast-food creations, are comparably marketed and priced. So I found myself a few days later racing down to Dos Toros in a cab, while Erin (synchronized watch in hand) brought back four Chipotle burritos.

Left to right: Chipotle and Dos Toros.

I am a fan of Chipotle—I have a lot of respect for what they do, as responsible citizens turning out tasty food while operating in the fast-food realm. But my respect made the results of the taste test that much more disappointing. Up next to Dos Toros, the Chipotle tortilla was stiff, thick, and dull. The rice and beans were underseasoned and so were the proteins. The chicken was really dry and the pork and beef weren't much better. The Chipotle guacamole is fine, and the various salsas are really the strongest part of its game. Good to know—the small shop beat the chain, hands-down.

So if you're looking for a burrito in New York, there's your answer. If this were a burrito episode of Iron Chef, Dos Toros would be the winner. If they spiced the beans more intensely and moistened the pork, I wouldn't have to hold the memory of my beloved Kitchen so close to my heart. But Kitchen is not coming back any time soon, so in the meantime, I will happily make do with Dos Toros.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on January 12, 2010 6:00 PM

A tweet from Jeff Sullivan this afternoon sparked my curiosity into batters faced totals and I headed to Baseball-Reference to dig around. I enjoy using batters faced rather than innings pitched for tow main reasons. One, because I think it’s a better measure for durability. Number of pitches is actually even better, in my opinion. Secondly, I think it makes for a much better denominator in rate stats than the more standard per nine innings.

On the subject of the tweet itself, how many people know or remember that Tanyon Sturtze lead the American League in batters faced in 2002? He also lead the league in losses, hits allowed, earned runs allowed and walks. Not all sunshine for Tanyon down in Tampa that season.

Less surprising is that Livan Hernandez lead the National League in batters faced multiple times. Three straight seasons, from 2003 through 2005, in fact. Livan faced 3,085 batters during those three years, logging 734.2 innings pitched. The next highest for that same time period was Greg Maddux at 2,709 batters faced, over 300 fewer than Livan and 656 innings pitched, nearly 80 fewer. Maddux’s achievement was possibly more impressive given that he was between 37 and 39 years old at the time while Livan was in his late 20s/early 30s.

It pales a bit in comparison to Phil Niekro between 1977 and 1979 however, as Niekro’s 4,253 batters faced was 847 more than second place J.R. Richard. Some of the other names on the 2003-5 combined National League list are a hoot. Brian Lawrence, 5th most batters faced. 11th through 15th were Jason Schmidt, Dontrelle Willis, Woody Williams, Matt Morris and Russ Ortiz.

2005 marked the last year so far that a pitcher has repeated atop the batters faced leader board and it happened in both leagues as Mark Buehrle in the AL joined Livan Hernandez. Since then it’s been Barry Zito, CC Sabathia, Roy Halladay and Justin Verlander in the American League and Aaron Harang, Brandon Webb, Johan Santana (he never lead while with Minnesota, weird) and Adam Wainwright in the National League. So who takes over in 2010?

Originally posted by Matthew Carruth from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 12, 2010 5:56 PM

There's nothing worse than bland food. The only thing that trumps it are bad comedians.

Therefore, I propose that Leno is as funny as Subway is tasty.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Airbag Industries, on January 12, 2010 5:26 PM

Today was an interesting day for me.

This article is about The Mets Police and not about the Mets, but whether you're new to the site or a regular, I'd like to tell you a little about me, the site, and most importantly pick your brain.

The basic question is: What do you want when you come here?

I am doubly committed for 2010 to take Mets Police seriously.  I've been thinking about the site a lot the past month, and I have been having conversations with some of my oldest friends and some of my newest friends about the site. I thought I'd walk you through my brain, and see what kind of feedback you have.  Let's start with the basics.

Who am I?  I'm Shannon Shark.   I'm Batman.   I'm a fan.  I hope to be a fan advocate.  I'm not playing a character.  I don't sit here in Mets Police HQ (a basement with a very large television and a smelly carpet) making up things to get a reaction or to be popular.  I'm just writing what I believe.

For example, this morning I wrote that I didn't mind the black mets jacket.  A "character" would just hate all things black and never yield.  Well, the real me despises the black but you know what, that particular jacket looked OK so I wrote that.

Sometimes I comment that I think one particular player is overrated.  That's not to get people to nreact for reactions sake, it's just what I think, and maybe I'm wrong, but it's really my opinion.   I'm a guy that grew up along the 7 train in Queens, sat in the uppers, now I sit in the Promenade...and it's Promenade Left not even the part behind home plate.  I'm you, I'm a fan, I believe this stuff.  (I also must very much thank writers Dan who has written some of the more popular and powerful articles on the site, and Vegas Rich who I've actually never met, but contributes from out west from time to time.)

Why do I do this?  This came up today.   I don't get rich doing this.   I like doing it, and yeah wouldn't it be awesome if somehow this turned into something that gave me the financial freedom to not travel into Manhattan every day?  I'd like that.  Wouldn't you like to watch Mets games and sleep in?  I sure would.

So why do it?   Once the site found its voice, I found that I really enjoy when Mets Police can help fellow fans.  The day Albert asked me to call him because a Mets ticket rep called him a bad fan?  A few hours later he had his apology.  It made the mainstream press.  That was a cool day.

I think of The Mets changing the name of the ticket plan from "Saturday" to "Saturday Plus" after me complaining about it for a year, yeah that felt good and yeah I'm taking credit on that one.

I enjoy posting pictures of Obstructed Views and getting on Dave Howard for not admitting they exist.  Dave went on WFAN  and said fans overreacted.  Well Dave, I'm here for the other side of the story, the side of the customer.

Around all this forms a community.  I liked "5 questions for an average Mets fan" and swapping tales of old with fellow fans.   I like when Peter sends me a text at 8:15 in the morning the day after Thanksgiving asking if he can send me the first pictures of the throwbacks.  I liked last night when Alex sent me the Alabama/Shea story, and because of that, the community grows which leads us to...

What kind of things should I write about?  One of my oldest friends was telling me how he likes the site, but that some articles don't interest him at all, so he skips them.  Another friend used the word "filler."   These are good points, and this is where I turn to you and walk through 48 hours of the site and see what makes sense or not.  Let's start with this morning:

I study the traffic patterns.  I always try to have something in the morning, noon and night.  11pm is the top hour for surfing, and people with jobs like to look at websites when they get to their desks and during lunch.  I like to be read, so I feed the Google monster.  New content moves you up the search engines.  It's how it works, so that's how I approach it.  You'll notice often the 11pm article is fluffy in the off-season or an off-day.  It is.  I'm working Google.

When I woke up the leadoff piece was going to be the Alabama thing. (They used Shea in an ad).  Is that fun for you to read?  I thought so.  It's nice harmless chop-busting, doesn't change how many games the team will win, actually has almost nothing to do with the Mets, but it's fun.  Was it "policing?"  Probably not.  However, the upside of it was that Gothamist linked to it, and was the top traffic feeder of the day.  So I think that was a win.

On my way in I saw the Mets jackets thing, and I decided to move that to leadoff, but only for about 10 minutes because I liked Alabama better, but I was feeling something with the jackets.   Fluff?  Filler?  Should I not bother, or is part of the charm of the site that kind of randomness?  I have some stuff about "Mets couches" next week.  Do you want to read it?

Then was another installment of Meet the Mets Bloggers.  Do you care about the other sites?  I do it because I know how hard it is to get people to read my stuff, and I am very thankful when people link to me.  So I pass along the love.  Hopefully you find some new sites you like.  My question to you, do you care, or waste of time?

Then some McGwire stuff - now this is where it gets interesting.  I could "shut up and talk about the Mets" however last night's McGwire article made Yahoo, so hooray more traffic and hopefully some stick around.  Does the occassional non-Mets thing annoy you?

The article below this is is just informational about a Strawberry appearance.  I don't think most poeple will care, but maybe some will.  Should I not bother with that stuff, or is it just as easy for you to skip it?

Moving on to tomorrow - I think there's a nice day planned.  I'm going to let this one bat leadoff because I'm interested and it doesn't seem like I will wake up to Mets news.  If something happens, I can always change it.  Then I have a piece about "Kid Met", a character I hadn;t heard of, some reader photos of obscure jerseys, and more Meet the Mets Bloggers.  I had a cool photoshoot of the commissioner's office scheduled but I'm holding it for Thursday because "I got nothing" for Thursday yet.   To me that seems like a typical day for the site, I'm sure I'll add stuff as I see it.   You're the reader, is it what you're looking for?

The other question in all this is "do I just do my thing?"   Maybe I'm the only guy in the world that cares about alternate caps, but I like making fun of them.   I like Men's Health magazine.  I like Joe the Bartneder's article, I like some workout tips, I like when they have a feature article on something like Obama's workout.  I don't care about muscle building so I skip those.  So maybe you skip alternate caps, or maybe this isn't a magazine.  This is the stuff I'm sorting out in my head now.

For yesterday and today - the most read articles are the one about me walking into Modell's and taking pictures of Jason Bay shirts, and the Alabama thing.  The #3 most searched keyword that gets you here is "yankee stadium demolition."  Ha.   How did you wind up here?

The re-design.  I went for a run and thought about all this, which is where this post comes from, and I decided that this week's mission is to move to Wordpress.  What that means is a new look (you won't like it at first, nobody likes when a site looks different) and some behind the scenes stuff that will hopefully make it work better and not accidentally cost me followers (will the twitter-feeder break, what about people who get this via email etc).  I worry about that, but a 3-day weekend in January seems a better time to do it than during the Subway Series, and as I opened up with, I'm taking this very seriously for 2010.  If you're kind enough to help me make it better, I'll be very appreciative to listen.

I appreciate any feedback whether it's in the annoying comments system (that will be one of the improvements of the redesign) or at shannon@metspolice.com

Another reason I do this?  Look at this picture.  If it makes you smile the way it makes me smile, you understand me.  I'm you.  Thanks for visiting the site.








Now I have to go to explain to Mrs. Mets Police why it's 10:15 and we haven't watched American Idol yet.





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Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 12, 2010 5:16 PM

At around 4AM local time, Google updated their official blog with an entry titled "A new approach to China." It states that around mid December, Google discovered a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure" coming from within China. And this, they asserted, was the last straw for their operations here.

Basically, Google discovered that:
1. the security of various multinational companies had been breached
2. a main directive of the hackers was to access the personal emails of Chinese human rights activists
3. the personal emails of human rights activists concerned with China around the world were routinely being accessed, far beyond the incident in question.

As a prominent website, Google said it was used to hackers trying to breach its security. But its months of research into these attacks raised such serious issues that it may spell the end of Google in China completely.

From the Official Google Blog:

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China's economic reform programs and its citizens' entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that "we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China."

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Google has always had a tenuous place in Chinese cyberspace, particularly when it comes to issues of censorship: the ideological discord has been apparent since the company first came to China in 2006, hoping to expand their informational services without compromising their integrity. But in the light of China's increasing internet restrictions, it seems Google's very presence in China facilitates the government's censorial agenda.

Word on the street is that the move is Google doesn't plan on "negotiating" in the true sense of the word: rather, they've laid out their motives and beliefs, and expect to walk away when the government refuses to accept them. A pretty bold move from any company... though some have already wondered if this was also a way to "back out of a market it was losing to Baidu".

We'll be following the story for the rest of the day, so stay tuned for updates.

Originally posted by Cary Hooper from Shanghaiist, on January 12, 2010 5:00 PM

Charlie Rangel says House/Senate negotiations are at an impasse. "We've got a problem on both sides of the Capitol. A serious problem," Charlie Rangel tells Roll Call. Another senior Dem says no progress has been made at all. And they probably won't have a bill for the president until February. This article in the AP confuses me even more, suggesting the negotiators may drop the mandate for large employers to provide coverage and some other points about the exchange system that don't even square with my understanding of the two underlying bills.

All the details aside, are we really serious about this? Are they going to fumble this ball at the five yard line? February? March? Why not May?

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 12, 2010 4:35 PM

When I hear about startups that have made some amazing technical innovation in NLP (natural language processing), OCR (optical character recognition), image recognition, speech recognition, I am somewhat skeptical. The government, especially DARPA, many university research departments, Xerox PARC (and Interval Research, where I worked briefly in 2000) have sunk a lot of time and money into this kind of research, in some cases billions of dollars, and a lot of this research not only available but free to all comers. Improving on them is a vast and difficult task, and even a 5% improvement on the existing state-of-the-art is invisible to the end user - the innovation has to be an order of magnitude better to 'feel' better.

There were dozens of startups that approached us at Flickr with tech that could do fantastic things with image recognition software. But we were pretty good at getting people to tag photos with what were in them. The image recognition software could tell us if a photo was a photo of Mom, but not if Mom was smiling, or looking puzzled, or dancing on her 50th anniversary. People adding tags, descriptions, titles and comments turned out to be better sources of metadata for those photos, and that metadata could then be used in interesting ways.

Some easier, faster, less expensive and I think, more satisfying ways for startups to innovate using these technologies are:

1. Find a new way to use the tech that serves a pressing consumer need (this is hard)
2. Find a new source of data (the original PageRank algorithm's use of links as its primary data source)
3. Create a new source of data and apply the tech to it (in the example above, Flickr using "social engineering" to create a vast amount of human-added metadata)

To have credible tech, it's a bit of a Goldilocks problem. If you build something too easy, it's not defensible, and you'll be easily copied. Too hard, and it's a job that requires government research or academia. Startups whose strength is technical should try to something of middling technical difficulty. Some startups, such as Daily Booth, can be successful without a lot of tech. Nothing wrong with that! But I see startups all the time making tech claims that I find dubious.

Entrepreneurs can build on work that's come before to solve lots of interesting problems. So, thank you Berkeley, Stanford, et al!

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on January 12, 2010 4:20 PM

Ballsy and impressive: "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered - combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web - have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on January 12, 2010 4:18 PM

Google's David Drummond, in a post titled A new approach to China:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.

The whole post's amazing. The first half describes an attack on Google's infrastructure, and while he doesn't say it explicitly, the implication here is that the Chinese government was responsible for the attack.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 12, 2010 1:48 PM

This is a sandwich, NOT a sammy (or sammie, or sammich). [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

Here are the results to last week's poll: Which Food Term Should We Stop Using in 2010?

Sammy/Sammie/Sammich 30%
Foodgasm 17%
Foodie 14%
Food porn 9%
Rezzie 7% **
Nom (except when said by a lolcat) 7%
Flexitarian 7%
Mouthfeel 6%
Toothsome 4%
Healthful 4%

So stop eating sammies and having foodgasms, foodies!

Thanks for your participation. Stay tuned for this week's poll coming at ya tomorrow morning. (As always, I take poll suggestions.)

** Many of you chirped up asking what "rezzie" means. It's just an annoying shortcut for reservation—but maybe it's still too underground to be annoying.

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on January 12, 2010 1:20 PM

Google senior vice president David Drummond:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

He also revealed that Google was the victim of a large-scale security attack last month, aimed at getting access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates. The implication is clearly that the attack was the work of the Chinese government.

Good for Google.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 12, 2010 1:17 PM

Google is releasing information about a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their corporate infrastructure that occurred last month. The attack originated in China and resulted in the “theft of intellectual property from Google.” In light of the attack Google is making sweeping changes to its Chinese operations.

Google is releasing some information about these attacks to the public. The company says that a minimal amount of user information was compromised, but has come to the alarming conclusion that the attacks were targeting the information of Chinese human rights activists. Google found that these attacks were not just going after Google’s data, but were also targeting at least twenty other major companies spanning sectors including Internet, finance, chemicals, and more. Google has also discovered that phishing attacks have been used to compromise the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

In light of the attacks, and after attempts by the Chinese government to further restrict free speech on the web, Google has decided it will deploy a fully uncensored version of its search engine in China. This is a major change: since January 2006, Google has made concessions to the Chinese government and offered a censored (and highly controversial) version of its search engine at Google.cn. Google isn’t playing that game any longer. Should the Chinese government decide that an uncensored engine is illegal, then Google may cease operations in China entirely.  We have included Google’s blog posts about the decision in their entirety below.

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People interested wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve’s blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Here’s a second post, from the Google Enterprise Blog:

Many corporations and consumers regularly come under cyber attack, and Google is no exception. We recently detected a cyber attack targeting our infrastructure and that of at least 20 other publicly listed companies. This incident was particularly notable for its high degree of sophistication. We believe Google Apps and related customer data were not affected by this incident. Please read more about our public response on the Official Google Blog.

This attack may understandably raise some questions, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share some additional information and assure you that Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of your data.

This was not an assault on cloud computing. It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure.

While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust.

Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise

CrunchBase Information

Google

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Originally posted by Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, on January 12, 2010 1:02 PM

Shared by Eve
brilliant letter!

Conan quits (sort of). Ball in NBC's embarrassed hands. Fox waiting?

Conan O'Brien released this statement today, sending the insane late night situation at NBC into further disarray. It's a beautiful piece of work that smells like a resignation letter but doesn't actually say "I quit," just in case the lawyers are looking and vast sums of money are involved (yes on both counts). He won't accept the shift to 12:05 a.m. behind Jay Leno. He calls NBC on its lack of vision (and foresight). And he immediately opens the door for Fox to pick him up:

The mess is this high.

People of Earth:

In the last few days, I've been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, Ive been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I've been absurdly lucky. That said, I've been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over The Tonight Show in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004 I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my Tonight Show in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime-time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the Tonight Show to 12:05 to accommodate the Jay Leno Show at 11:35. For 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn't the Tonight Show. Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn't matter. But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair: it's always been that way.

Yours,Conan

That's impressive, people. And NBC is now backed into a corner, where it should be. I've been commenting on this a lot today on Twitter. (Come follow the barbs and bullets!) And I'll have more updates both here and at The Bastard Machine Facebook page.

Posted By: Tim Goodman (Email, Twitter, Facebook) | January 12 2010 at 01:03 PM

Listed Under: Feed The Machine

Originally posted by (author unknown) from www.sfgate.com, on January 12, 2010 12:36 PM

Pay attention, here's how you write a statement.

1. Address it to "People of Earth".
2. Write it like a person wrote it, not like a robot wrote it.
3. Oh, just go read it.

I think companies should hire comedy writers to write their press releases. Why not, right? They already produce our most trusted news sources.

Tags: Conan O'Brien

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 12, 2010 12:05 PM

Note: Oinoanda is pronounced oy-NAN-da. Or, at least, it’s probably pronounced that way.

In my darker moments — that is, chiefly, between my last cup of coffee and first glass of the good stuff — I sometimes find myself asking the most ridiculous questions. Questions like: “What does it all mean?” or “What’s the point of life?” and other sorts of open-ended queries that are probably best left to the Russians of our species.

It’s not something about which I’m proud, but I mention it here because (a) it’s true, and (b) I’m not so special as to have something even remotely like original thoughts or experiences. Translation: The chance that you and/or you and/or you have had similar pangs of existential angst is pretty high.

Like just last week, I stopped while reading something at FanGraphs — Cameron’s piece about Casey Kotchman, I think it was — I stopped and wondered, “Why? Why read about this journeyman first baseman? Is this the most important thing I could be doing? Isn’t there some sort of cancer I could be curing?”

The questions had nothing to do with the merit of Cameron’s article itself — Dave Cameron, as everyone knows, is a sabermetric cyborg with no flaws — but rather the nature of the exercise. In other words, Why should I think about baseball in a time like this?

My guess is, if you asked a reader of FanGraphs or Hardball Times or Beyond the Box Score or any of those places why he reads them, he’d probably say something like, “Because it helps with my fantasy team” or “To read analysis about my team and my team’s rivals” or even just “Beats working.”

Those are fine reasons, but I don’t think they hold up to closer scrutiny. For me, personally, were I stripped of my fantasy teams, were I to possess nothing in the way of team allegiance, were I, in fact, to wake up in a roadside ditch, I would very probably wake up thinking about baseball. And depending on exactly how long I’d been in said ditch — that, and the extent of my injuries (had I any) — I’d most likely try to find a decent wireless signal so’s I could see what the Dave Camerons and Rob Neyers of the world were writing about baseball. In short, thinking about baseball is something I do with great frequency and urgency. And understanding the sabermetric implications of baseballing current events is important to me.

But why?

My guess is it has a lot to do with the Oinoanda Inscription. Not familiar? Neither was I till like a week ago, so don’t sweat it.

The Oinoanda Inscription, according to Epicurus Wiki, was

an inscribed limestone wall conspicuously located in an open marketplace… in the ancient city of Oinoanda. The inscription, commissioned by Diogenes of Oinoanda, proclaimed the wisdom of Epicurus, then deceased for five centuries.

Basically, it was a wall erected by this wealthy guy named Diogenes. Diogenes was a great follower of Epicurus’s doctrine of happiness, and it was owing to this love of Epiciurus that he erected this wall, onto which was inscribed the entirety of the latter’s ethical philosophy.

About the wall and its purpose, philosopher Alain de Botton says in the second of these videos

In order to live wisely, it isn’t enough just ro read a philosophical argument once or twice. We need constant reminders of it, or we’ll forget… We have to counteract the influence of advertising by creating advertisements that say we we really do want. And that’s why Diogenes put up his wall.

Of course, de Botton is using the term “advertisement” quite broadly here. Really an advertisement can be anything that takes your eyes off the figurative prize. For Epicurus, that prize was happiness, and the means by which you attained it was through friendship, freedom, and contemplation.

But, as you might agree, it’s sometimes hard to think about friendship and freedom and contemplation when Beyonce is shaking it and asking you to upgrade. So it’s important to have other “advertisements” that promote right thinking.

I submit that sabermetric blogging represents one such version of these advertisements. No, there are no walls set up in our city centers warning us against the baleful effects of excessive consumption or the pursuit of vain pleasures, but there are blogs — like this one, like a lot of others — designed constantly to remind us of the merits of reason, of the scientific method. The baseballing world provides lots of material to be analyzed and we are able — by virtue of sabermetrics and an army of dedicated, if poorly compensated, authors — to examine how a particular trade or free agent signing or breakout performance ought to be regarded in light of what we know about statistics. And it’s by virtue of these constant reminders that we are, essentially, philosophizing every frigging day.

Originally posted by Carson Cistulli from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 12, 2010 11:27 AM

Baseball-Reference Blog » The Baseball Reference Player Folio on your E-Reader

Teaming with John Burnson of Heater Magazine we've produced a set of Encyclopedia files specifically formatted for the Kindle. The files are plain pdf files, so they should work in other settings as well. We hope you enjoy the downloads.

Originally posted by Sean Forman from Baseball-Reference Blog, on January 12, 2010 11:00 AM

Mark Ovenden notes (with obvious delight) that his book about the Paris Metro, Paris Underground (which I reviewed in November 2009), got a glowing mention on the New Yorker website (much like Strange Maps did in October). Previously: Review: Paris Underground; Paris Underground. Buy Paris Underground at Amazon.com...

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on January 12, 2010 10:54 AM

We already have stacks of pretty books jostling for space on our coffee tables, so its hard to find an excuse to make room for yet another one. But since we heard that Yvan Rodic of Face Hunter, the blog of all street style quirky and off-kilter, was publishing his own book—in a manageable novella-size size, at that—we had to reconsider our book-buying moratorium. The book compiles some of the best images Yvan has showcased on his blog, including shots from his jaunts to almost thirty countries. The book will premiere at fashion retail mecca Colette on January 23rd, and for now, they can be pre-ordered online on Amazon. Walk, don't run! (Facehunter)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashion News RSS- Refinery29.com - View Models and Glamour Shots, on January 12, 2010 10:45 AM

The New York BBWAA picked Mets OF Jeff Franceour for this year’s Good Guy Award, according to David Lennon of Newsday.

In a post to his blog for the New York Times, Mets reporter Ben Shpigel wonders about the future of Fernando Martinez, concluding, “After this critical year the Mets will have a better sense of whether to make room for him in 2011 - or perhaps begin making plans without him.”

Mike Silva of NY Baseball Digest explains why Aroldis Chapman was not worth signing for the Mets and Yankees.

According to these stats from Sam Page at Amazin Avenue, the Mets, as currently constituted, are an 83–win team, and could be better with certain moves.

The Marlins have to spend more of your money to be better, according to the Biz of Baseball.

SNY’s Ted Berg answers questions from readers on TedQuarters.com about the Jason Bay negotiations, Jarrod Washburn an Citi Field, and, of course, Taco Bell.

Lastly, Anthony Lafaman of the Daily Stache asks, ‘Why is Luis Castillo still on the Mets.’

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on January 12, 2010 10:45 AM

From Recipes

[Photograph: Robin Bellinger]

Over the holidays, I twice made my parents black-eyed peas and rice. They declared it delicious and themselves eager to eat it, even the second time, but then a cloud of worry crossed my mother's face: Was my little family, she asked, eating beans and rice so often because we had to?

Nope. It's true that beans and rice are cheap, and that we couldn't afford to eat meat every single day of the week (at least, not the kind of meat we choose to buy). But it is equally true that few meals are so healthy, so filling, so effortless, and—yes—so delicious as plain old beans and rice. Learning how to cook beans properly is the best thing you can do if you're trying to eat well and cheaply.

In my early twenties, I ate Zatarain's black beans and rice, having somewhere picked up the idea that beans are hard to cook yourself. They are not. Although I usually do a "quick soak" (by boiling the beans hard for 2 minutes and then letting them sit in the hot liquid, covered, for 2 hours before proceeding to cook), in my experience soaking isn't really necessary, as long as you have time to monitor a quietly bubbling pot.

I use plenty of water, maintain the gentlest simmer possible, and check frequently near the end of cooking in order to catch the beans at the point where they are creamy on the inside but not overcooked. Taste a few beans at a time and crush a few between thumb and forefinger. When crushed they should simply yield and your fingers should meet each other; the bean should not crumble to bits. Sometimes I don't get it quite right, but black beans and pinto beans are good starter varieties, easier to work with than chickpeas. When the beans are soft and cooked all the way through, I usually let them cool in their cooking liquid.

As for canned beans, I'm not a snob about their supposedly metallic taste, but I am a little freaked out about BPA. Although I've heard that Eden Organic does not use BPA in their can lining, they also charge more than I'm willing to pay for beans. I've gotten into the habit of making big pots myself and then freezing 2-cup Mason jars full of beans in their own cooking liquid. It's like making your own convenient cans.

Last week in my tireless efforts to find new variations on that theme of legumes and grains for this column, I tried a recipe for a sort of bean pancake--just like your weekend hotcakes, except full of mashed beans. It was, I'm sorry to say, not a success.

Left with a big pot of black beans and a spoiled dinner, what did I do? I cooked a chopped onion until it was soft and browning, added garlic, cumin, salt, and pepper, and stirred in a few cups of beans, letting them bubble for a few minutes before spooning them over brown rice. With or without salsa, cheese, and cilantro, it was tastier and easier than those gummy bean pancakes. It reminded me how good a simple bowl of beans and rice can be, and so I thought I'd remind you.

Originally posted by Robin Bellinger from Serious Eats, on January 12, 2010 10:45 AM

I've had this idea in my head but I doubt I'll ever use it for anything, so I wanted to write it down.

When I pause a TV show, on TiVo or Netflix I assume the play head will stop exactly where I left it. When I hit play it starts from precisely that point. This is great for when I pause to use the restroom or grab a glass of water.

However, when I pause and to go to sleep or to take care of dinner, I wish the play-head would slowly creep backwards until finally stopping at a good 20 seconds before where I originally stopped the play-head.

I often find myself hitting the 30-second rewind button on my TiVo controller whenever I come back to something I've been watching. It'd be nice if that could be programmed into what I'm using.

This idea though isn't about play-heads, it's about cutting out those small interactions we inevitably find ourselves participating in when we don't need to. My iPhone knows that if I just locked my device and decided to restart it within a few seconds it won't ask me for my passcode again. The same happens with the OS X screen saver password.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 12, 2010 10:35 AM

There must be something wrong with me. Because I'm starting to find the Leno-O'Brien feud fairly compelling. And the weird thing is that it's actually been a long time now since even watched late night TV. And when I did, I was a Letterman man.

Also somewhat upsetting is that in his press release here, Conan says he's been on the air for 17 years. This is shocking in itself.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 12, 2010 10:28 AM

You will shortly have the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs.

Main features:
- Individual file size limit of 250MB.
- Ability to upload files such as CAD, HTML, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, RAW photos, ZIP or RAR archives.
- 1GB storage limit for files you upload that are not converted to Google Docs format (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets and presentations).

Editions included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

How to access what's new:
This feature will be rolled out to all domains gradually over the next few weeks.
To upload a file, simply click on the 'Upload' button just as if you were uploading a file into Docs as before and select the file to upload.

Premier Edition Only:
Premier Edition users can also use the Google Docs List API to upload files to Google Docs, or purchase applications offered by third parties that enable you to migrate and sync your files to Google Docs. More information about these applications in the blog post below.

For more information:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/store-and-share-files-in-cloud-with.html
http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html

Get these product update alerts by email
Subscribe to the RSS feed of these updates

Originally posted by Google Apps Team from Google Apps update alerts, on January 12, 2010 10:27 AM

Funny we were just discussing this the other day. Looks like it's in the works. I feel like such a wimp for responding to it, but hey, I'm interested. I need to do some thinking on why I became such a Shadowcat fan. Storm is probably my all-time favorite among the X-Men (for obvious reasons.) I wanted to kill somebody when they cast Halle Berry.

But Shadowcat was awesome. I started collecting when Magneto joined the team, and they were bonding over the Holocaust. Thought that was awesome.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ta-Nehisi Coates, on January 12, 2010 9:52 AM

You know how long it takes to make a pizza? Ten minutes, you lazy little thing. Plus two hours. Sort of.

1. Put a almost-a-tablespoon, or at least a teaspoon, of sugar and some honey and maybe a little molasses in a measuring cup with 3/4 cup of hot tap water. STIR.

2. Add two packets of dry yeast. Don’t stir. Let it get all foamy and gross, about 5 to 10 minutes.

3. Pour one cup of white flour and one cup of semolina flour onto the counter. WHICH YOU SHOULD HAVE WIPED DOWN before you did that, or else there’ll be garbage in your pizza.

4. It doesn’t have to be white and semolina. Just two cups of flour. Half wheat? Half white? All white? Whatever you like! You only have cake flour? Who gives a shit! Do you think in the middle ages when they made flour products they had time to care what kind of flour it was? No. They were just trying not to eat rats.

5. Add a bunch of salt to the flour. I use like slightly less salt than I do sugar. I use a lot of salt and sugar. This is what makes it taste good, and go fuck yourself, Mike Bloomberg.

6. Make your flour pile into a volcano-crater shape. Pour some of your yeasty mess into the CALDERA. That’s right. I said caldera. Mush it into the flour.

7. Continue until yeast-water is absorbed. Early on, add a couple tablespoons of olive oil too.

8. As with any dough? This should be pretty dry-firm. Not sticky. Not wet. You know. Doughy. ADD MORE FLOUR if you’re soggy.

9. Make it into a ball, cover it in olive oil and put it in a plastic or ceramic bowl. Put saran wrap over the top of the bowl and put it in either: A) The turned-off oven, if the house is cold, B) Somewhere toasty and not breezy or even C) in the sun. Particularly if you are in a hurry.

10. Let 90 minutes to 3 hours pass. When it is all puffy and blown up like a Nerf soccer ball, take the saran wrap off and punch it like it’s your ex’s face.

11. This will be enough dough for two medium-ish pizzas, or one huge one, or one really thick one, or whatever. (Heh.)

12. ONE STEP SAUCE: Chop some garlic, throw it in a saucepan with olive oil briefly, maybe an onion or something, then put in a can or so of whole peeled tomatoes or you know some REAL tomatoes from “outside,” mash those up as you stir for a while, put in some oregano and I usually put in a little red wine vinegar or something tart and some honey, and some salt, obvs, and sometimes a little lemon peel. Let this cook down to a smooth pasty sauce-like thing. Basically you can put ANYTHING in this. Just don’t let it be watery at the end.

13. MOST IMPORTANT PART. Turn your oven on to the CLEAN SETTING. If your oven is one of those that locks during this, find some way to psych it out. Self-cleaning ovens top out at around 900 degrees F, which is a little crazy. Try and get the oven to like, 600 degrees. As hot as you can get it.

13.5 This is my only concession to being a food bitch, because, honestly? A pizza stone really works. This should be in your oven getting hot. Don’t have one? That’s fine! You can use an upside-down cookie sheet, or any kind of tray—leave it in the oven, and you will throw the pizza on top of it when it’s time to cook. Worse comes to worse, you are going to want a tray at the bottom if you just have to throw your pizza on the rack, because, OMG, stuff will leak down. Just find something flat that you can put some flour on and let get hot.

14. Get out your trusty label-less wine bottle, or if you are very fancy, your rolling pin. Throw a TON of flour around. Plop down half the dough, or all the dough, or whatever. Roll it out to something like the size of a pizza. Square, round, misshapen, whatever.

15. Sauce it. Top it. Twerk it.

15.5. No seriously you can put anything on this.

16. Gather up your pizza and have someone open the blisteringly hot oven and then somehow you will throw it in there without losing all toppings. This can and may go horribly wrong! So what!

17. Cook for 6 to 10 minutes. IT WILL LOOK LIKE PIZZA WHEN IT IS DONE. IT COULD NOT BE MORE OBVIOUS, ARE YOU A MORON?

18. Removal is also very frightening. I do not have a “pizza peel” because I am not a total homo, NO OFFENSE, so I use like two spatulas and then toss the pizza from the oven to the nearby counter (burning myself slightly on the way) where it is devoured like a lost rabbit at a junkyard dog party.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on January 12, 2010 9:45 AM

I doubt I'll live to 104 and my obituary won't begin like this:

Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth.

Rollino wasn't even felled by old age. He was killed by a minivan -- a fucking Windstar! -- while crossing the street in Brooklyn. Here's the deceased circa 1905 at age 10, already displaying a winning form:

Rest in peace, Joe.

Tags: Joe Rollino   obituaries

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 12, 2010 9:44 AM

Free genius TV advice; worth it for the Leno impression alone. Wait for it.

"We know two things about Jay. He likes to tell jokes at 11:30, and he has an old truck he works on."

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 12, 2010 9:31 AM

via www.advancednflstats.com In this post, I'll look at where Lechler's average field position is compared to the rest of the league. We'll see that this has a big effect on punt distances. But we'll also see that I'm wrong about Lechler in the end. Despite this unfair advantage, he's still the NFL's best. Do you see that? That's an abstract! And where there's an abstract, there's science. Thank you Jason Kottke for the weblog link. I am considering a "Via Jason or Sippey" category.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 12, 2010 8:52 AM

So what if on January 27th Apple announced that the iTunes and Lala teams have been merged, and have been hard at work on some exciting new things for online music.

• Introducing iTunes.com. The iTunes experience is now extended out from the client out to the web, where tools for media discovery, sharing and browsing feel more natural. They demo Facebook and Twitter integration.

• If you were a Lala user, welcome! You can now sign in to Lala with your iTMS credentials. If you have an existing Lala account, you can merge that with your iTunes account. The standalone Lala downloader / uploader is now just part of iTunes, no need for a separate application.

• All of your music is now available in the cloud. iTunes will now scan your library and make everything you own available to you for streaming on demand from anywhere online. This process is now integrated with the "Update Genius" process, and happens in the background, automatically.

• Introducing Genius Radio. Heralded as a "new way to discover music," Apple launches personalized online music radio that is clearly "inspired by" Pandora. But instead of being based on the Music Genome Project, it's built on top of Genius Playlists; it learns from the music you listen to in iTunes, your iPod or your iPhone.

• You can stream your library to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Lala's long-awaited iPhone / iPod Touch app finally ships, delivered as an update to the default iPod app. You can now stream music from your library to your device anywhere. It's limited to wifi only (so as not to further overload AT&T's network), but deploys intelligent caching (your own local Genius Radio station?) to give you access to the tracks you're loving lately.

• Today music; tomorrow everything. At launch iTunes.com will support buying, discovering and enjoying music, but eventually it will be the place where you discover and enjoy all types of digital content.

Which would be the perfect place to transition to, say, the introduction of a tablet-like product.

Two obvious bugs in this vision.

First, they already have iTunes; why shift to the web? I think Apple's been surprised and caught a little bit off guard with the rapid spread of the social web. (Remember the Twitter acquisition rumors? And why do you think they bought Lala?) In the short term, the browser is a more natural way for them to hook into that ecosystem than trying to bridge the web experience with the iTunes experience. And while Apple might not interested in delivering a Chome OS-style web only future, I think they're smart about the netbook market and what it signals about the long term trend of personal computing from locally-installed client software to well-featured apps in the cloud.

Second bug: Flash. It's probably a bit too early for them to commit fully to an HTML5 implementation of streaming audio and video, but it's not too hard to imagine a Safari 4.x (for Macs, Windows and Apple mobile devices) that supports streaming of protected content to the browser based on iTunes music store credentials. So Flash in the near term, HTML5 in the long term.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 12, 2010 8:48 AM

Many of you who are members of SABR already know this, having received your copy of the latest issue of the Baseball Research Journal, and Matt Swartz is too modest to mention it, but a version of his series on home-field advantage was included as one of the more sabermetric pieces. Overall, this latest copy of the BRJ was devoted to the subject of baseball and the law, featuring the work of such baseball fans/luminaries as Samuel Alito (the Supreme Court Justice) on the origins of baseball’s antitrust exemption, Roger I. Abrams on the Seitz decision, BP alum Mark Armour on AL president Joe Cronin’s firing of two AL umpires in 1968 for attempting to organize their league mates, and a piece by the late Gene Carney on the detectives hired by Charles Comiskey to tail the Black Sox. David Smith and Tom Ruane of Retrosheet also contributed pieces, and there’s far more besides.

So, first off, congratulations to Matt for a job well-done. Second, if you haven’t explored the benefits of being a SABR member, check it out, you won’t regret it. If you didn’t know, SABR Day in America is coming up on January 30, and while it doesn’t appear that the Chicago chapter’s pulling anything together, you tell me, anyone in the Windy City interested in trying for something more informal?

Originally posted by Christina Kahrl from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on January 12, 2010 8:30 AM

The Morning News just announced the judges and books for their 2010 Tournament of Books -- "the one and only March Madness battle royale of literary excellence" -- and I am terrified to report that I will be one of the judges and therefore responsible for evaluating the writing (in public!) of some truly excellent authors like Nicholson Baker, Barbara Kingsolver, and the awesomely named Apostolos Doxiadis.

Tags: books

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 12, 2010 8:23 AM

Peter has made it the suite level where there's all kinds of pictures of Mets history.











Some might say it might have made sense to put some of this out where the other 45,000 fans might see them, but what do I know?

More tomorrow.  They sure have lots of this stuff.  Too bad nobody sees it.












Main Mets Police page
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Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 12, 2010 8:11 AM

In the last day, BP has posted two articles — one a quick Unfiltered post about Mark McGwire and his steroid confessions, another a longer statistical look at aging curves by an outside writer — that have had long, involved discussion threads. Call them “comments” if you want, but to me, it’s a discussion and even sometimes an argument thread.

A couple years ago when Dave Pease first started proposing the addition of comments to BP, I was probably the loudest voice against. I didn’t think we could have substantive discussions because of what I saw taking place across most of the internet.

I was wrong.

The fact that BP subscribers are almost by definition substantive people helps. The fact that we limit discussion to subscribers helps. But mostly, it’s just good discussion. At times, it gets a bit screechy and there’s a few people who are so regularly disruptive that I would have kicked them off the playground a long time ago if it were just up to me. But by and large, it’s been awesome.

Whether it’s a debate about steroids or a respected writer/thinker like J.C. Bradbury, I’d love it if BP became the pulpit for discussion again. So, while I don’t make decisions on this (or anything), I want to personally invite *anyone* who thinks they have a high quality idea that needs a bigger audience to bring it up. I’m not saying BP will publish anything and everything, but I hope that we’ll have more guests in the coming months.

And a lot more good discussion.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on January 12, 2010 8:02 AM

I have been lured into multiple Atom Egoyan movies and I have always left them enraged, disappointed or confused. Sometimes very sleepy. And then every time a new one comes along, I am foaming. They all trailer-up really well! In this newest, Chloe, we have Julianne Moore at her Julianne Mooreiest, which, DONE AND DONE. And then Mamma Mia! girl suddenly becoming a sex kitten and ripping off her togs. And Liam Neeson getting it on with everyone. I am going to see the holy hell out of this movie… until the last 20 minutes, when I’m very sad again, I imagine.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on January 12, 2010 7:50 AM

The shakeout in the next few years is going to be whether you just need an iPhone app, or whether you need a lineup of mobile apps.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 12, 2010 7:43 AM

I'm kind of freaking out over The Catorialist blog - which is exactly what it sounds like. The titles of the post are almost better than the photos. But only almost, as the photos are pretty fantastic.

via refinery29

Originally posted by Kate from for me, for you, on January 12, 2010 7:21 AM

We've sung the praises of old school card games for years, ready to pull them out at the smallest sign of a friendly gathering. Ready to battle for Old Maid's space in our collection is the Street Style Memory Game by BIS Publishers, a cute spin on street style books which trains our ability to match the pretty mugs of the sartorially advanced with their headless bottom halves. Truth be told, we're pretty sure we'll have these outfits memorized in a single session, but hey, even if it will never lay claim to Go Fish's place in our heart, at least we can put the pictures up on our walls for inspiration. Buy the set here for $19.37. (Fab Sugar)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashion News RSS- Refinery29.com - View Models and Glamour Shots, on January 12, 2010 7:00 AM

I finally signed up for Goodreads this morning, which I have been hearing buzz about for the longest. They nailed the Facebook integration, the sign-up and friending process was an excellent experience. Within an hour I had a full list of friends, people obviously find this service meaningful and rewarding. One nit - I was stopped dead in my tracks the first time I tried to add an active book. I don't know the page number, I only know the Kindle location!  

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 12, 2010 6:45 AM

If you liked Hedgehog Launch, you'll also like Fly Hard.

Tags: addictive Flash games   video games

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 12, 2010 6:39 AM

Someone asked me the other day whether I thought the United States was vulnerable to a large scale “cyber” attack. While I have no doubt that any particular organization can be compromised, what comforts me at the national level is the sheer diversity of our systems. We have – unintentionally – employed a very effective defensive strategy known as “security through diversity.”

Every organization’s IT system is composed of multiple layers: credential systems, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, tripwires, databases, web servers, OS builds, encryption schemes, network topologies, etc.  Due to a variety of factors — competitive markets for IT products, lack of standards, diversity of IT managers’ preferences — most institutions make independent and varied choices at each layer. This, in turn, means that each insitution requires a customized attack in order to be penetrated. It is therefore virtually impossible for a single software program (virus, worm) to infiltrate a large portion of them.

On the web, a particular form of uniformity that can be dangerous are the centralized login systems like Facebook Connect. But this is preferable to the current dominant “single sign on system”:  most regular people use the same weak password over and over for every site because it’s too hard to remember more than that (let along multiple strong passwords). This means attackers only need to penetrate one weak link (like the recent Rock You breach), and they get passwords that likely work on many other sites (including presumably banking and other “important” sites).  At least with Facebook Connect there is a well funded, technically savvy organization defending its centralized repository of passwords.

I first heard the phrase “security through diversity” from David Ackley who was working on creating operating systems that had randomly mutated instances (similar ideas have since become standard practice, e.g. stack and address space randomization). It struck me as a good idea and one that should be built into systems intentionally. But meanwhile we get many of the benefits unintentionally. The same factors that frustrate you when you try to transfer your medical records between doctors or network the devices in your house are also what help keep us safe.

Originally posted by chris from cdixon.org - chris dixon's blog, on January 12, 2010 6:32 AM

From time to time, The Awl offers its space to normal, everyday people with a perspective on national issues. Today, we’re pleased to bring you this report by the Incredible Hulk, who offers a counterpoint to our recent declaration that we “don’t care about Jay Leno.”

Hulk have to humbly disagree with editors of this site—one of Hulk’s best new blogs of year!—on subject of NBC’s Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien dispute: Hulk thinks is TOTALLY FASCINATING story and cannot get through thick green skull how anyone else not be as interested.

Think about it: When was last time you get to see major entertainment corporation make such a public and embarrassing mess of things? It almost like Jeff Zucker say, “Me take one of greatest franchises in television history and SMASH!” How Jeff Zucker still working, by way? If it you or me run NBC into ground they fire us LONG TIME AGO. Maybe back when we greenlight “Hidden Hills.” For sure after confused mess that was “Joey.” Hulk HATE “Joey” worse than tanks and angry generals try to shoot Hulk everywhere he go.

Hulk so intrigued by how strands in big mess will play out! Will Conan take giant red head and go to Fox? If Jay come back at 11:30 are old people who used to watch him still alive? Is David Letterman luckiest man in show business? (Apart from Jeff Zucker, who somehow still employed.) Now that all contenders are mixing it up in monologues, the real winner is us, the late-night viewer! So much funny and angry. Like time Hulk fight Killer Clown!

Look, Hulk know deep in heart that interest is subjective and that what some people find appealing not as compelling to others, but Hulk see so many angles to this story that reflect on way we live now—celebrity turmoil, institutional hubris, a secular decline in viewing patterns, inexplicable ability of Jeff Zucker to keep job, etc.—that Hulk want to sit back and let it all sink in. Hulk think Hulk make point, so Hulk step away and let you resume your regular Awl reading. Hulk thank you for your attention.

The Incredible Hulk’s Understanding Gethsemane: Keir Hardie and the Independent Labour Party, 1893-1900, will be published this fall by Harper Studio.

Originally posted by Incredible Hulk from The Awl, on January 12, 2010 6:30 AM

Oh hai, I made that. The rest is coming in a few days!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from lather rinse repeat, on January 12, 2010 6:30 AM

The Google Wave Preview has been available to one million+ people for over three months now, but questions about Wave still abound, even by the early adopters who have gotten in and taken it for a test drive.

After publishing a book on everything I know about Wave, I still get many of the same questions I heard back when I started. Even folks usually bullish about new technology still don't understand what they can use Wave for, how to sell it to their friends and co-workers so they have someone to use it with, and how to fit it into their workday.

As much as I'd love it if everyone bought a copy of my book for every person they invite to Wave, reading 102 pages just to "get" a product is ridiculous. So, I've compiled some of the most frequently asked questions I've gotten about Wave and my best (and briefest) answers for them right here in quick-fire format.

Step inside to hear a two-word definition of Wave, what it's useful for, why you'd choose it over similar products, and how to do the things in Wave that most often trip up new users.

Q: How do you describe what Google Wave is in the fewest words possible?

A: Two words: Google Wave is multimedia wikichat.

Ok, I cheated a little. Wikichat is my made-up word for the combination of document collaboration (wikis) and messaging (chat). Imagine a Wikipedia page that only your workgroup can access and that multiple people can change simultaneously, with live, inline chat embedded in it and the ability to add online multimedia like an image slideshow, videos, maps, polls, a Sudoku game, video conference call, and other interactive widgets. See it? That's Wave.

Q: Why would I use Wave instead of email?

A: You'd use Wave instead of email because you can have real-time, IM-like conversations inside it, and cut out the lag time of asynchronous email communication--you know, when you send an email and have to wait for your recipients to read, reply, and send one back. In Wave, if your recipient is online, you don't have to wait. In fact, your recipient can start typing before you stop. It's wacky.

Q: Then why would I use Wave instead of IM?

A: You'd use Wave instead of instant messenger because you can edit the same text, images, captions as someone else is at the same time. During an instant messenger conversation you pass back and forth a series of single-author, uneditable messages. In Wave, anyone can edit any message (or blip, in Wave-speak). Imagine correcting someone else's typos during a chat yourself, without pointing out to them that they mistyped.

Wave also supports conversation threads, which means that instead of one linear discussion where new messages appear on top or below old ones, you can branch off sub-chats on different topics in one wave.

But mostly you use Wave to collaborate on a single copy of a document with multiple people at the same time.

Q: Then why would I use Wave instead of Google Docs?

A: GDocs is more like collaborative/web-based Microsoft Word, where the object is to create a flat file that gets printed or emailed to someone. Wave is more like a real-time wiki, which creates pages meant to be linked and constantly revised, pages that contain web-based multimedia and interactive gadgets.

In Wave you can drop multimedia like image slide shows, YouTube videos, Google Maps, and countless other gadgets that you can't in Google Docs. Like a wiki (and unlike Google Docs), you can link waves to each other very easily.

Wave is more like a real-time, workgroup Wikipedia than Google Docs or email.

Q: So, what would I actually use Wave for?

A: Wave works when two or more people need to co-write a document. A few common use cases include:

• collaborative meeting, conference, or class notes--whether or not everyone's in the same physical room, several people taking notes in one place is much more efficient than everyone taking their own individual notes
• interviews--each question and answer series can be one thread within the parent interview thread, where the interviewer and interviewee can revise and expand questions and answers inline
• group event planning, like a party, trip, wedding
• co-writing and editing--whether it's books, blogs, brochures, policies
• surveys
• translations
• project management

---

The following are questions I've gotten from people already in the Wave Preview, trying to figure out how to use the system.

Q: Now that I've gotten into the Preview, how do I invite other people in?

A: Search for a wave called "Invite others to Google Wave." Enter title:"Invite others to Google Wave" into the search box, and press Enter. One wave with only you as a participant on it should turn up. In it, you can enter the email address of the folks you want to invite.

If no wave gets returned, be patient! Google may not have doled out nominations to you yet. Save your search to check back later by clicking the Save Search button on the bottom of the Search Panel.

Q: How do I use Wave if no one I know is ever online while I am?

A: To experience the real-time magic of Wave even if your friends aren't online, search for public waves in action using the with:public search operator. Select a wave at the top of the list of results, and watch as others type into it--then jump in yourself.

Q: How do I make a wave public?

A: The easiest way is to use the Easy Public bot. Add easypublic@appspot.com to your Contact list, and then drag and drop it onto any wave to make it public.

Q: How do I see the next unread blip in a wave?

A: Press the Spacebar. In a big wave with lots of unread blips in various locations, the Spacebar will take you to the next unread blip in one press.

Q: How do I publish a wave in a blog post?

A: Right now the Madoqua Bot can give you the embed code for putting a wave on a public web page. Add Madoqua to your wave to get started.

Remember, though: the people viewing your blog post or web page will have to be logged into Wave to see the embedded wave. Otherwise they'll just get a prompt to log into the Wave Preview, which is frustrating for people who aren't in Wave yet.

Q: How do I remove a Wave contact?

A: To remove a contact from your Wave contacts list, you've got to do so in the regular Google Contacts interface. Click on the Manage contacts link at the bottom of Wave's Contacts panel. Here's how to remove a contact step-by-step.

Q: How do I remove a participant from a wave?

A: You can only remove bots from waves--not regular users. Yes, this is crazy and needs to be fixed stat. Here's more on the inability to remove participants from a wave.

Q: How do I link to another wave inside a wave?

A: You can create a link to a wave in another wave by simply dragging and dropping the destination wave from the search panel onto the linking wave while you're editing it. Make sure all your participants have access to the linked wave, otherwise they won't be able to open it.

To link to a wave outside of Google Wave, first open the wave then minimize your Search panel. Copy and paste the link in your browser's address bar--that link will open that wave with those panels minimized for anyone who clicks on it, is logged into Wave, and has access to that wave.

Q: How do I set my Google Wave icon?

A: Click on your name at the top of the Contacts panel. From the profile pop-up, click the Edit profile button. A special profile wave opens, and there you can upload an image that will appear as your icon whenever you participate in a wave or appear in others' Contacts lists.

Q: How do I remove a gadget from a wave?

A: Hover over the gadget, and an arrow will appear on the top-right corner. Click it to view the drop-down and choose "Delete."

Q: Since my friends and co-workers don't use it every day, I forget to check my Wave inbox. How can I get notified when waves are updated without logging in?

The Google Wave Notifier (Windows only) is a system tray application that notifies you when you have unread blips in waves.

The Google Wave Add-on for Firefox notifies you of unread waves in Firefox's status bar.

---

Now I've got questions for you. I'm working on the next edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, and I want to know: what do you want to see get added to the book? What burning questions did I miss here? How are you using Wave day-to-day--or what's stopping you from doing so? Post your thoughts in the comments, and thanks in advance for your help expanding the book.

Originally posted by Gina Trapani from Smarterware, on January 12, 2010 6:30 AM

Examiner column for January 13.

            Next week a new semester begins at George Mason University, and that has led me to think about how we view education while we’re part of the process, compared to our views as we look back.

            What do my students want from my advanced composition class in the new semester? They want to improve their writing, and get a good grade—not necessarily in that order.

 

            Students realize that a high G.P.A. makes it easier to secure a job, or go to their graduate school of choice. Gone are the days when employers competed for the best graduates with signing bonuses and moving allowances. Employment is now a seller’s market.

            Teachers understand the grade-based mentality of their students. It’s no different from the test-based mentality by which society judges students, teachers, schools, and school systems. Much as we pay lip service to the idea that education is about love of learning, when we make decisions about where to go to school or where to move our families, we look at test scores.

            So we’ve bought into numbers-based evaluations of education. Yet spending time before the semester with Ruth, age 93, the last of the many friends my mother had during her lifetime, has led me to reassess what’s of lasting importance in education.

            What counts towards the end of your life is having the skill to tell your story. Students in my writing classes seldom recognize that value. “Our lives are boring,” they tell me. “We have nothing to write about.” Part of my job as their teacher is convincing them that their stories are as valuable as the fascinating ones passed down in their families.

            Although Ruth finished her formal education 70 years ago, she signed up for a writing class so she can record part of her life for posterity.  No one needs to convince her her stories’ value.

            For her first assignment, she’s chosen to write about the day she met her husband. “It’s only one page!” she complained. “Writing is much harder than I thought it would be.” As I looked at the page she thought was so inadequate, I saw great strengths: her humor, and her use of dialogue to capture the voices of those involved.

            I suggested she expand her descriptions to include more concrete detail—including colors, sounds, and shapes that would make her writing more visual. This is what I advise all my classes, advice many students consider part of my particular writing “bias.” What students don’t realize is that visual detail and inclusion of voice is precisely what makes a story memorable.

            Ruth will easily be able to expand on her excellent page, but what she knows at her age is something I wish my students could understand as they start classes next week. Education as a passport will help advance careers, but education as a tool that allows you to pass along your voice, ideas, and soul is more than a grade--it is a legacy for those you leave behind, for their children, and their children’s children. That aspect of education is immortal, and will allow generations to appreciate the day Ruth and her husband met, as well as your own family stories.

 

 

Originally posted by Teachertalk from TeacherTalk, on January 12, 2010 6:28 AM

New friend of hello, typepad Alex sent this brief note to Mets Police: I thought you would find the attached photo ad from espn.com marketing Alabama merchandise... Not only did they use Shea, they added the 50 yard line. Sad on many levels.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 12, 2010 6:24 AM

With the looming loss of Deitch Projects, now that Jeffrey Deitch is headed to the MOCA in L.A., Manhattan's art scene is losing a huge edge. L.A. is pumping, folks. Check out this awesome five week film festival our old friend Aaron Rose organized called Projections that's taking place Roberts & Tilton in Culver City.
 
Billed as a festival of "rare and hard to see films," Projections will feature the work of lots of our favorite artists and friends: Cheryl Dunn, Mike Mills, Chris Johanson, Jo Jackson and Thomas Campbell to Sarah Sophie Flicker, Alia Raza, Maximilla Lucacs and Autumn De Wilde. And on opening night (January 16th) don't miss a screening of Jonas Mekas (he was my teacher in college!!!)'s legendary 1968 film called Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches featuring appearances by the likes of Alan Ginsberg, Warhol, John and Yko, Edie Sedgewick, Jack Smith and more. Check the Projections site for more information.


Projections
January 16th-February 20th, 2010
Opening reception, Saturday, January 16th, 6-9 p.m.
Roberts & Tilton
5801 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232

Originally posted by Kim Hastreiter from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 12, 2010 6:17 AM

While fashion designers might seem like the keenest clairvoyants of the fashion sphere, we actually hand the honor to textile designers. Before the sketches are even drawn at fashion design houses, mills are producing the fabrics in colors and patterns that will outfit people a whole year in advance. Wanna get a peek at spring '11? New York Textile Week is underway, and they've released a chart of what's up-and-coming. Expect busy prints in under-saturated hues like auburn, burnt sienna, cornflower, and hunter green. It's probably the least spring-y palette we've seen in recent seasons, but we can already imagine the softer, duller shades on demure skirts, lightweight blouses, and accessories with a ingénue-meets-school-marm kick. (WWD)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashion News RSS- Refinery29.com - View Models and Glamour Shots, on January 12, 2010 6:13 AM

The asphalt expanse where Flatbush and Vanderbilt Avenues meet at the north end of Grand Army Plaza. Photo: Google Street View

We missed it in the run-up to the holidays last month, but this item in the Brooklyn Paper is worth a longer look. DOT has announced its intention to implement some safety fixes at the northern end of Grand Army Plaza.

According to the Brooklyn Paper, the agency may calm the racetrack conditions on the plaza's north end, where drivers speed around the traffic circle without stopping:

The suggested improvements would do away with the loop in favor of a normal traffic light with a left turn signal at the intersection of Vanderbilt and Flatbush avenues inside the circle.

The Brooklyn Paper also published a drawing of a re-configured plaza, showing expanded pedestrian areas, but there is no official proposal yet. We asked DOT if they had any renderings of the plan to share, and it looks like they're still putting together a proposal to present in the coming months.

Robert Witherwax of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition expects any changes on the north end will make it much easier to walk to the middle of the circle, helping to reconnect Olmsted and Vaux's plaza to the public realm. "Right now," Witherwax said, "people who are running, and running fast, are the only people who can navigate Grand Army Plaza."

Originally posted by Noah Kazis from Streetsblog New York City, on January 12, 2010 6:09 AM

(Cross-posted with the Google Code Blog)

I'm excited to announce that registration for Google I/O is now open at code.google.com/io. Our third annual developer conference will return to Moscone West in San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. We expect thousands of web, mobile and enterprise developers to be in attendance.

I/O 2010 will be focused on building the next generation of applications in the cloud and will feature the latest on Google products and technologies like Android, Google Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Google APIs and more. Members of our engineering teams and other web development experts will lead more than 80 technical sessions. We'll also bring back the Developer Sandbox, which we introduced at I/O 2009, where developers from more than 100 companies will be on hand to demo their apps, answer questions and exchange ideas.

We'll be regularly adding more sessions, speakers and companies on the event website, and today we're happy to give you a preview of what's to come. Over half of all sessions are already listed, covering a range of products and technologies, as well as speaker bios. We've also included a short list of companies that will be participating in the Developer Sandbox. For the latest I/O updates, follow us (@googleio) on Twitter.

Today's registration opens with an early bird rate of $400, which applies through April 16 ($500 after April 16). Faculty and students can register at the discounted Academia rate of $100 (this discounted rate is limited and available on a first come, first serve basis).

Last year's I/O sold out before the start of the conference, so we encourage you to sign up in advance.

Google I/O
May 19-20, 2010
Moscone West, San Francisco

To learn more and sign up, visit code.google.com/io.

We hope to see you in May!

Posted by David Glazer, Engineering Director

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on January 12, 2010 6:03 AM

From Slice

"... we were forced to sell and deliver our pizza as if it were drugs or another illegal commodity."

[Photograph: Skylash]

@Skylash tweeted about this unusual pizza flier that he posted to Twitpic.

His tweet says, "Pizza in La Ventana," which I'm guessing is La Ventana, Mexico. I've emailed the flier person to get the intrigue-filled story, which appears after the jump. I love how he is advertising what seems to be a homemade pizza-delivery service via a flier.

Hello!

I am the designer of the poster.

It's true, we were making pizza in la ventana. I am currently in San Francisco any my friend is carrying the torch down there. Our pizza is a Sicilian-style and is cooked in an outdoor brick oven in our backyard. Pizza is uncommon that far south in Mexico and the "pizza" they try to sell is hardly pizza at all.

Our recipe for crust was passed on for generations and a guarded secret in my family, known for their guarded secrets. Inspired by our favorite pizza parlor proprietor, Dominic Di Fara, we got to work.

La Ventana is a gringo hangout highly regarded for its world-class kite surfing, so we already had a big niche market.

Unfortunately a rival pizza parlor, run by a vicious gang (rumored to have raped and killed a girl just down the road a year earlier) opened up and they threatened our families with violence if we continued selling our superior pizza so we were forced to sell and deliver our pizza as if it were drugs or another illegal commodity.

We delivered the pizzas both by car and by boat and it was about 45 minutes from stretching the dough to monetary exchange. We continue to get 4 to 5 orders a night, and people love our fresh green peppers.

My name is Chris B., and I am a 19 year old artist traveling the world.

I run a photoblog called Neon Leon.

Transcript of Flier

PIZZA
LET ME COOK YOU SOME PIZZA
IT IS MADE FROM SCRATCH
FRESH AS THE PRINCE OF BEL-AIR

I HAVE SOME STUFF TO PUT ON
TOP OF THE PIZZAS IF YOU WANT
I HAVE THE FOLLOWING STUFF

~PEPPERONI
~HAM
~GREEN PEPPERS
~ONIONS
~OLIVES
~JALAPENOS
~TOMATOS
~MUSHROOMS

PIZZAS COST ONLY 10 DOLLARS

IT COSTS $1 MORE PER TOPPING

CALL ME IF YOU WANT ONE
612-114-0226 OR EMAIL ME AT
metrosystem@gmail.com
DELIVERY ANYTIME DAY & NIGHT

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on January 12, 2010 5:30 AM

From Maya Lin, a short video about deforestation.

The unchopped tree bit in the last minute is particularly beautiful.

Tags: Maya Lin   video

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 12, 2010 4:53 AM

Molly reports on cryogenics, sea lions, and alternative energy. Story links: DMSO molecule, World’s Largest Solar Building, World’s Largest Solar Park, cell phone powered by soda, German solar cells, German solar cells II, Snowman Illustration, Frosty The Snowman Illustration 1, Frost The Snowman Illustration Close Up, Preserved Brain, James Hiram Bedford Being Transferred to new Cryo-tank, Sea Lions in Florence Oregon, Sea Lions Lying Around in Florence Oregon, Germany provides solar incentives, Pope’s Solar Homes, Huf Haus solar home, Pier 39 Sea Lions, Pier 39 Sea Lions Lying Around on docks, Sea Lion Cub and Mother, Fish in cold water, Shangdong Province, China, Map of Germany, Cryogenic images

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on January 12, 2010 4:41 AM

Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is dragged back begrudgingly in the exciting two-day, four-hour premier of "Day 8," the new season of 24 that starts on Jan. 17th on FOX. And it's set in Manhattan! Jack is out of CTU and planning on traveling to LA with his daughter and his grandchild when an informant, bleeding, stumbles into his apartment and apprises him of a plot to assassinate a foreign leader (Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor) just as he is about to sign a nuclear disarmament treaty with the US President (the fabulous Cherry Jones) at the UN. So Jack is off and running, and before long shooting and dodging missiles. Freddie Prinze Jr. is a great fit as a CTU agent as is Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff as his data analysist girlfriend with a dark secret in her past. The first four hours are thrilling as usual and  will inevitably hold me hostage for another 20 hours of New Jack City. 

Originally posted by Dennis Dermody from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 12, 2010 4:29 AM

Here's the find of the week, from Alex.  

We have joked last year about the met fans used in ads, and how they obviously are not at shea.  With that, I thought you would find the attached photo ad from espn.com marketing Alabama merchandise.

Not only did they use Shea, they added the 50 yard line.

Thanks for the site.

Alex

Alabama's stadium sure looks familiar!

For previous poor decisions in photoshopping Mets related advertising, such as these "Mets fans" read here and here.











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Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 12, 2010 3:49 AM

If you are in the Boston area come by to see the exhibition, “Sailing the Barbarous Coast.” It is a two-person show with Anthony Smith and myself. The show opens Jan 15 in Newton, MA (near Boston).

Details Below:

Who is Prester John 2, by Anthony Smith Jr

Detail of Staying Afloat, by Colin Matthes

Sailing the Barbarous Coast
Colin Matthes and Anthony Smith Jr.
January 15- February 24, 2010
Reception: Friday, January 15, 6-8pm
New Art Center
Newton, MA
www.newartcenter.org

Originally posted by Colin Matthes from Just Seeds: Blog, on January 12, 2010 3:23 AM

via www.guardian.co.uk Nintendo has revealed a new fitness gimmick to accompany the European release of Pokémon HeartGold Version and Pokémon SoulSilver Version in March. The latest games in the massively successful series will come packaged with the Pokéwalker - a pedometer that interacts with the Nintendo DS via infrared. Players can transfer any of their Pokémon into the Pokéwalker and then train them by taking them for an actual walk.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 12, 2010 3:03 AM

Muji & Lego recently released a joint product that consists of a box of Lego pieces that also comes with sheets of paper — with a particular hole-punch (not included), the paper and Legos can be combined into some cute creations.

Originally posted by Gerry Mak from Lost At E Minor: For creative people, on January 12, 2010 3:03 AM

Remember last year, when I posted a link to a group in California that wanted scraps to make quilts for Quilts for Valor and other groups?

I wanted to share this thank-you note I received from Jane Ellen, who manages their donations:

Over the year I've received at least 6 large boxes of marvelous fabrics--silks, Japanese cottons and more. Most have arrived anonymously, but a couple had return addresses and I hope they got their thank you notes. The Pieces of Love quilting group at Northpoint Church in Corona, CA made and distributed at least 120 quilts in 2009--not bad for our first year with 12 members! Twenty were handpicked for women and children at an emergency homeless shelter and extras were left for others to receive as needed. For seven years our church has partnered with a Head Start Program in a disadvantaged area near us. Each year we give a Christmas in Corona party for the children and their families. This year we had over 400 people on our Christmas lists. Originally we just provided toys for the preschool children, but we have expanded to provide an item of clothing and a toy for each child in a Head Start family and gift cards for the parents. We also provide a small (50x63" min.) quilt for each child under age 3. The last count I heard was 52 quilts this year. Other quilts were personally delivered to members needing a tangible reminder of God's love in our church family. One quilt was sent to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where our church partners with a school and ministry. Several were sent on to Quilts of Valor for wounded warriors. Between now and March we'll put together a blue and white quilt for a woman who's speaking at our women's retreat then. This year's retreat is entitled "Sacred Scraps" and will have many of our quilts.

So thank you, from Jane Ellen, and thank you from me, too!

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on January 12, 2010 2:31 AM

Now Pikachu fanatics can catch critters by walking!

Nintendo has revealed a new fitness gimmick to accompany the European release of Pokémon HeartGold Version and Pokémon SoulSilver Version in March. The latest games in the massively successful series will come packaged with the Pokéwalker - a pedometer that interacts with the Nintendo DS via infrared. Players can transfer any of their Pokémon into the Pokéwalker and then train them by taking them for an actual walk. From the press release:

The Pokéwalker counts the number of steps you take in the real world as you walk with it, using these to earn vital experience points while strengthening the bond between you and your Pokémon. The more steps you take in the real world, the more Watts are gained. Watts are used within the Pokéwalker to encounter and catch wild Pokémon using the Poké Radar or to search for hidden items using the Dowsing Machine, which can then be transferred into Pokémon HeartGold Version and Pokémon SoulSilver Version.

Apparently, you can match your wander to the shops with an in-game route - perhaps a jaunt through the plains or along the coast. Each route has different wild Pokémon to find and grab, and some special Pokémon can only be found within certain routes. And to ensure you recruit friends to your Pokémon-based fitness drive, users can create an infrared connection between two Pokéwalkers, receiving a game item as a gift.

Of course, this is a transparent attempt to allay parental (and media) fears about the sedentary lifestyles of our technology-obsessed children. But it's an amusing real-world implementation nonetheless, and reminds me of Konami's Game Boy Advance RPG, Bokura no Taiyou, which came with a light sensor that meant certain in-game interactions would only take place if you played outside in the sun. The next evolution is a game that comes with some bathroom scales - "You cannot access level two until you lose 10 pounds..."

Can you think of any other game series' that would benefit from a pedometer?

• Games
• Nintendo
• Casual gaming

Keith Stuart

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Originally posted by Keith Stuart from Technology: Games blog | guardian.co.uk, on January 12, 2010 12:39 AM

Typeface: Vitesse

H&FJ is delighted to introduce Vitesse®, a new slab serif in twelve styles.

Slab serifs are one of typography’s most vibrant categories, yet they remain dominated by two ancient forms: the nineteenth century Antique, and the twentieth century Geometric. Both are vital and living genres — we’ve explored each of them, in our Sentinel and Archer type families — but what of the twenty-first century slab? Vitesse revels in the tension between organic letterforms and mechanical grids, and offers designers a distinctive new voice that’s suave, confident, and stylish. Engineered for responsive handling and a sporty ride, Vitesse is now available, starting at $199.

Vitesse. Exclusively at H&FJ.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, on January 11, 2010 8:00 PM

Per an earlier Formspring post (avert your eyes, Justine Bateman), I mentioned [what I think is] the importance of acquiring skills outside of your primary areas of interest/career focus and it occurred to me that I mostly do that incrementally.  Couple that with the fact that a lot of what I do work-wise isn’t so new to me at this point and that my learning curve seems to have flattened off (read: I know how to blog! Finally!) and I have to conclude that I’m not doing much that makes me work hard intellectually. And I think I’ve killed enough brain cells at this point with various recreational activities that I can’t afford to lose any more.

One caveat: Fiction writing is very stimulating in that respect, but it’s very right-brained creative stuff, and part of the reason I feel brain dead sometimes is that not a lot of left-brained activity in my work anymore. Finance was draining in other ways, but it was a nice balance.

So I wanted to do something new that’s more left-brain-y and difficult [for me, at least] than what I mostly do for work, and decided to opt for programming. I’m attempting to learn Python via MIT’s Open Courseware Comp Sci courses, Google and general determination to crack something I don’t know how to do.

So here’s a newbie question for programmers: if you were starting from scratch as one of The Olds (which I am, vis-a-vis most people who learn Python as a starter language), what would you do? What would you read? How would you practice?

(I’m not guaranteeing that I won’t completely flake and drop this in two months, but I was trying to decide between this and some general mathematics stuff, and it seemed more practical.)

So what would you do?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on January 11, 2010 7:01 PM

From the best damn baseball blog ever, MLB Trade Rumors:

MLB.com's Brian McTaggart reports that Houston Astros owner Drayton McLane has entered into negotiations to sell the team. McLane says he's in no hurry to sell the team, but has entered into an exclusive 30-day negiotiating window with an unnamed New York investment banking company.

The only thing that would make this better is if the unnamed bank is using TARP funds to purchase them.

Originally posted by Andrew Anker from quid.pro, on January 11, 2010 6:59 PM

Shared by Leandro M. P.
É o para-raios da cidade...

Beautiful shots of lightning striking Burj Khalifa in Dubai – recently crowned tallest building in the world.

Photos courtesy of Alisdair Miller. If you haven’t seen his fabulous shots from the top of the viewing deck, I highly recommend you check them out.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Next Web, on January 11, 2010 5:55 PM

There's always been a confusion on what Plack really is. 

First, there were people who thinks "Plack is a framework." This is probably because we have Plack::Request as a separate utility module on CPAN to write "mini-frameworks". Our current plan to kill this confusion is to merge Plack::Request to core as a middleware library and release the current Plack::Request under a new name, kind of like Python's WebOb.py.

Then today I had the following conversations on IRC with Marcus and Theory. They say different things on Plack, and the problem is that they're mostly correct, but the view where they look at Plack from makes them say different things.

Most people on the application developer side thinks "speak PSGI" and "use Plack" mean the same thing. That is totally fine. Using tools like Plack middleware and Plack::Test doesn't add any dependency for particular Plack server environments.

What's confusing you and some of us internally, is that this "Server" means different things: 1) Standalone Web server that speaks PSGI 2) Web server adapters for CGI and FastCGI and 3) plackup and the daemon process. etc. 

There's a couple of PSGI servers out there, and most of them are implemented as a Standalone HTTP server and has Plack::Server::* namespace, while other web server extensions are called like mod_psgi, evpsgi or Perlbal::Plugin::PSGI.

I've been thinking this is a bit confusing, but didn't have a tuit to rename it since that might cause compatibility issues for early adaptors. Today, however, we chatted on #plack and decided to make some changes. But no worries, the changes are 99% transparent unless you're one of the very few server developers (and all of them are involved in this discussion already).

Plack::Server stays, but they are adapters

Plack::Server namespace stays, and plackup -s BlahBlah autoloads the server backend appropriately. That'll be the same and nobody should ever change any code around it. What we change is that we move out the actual standalone Web server implementation into a different namespace, and what's left in Plack::Server:: namespace is just an adapter for palckup (and Plack::Runner).

I already started this process on the branch, and it's now more straightforward. Server::Standalone stays the same, but it's now an adapter to dispatch the standalone PSGI server implementation whether single proc or preforking one. We had a huge bikeshedding discussion about its names, but we agreed HTTP::Server::PSGI is the most appropriate and intuitive name to upload to CPAN, assuming it's a "reference implementation".

We potentially have another "application" like HTTP server (think of Ruby web servers such as Thin, Mongrel, Rainbows! and such) with a different name but uses HTTP::Server::PSGI and its Prefork class as a base class, and we can continue to have Plack::Server namespace for adapters/bridges to those new web servers. 

Similarly, Plack::Server::POE would be renamed to POE::Component::Server::PSGI, so does Plack::Server::AnyEvent be AnyEvent::HTTPD::PSGI, etc. etc. But the Plack::Server::* are kept as an adapter to delegate to the appropriate components.

Well, these bridge classes are called "handlers" in Rack and we always thought it's kind of confusing since it's even internally called server (the variable name). But it makes sense since most of the time those classes are "handlers" that run on those web servers such as Mongrel.

Anyway, I'm all for having top level namespaces to have some software that stands out, but i don't disagree to having descriptive names like POE::Component::Server::*, assuming that plays well with the standard CPANisms that is already out there.

I hope this is one of the last very few things to shave before making Plack 1.0 release... :)

Originally posted by miyagawa from bulknews.typepad.com, on January 11, 2010 4:53 PM

I can't believe a thing Mark McGwire says.   I started out feeling bad for the guy, always hard to see a grown man cry, but as it went on I got angrier and angrier.  

Good job, as always, by Costas.  Bob at times seemed like he was thinking "are you really going to sit here and say this stuff?"

First, let me say for not the first time that there are a lot of people who are either hypocrites or fools.  Fox, Joe Buck, Sports Illustrated, and most everyone else who covered babseball in '98 made this guy out to be a hero.   Maybe they didn't know, but wow you had to be an idiot if you didn't think he was on something.  

I love when Costas quotes that 1985-94 there were 21 40+ home run seasons in baseball, from 95-2003 there were 104.   Costas brought this stuff up at the time, he brought it up in his book, and he's one of the few that didn't have his head in the sand at the time.

For people to not vote for a guy with 583 home runs into the Hall, it's phony.  You knew.  Where were the columns at the time?  Everyone wanted to write books with titles like "Summer of '98" and "The Perfect Season: Why 1998 Was Baseball's Greatest Year"   Don't get righteous now that there's no more money to be made off that season.

Some other day we can get into what we want our heroes to look like - whether we like two smiling guys playing in midwest towns, or a surly man who didn't want to play the media's game.





Some stuff I jotted down while watching:

McGwire is sticking to the language about his God given gift of home runs, and "for injuries" (aka the Pettitte defense).

At one point McGwire went on and on about how people are still talking about his little league home runs.  I don't know how Costas didn't just get up and leave.

Costas asked McGwire if he thinks he'd hit 70 homers without steroids:  "I truly believe so"

"It was the era that we played in."  The Bud Selig era.  I will not be surprised when the day comes and someone has some evidence that proves beyond a doubt that Selig knew.

"I didn't want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger"  - hilarious.

Costas asked him if the timing has anything to do with the statute of limitations now having expired.  McGwire says no.  Come on dude.  Please.

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Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 11, 2010 4:28 PM

Alex Payne, in Don’t Be A Hero:

If someone is working at four in the morning, something is deeply wrong. Figure out what’s broken and delegate the work out evenly across your team such that it doesn’t happen again. Don’t pat your hero on the back for “pulling another late-nighter”.

This is one reason why, when looking for a job a few years ago, I didn’t consider working for any company whose job description implied (or stated) that I’d be expected to work extremely long hours regularly and not have a family life. Such companies are either run by “heroes” or expect to hire one. (Usually for the same salary as a nine-to-fiver and with a trivial equity stake.)

I resent the commonly held belief that this is an unavoidable part of “startup culture”. (It’s completely avoidable.) Such beliefs encourage workaholism, especially among young people, and cause poor-quality products, employee burnout, and high turnover.

I don’t want to be a part of any company that’s so poorly managed, or simply so cheap, that employees are expected to forego a healthy lifestyle. No job is worth that.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on January 11, 2010 4:02 PM

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on January 11, 2010 3:07 PM

via chatterbox.typepad.com I want to be careful about passing judgment one way or the other on Jumptown just yet. When it comes to Memorial Coliseum, I am not just an impartial blogger or journalist but an advocate for the building as part of the Friends of Memorial Coliseum leadership. What's more, it is impossible to separate completely the plans for the building versus plans for the larger Jumptown district and scheme. So far what I see is a preserved Memorial Coliseum, and I like that (the removed canopy not withstanding). I also like the density that would be added to the Rose Quarter with a highrise hotel and other projects. There hasn't yet been enough rigor applied to Jumptown other than the Coliseum to judge whether the architecture itself would be good or bad. It seems too large and ambitious at first glance, but first glances sometimes don' tell you much. Brian Libby loves the Blazers, Portland and Architecture (and like 12 other things!) more than you probably love anything (he even defends the Andre Miller signing). He is a very loving guy. Anyway, fun read.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 11, 2010 1:52 PM

Ebersol is the only person other than songwriter Carly Simon to know the name of the subject of Simon's song "You're So Vain." He won the right to know in a charity auction where he was taken to the singer's home at midnight where she would make a snack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and she would tell him the origin of the song. Beforehand he was required to sign a confidentiality agreement.

 Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by stamen to dickebersol wikipedia - More about this bookmark

Originally posted by stamen from Delicious/stamen, on January 11, 2010 1:43 PM

Appearing on Hardball tonight, former Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) made a clear declaration for Chris Matthews, as Ford gears up to challenge appointed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in the New York Democratic primary.

Ford, who lost a Senate campaign in his native Tennessee in 2006, said that he lives in New York, he and his wife plan to start a family there, and he's paid taxes there. "And once you pay taxes there, you feel like a New Yorker," Ford quipped.

Matthews asked Ford to declare that he is a New Yorker. Ford replied: "I am a New Yorker. I am a New Yorker. I am a New Yorker. I am a New Yorker." It was certainly entertaining -- and if this New York thing doesn't work out, he'll have no chance of ever running for office in Tennessee again.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on January 11, 2010 1:32 PM

It’s been a crazy day. I’m busy working, writing various things. Then, because I’m a real genius when it comes to hitting “reply all,” I realized that I didn’t let people know I wanted to post, and what I wanted to write on got (rightly) taken. To top it off, there’s big happenings afoot in Rumorland that may dramatically effect the outcome of The Contest, but I don’t want to jinx it (whatever “jinxing it” would involve).

So today, I want to do something different and look at some “low reliability” offensive projections for 2010. From time to time, I reference “my” projections for a particular player. Believe me, I’m no statistical or programming guru. I simply started with Colin Wyers’ MySQL script for a Marcel-type offensive projections, then added in some tweaks for different aging curves and amounts of regression for different components. Like Marcel, it doesn’t adjust for parks or leagues or include minor-league data. Marcel isn’t intended to compete with the “big boys” (e.g., CHONE, ZiPS, PECOTA), but rather to be a baseline against which they are judged — in fact, Marcel does pretty well. I just hope I’m not doing something worse. In any case, it’s just a toy for my personal enjoyment at this point, it will take a fair bit more tweaking before I published the projections as a whole or even gave the “system” a name (although I admit having some ideas for the latter).

For each player projected, my system, like Marcel, generates a “reliability score,” which, in Tango’s words,

shows how much of the forecast is based on his performance, and how much was regression towards the mean…. [for example] Bobby Abreu shows a .87. That means that I regressed towards the mean 13%. Using that, it should be easy enough to figure out a confidence interval for each of the stats. If I show a reliability of .00, this means that it is an absolute pure guess on my part.

Generally, you want to look elsewhere than Marcels or my system when the reliability score is under .72 or so.

But that’s where today’s “fun “starts, because the way the projection system is set up with the Baseball Databank, if a player (pitchers are excluded) even has 1 plate appearance in last three years, it generates a projection for him. So let’s take a look at four goodies my mystery projection system has in store for in 2010. I’ll give the “three slash,” then runs created above average per 150 games, and then the reliability score for each player and some commentary. At the very least, this might provide a weird corollary to Dave Cameron’s point about regression “fixing” problems.

Morgan Ensberg, .250/.332/.408, -2/150, .505 r. I just read that he retired last spring due to lack of interest from major league teams. It’s not surprising, I guess, but I have to say that it seems like just yet yesterday he was a decent-fielding, three true outcomes machine for Houston. Then, after 2006… nothing. But my system says he’s not a bad bat if he can field decently.

Neifi Perez, .251/.315/.402, -8/150 .141 r. Perez was the return for one of the worst trades in recent , but at least the team that got him never repeated that sort of mistake again. That’s not a bad line for a shortstop. Indeed, Neifi’s due for a career year at the plate (regression!). I mean, you wouldn’t hit him first or anything.

With the signings of Vladimir Guerrero and Jack Cust this weekend, here are two DH candidates.

Jay Gibbons, .254/.305/.403 -12/150, .412 r. Last seen playing for the Newark Bears, Gibbons, like Ensberg, retired in 2009 after being unable to find a job for a major-league team, I used to regularly take a certain well-known fantasy guru’s advice and put Gibbons on my roto team. It never worked, not even once. I was never really not sure what the guru or the Orioles saw in him. I guess he put up a decent season in 2005, and even payed the outfield pretty well. But he never really seemed to have the patience or contact skills to back up his lack of defense.

Barry Bonds, .261/.410/.478, +16/150, .536 r. You had to know it was coming, right? Not bad for a man who hasn’t played the past two seasons. Perhaps you’d expect better linear weights for a guy with a .410 OBP, but keep in mind that the lwts don’t include intentional walks, which Bonds had a lot of (like Marcel, my system current projects iBBs). Still, there are plenty of teams that could use a +16 hitter at DH. I wonder how permanent that retirement is?

Until the next installment!

Originally posted by Matt Klaassen from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 11, 2010 11:00 AM

You can get this 5,000 places but I'd feel weird if I didn't have it here too.  I am not the least bit surprised, and I've said many times - you knew, you knew, you knew.  By you I mean YOU, the person who cheered in 1998 and now doesn't want him in the Hall.


Mark McGwire:

Now that I have become the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, I have the chance to do something that I wish I was able to do five years ago.

I never knew when, but I always knew this day would come. It’s time for me to talk about the past and to confirm what people have suspected. I used steroids during my playing career and I apologize. I remember trying steroids very briefly in the 1989/1990 off season and then after I was injured in 1993, I used steroids again. I used them on occasion throughout the nineties, including during the 1998 season.

I wish I had never touched steroids. It was foolish and it was a mistake. I truly apologize. Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.

During the mid-90s, I went on the DL seven times and missed 228 games over five years. I experienced a lot of injuries, including a rib cage strain, a torn left heel muscle, a stress fracture of the left heel, and a torn right heel muscle. It was definitely a miserable bunch of years and I told myself that steroids could help me recover faster. I thought they would help me heal and prevent injuries too.

I’m sure people will wonder if I could have hit all those home runs had I never taken steroids. I had good years when I didn’t take any and I had bad years when I didn’t take any. I had good years when I took steroids and I had bad years when I took steroids. But no matter what, I shouldn’t have done it and for that I’m truly sorry.

Baseball is really different now – it’s been cleaned up. The Commissioner and the Players Association implemented testing and they cracked down, and I’m glad they did.

I’m grateful to the Cardinals for bringing me back to baseball. I want to say thank you to Cardinals owner Mr. DeWitt, to my GM, John Mozeliak, and to my manager, Tony La Russa. I can’t wait to put the uniform on again and to be back on the field in front of the great fans in Saint Louis.

I’ve always appreciated their support and I intend to earn it again, this time as hitting coach. I’m going to pour myself into this job and do everything I can to help the Cardinals hitters become the best players for years to come.

After all this time, I want to come clean. I was not in a position to do that five years ago in my Congressional testimony, but now I feel an obligation to discuss this and to answer questions about it.

I’ll do that, and then I just want to help my team.

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Originally posted by Shannon Shark, Mets Police Chief from The Mets Police, on January 11, 2010 10:37 AM

Speaking of typography, Alice Rawsthorn has a profile of H&FJ type designers Jonathon Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, regarding the difficulties they face in the shift from print to pixels.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 11, 2010 8:00 AM

When I took this it was all about the rain and the water pouring off the roof, but looking at it now all I see is the sky in the background and the Empire State Building.

Originally posted by Will from A Test Of Will, on January 11, 2010 7:29 AM

If the sabermetric crowd is known for anything, it is their love of acronyms. There are hundreds of statistics, most of which can be broken down into two and three letter abbreviations. FIP, UZR, wOBA, WAR – our language is full of words that are short and fully capitalized.

When written, this does not present any kind of problem. We all generally come to understand what the abbreviations stand for fairly quickly, and we don’t have to spend too much time saying the full version of the names of these things – I don’t remember the last time I said “Weighted On Base Average”, for instance.

However, increasingly, these terms are making their way into conversation. And that means we have to pronounce these things. I am quickly learning that everyone has a very different path to pronunciation for these acronyms, and there is no clear pattern or rules on how they should be spoken.

For instance, some of them I spell out, while others I pronounce. Why? I have no idea. It goes this way across all the numbers. Some get spelled, some get said, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

Acronyms I say:

FIP – rhymes with hip.
wOBA – woah-buh, emphasis on first syllable, rhymes with toga (sort of?).
SLG – slug, like the animal.
BABIP – bab-ip, rhymes with nothing, no idea why I say this.
ISO – eye-so, this is actually a word, so that helps.
WHIP – pronounced like Indy’s weapon
LOB% – lob percentage, said like its the rate of soft-tossed pitches
WAR – said like a really big fight

Acronyms I spell:

E-R-A – not sure why I don’t say era, like a period of time, but I don’t.
O-B-P – are you down with OBP? Yeah, you know me.
O-P-S – not ops, as in operation, and never heard it said that way.
U-Z-R – someone once called it “oozer”, and I tried not to laugh.
W-P-A – can’t even figure out how I would say this? “whoop-a?”
W-R-A-A – no way I’m going to say “were-aahh” to someone.

So, that’s my list. I know everyone does it differently, though, so I’m curious, which ones do you spell and which ones do you say? And does anyone have any idea why?

Originally posted by Dave Cameron from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 11, 2010 7:00 AM

I don't really get Charlotte Gainsbourg's music video Heaven Can Wait (featuring Beck) but I like it. Probably because it involves a baby in a hot dog suit, hamburger wheels on a skateboard, an astronaut with a pancake-stack head, and a Fruity Pebbles bath. Watch the wacky video after the jump.

[via nireih]

More Music Videos Involving Food

'So Fine' By Telepathe
'To Clean' by Woods
'Sad Song' by Au Revoir Simone

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on January 11, 2010 7:00 AM

I’m not sure who made this. But its awesome. I <3 Inglorious Basterds.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from lather rinse repeat, on January 11, 2010 6:59 AM

Architecture, curated by Cybergabi from Your Best Shot 2009 pool.

Photos from Stig Nygaard, o palsson, Emma I and Frens Jan.

Originally posted by Kevin Collins from Flickr Blog, on January 11, 2010 6:33 AM

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new album, Irm, out in two weeks.

http://www.amazon.com/Irm-Charlotte-Gainsbourg/dp/B002V9L57A/ref=nosim/fimoculouscom-20/

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on January 11, 2010 6:23 AM

[Image: saveur.com]

Saveur editor-in-chief James Oseland brings his magazine to the huge food lovers' conversation the rest of us have been participating in for years with his magazine's first-ever reader-generated Saveur 100.

The list's a little less quirky this year, but it's still fun to go through and see how many you are familiar with. Props to our friends at Hot Doug's and the Astor Center. And who knew that former Peristyle chef-owner Anne Kearney had opened a restaurant, Rue Domaine, in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio? Serious eaters in Dayton must be thrilled.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on January 11, 2010 5:30 AM

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a post entitled Facebook's Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over where he reviews some quotes by Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, on their recent privacy changes and how these changes are reflecting evolving social norms. Below is an excerpt on Marshall's take on Mark Zuckerburg's comments

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos - if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples' lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that's old news, that people are changing. I don't believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that's what it wants to be true.

There's lots of food for thought here. At first I wondered whether Facebook would have become the global phenomenon that is today where your friends, neighbors, coworkers and old school chums are sharing the minutiae of their lives with you if it had been public by default. Then I realized that sort of thinking doesn't matter since Facebook has 350 million users today so wondering how things could have turned out years ago with a different design isn't particularly interesting.  

What is interesting is considering why Facebook would want it to be true that many of their users think nothing of making their Facebook data public versus sharing it within their social network? The simple answer is Twitter.

Below is the Google Trends chart showing the difference in traffic between both sites.

In looking at the above chart, one might think it ludicrous that Facebook would have anything to fear from Twitter given that it has at least an order of magnitude more users. However compare the above chart to a comparison of news references and search queries for the phrases "search twitter" versus "search Facebook".

There are two things you learn from the above chart. The first is that the news media is a lot more interested in talking about search and Twitter instead of search and Facebook. This implies that even though Facebook has similar features to Twitter and ten times the user base, people don't talk about the power of being able to search Facebook status updates like they do about Twitter. The second is that there actually more interest from people actually doing search queries in searching content on Facebook than in searching Twitter content which is unsurprising since Facebook has a lot more users.

However the fact that status updates and other content on Facebook is private by default means Facebook cannot participate in this space even though it has the same kind of content that Twitter does but it is more valuable because they have lots more content and it is backed by real identities not anonymous users. Here's a quick list of the top of my head of the kinds of apps you can enable over Twitter's public stream of status updates that Facebook was locked out of until their privacy change

1. What The Trend – Lists topics that are currently trending on Twitter and why. Often a quick way to find breaking news before it is reported by the mainstream media.
2. Tweetmeme – The top links that are currently being shared on Twitter. Another source of breaking news and cool content. It's like Digg and Reddit but without having to vote on content on some geeky "social news" site.
3. Bitly.TV – A place to watch the videos that are currently being shared on Twitter.
4. Twittervision – A cool way to idle away the minutes by seeing what people all over the world are saying on Twirter.
5. Google Real-Time search – See what Twitter users are saying about a particular search term in real-time as part of your search results
6. Filtrbox – A tool that enables companies to see what their customers are saying about their products and brands on Twitter

All of these and more are the kinds of scenario Facebook could enable if their status update streams are public instead of private. People think Twitter is worth $1 billion because it is sitting on this well of real-time status updates and has created this ecosystem of services that live of its stream. However Facebook is sitting on ten times as much data yet could not be a part of this world because of their history of being a privacy centered social network. Being able to participate in the real-time search increases Facebook value and broadens its reach across the Web. With the privacy changes in place this will now be the case. Especially since 50 percent of their users have accepted the more public default privacy settings. Facebook can now participate in the same real-time ecosystem as Twitter and will bring more content that is easier to trust since it comes from people's real identities.

That said, I commend the people at Facebook for having the courage to evolve their product in the face of new market opportunities instead of being tied to their past. Lots of companies let themselves be ruled by fear and thus stick to the status quo for fear of ticking off their users which often leads to bored users. Kudos.  

Now Playing: Flobots - Handlebars

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life, on January 11, 2010 5:16 AM

Halal Cart [Flickr Photo Pool/Michael Feuerstein]

· Totonno’s Still Not Open But Showing Signs of Life [LC]
· Stupid Hipster Trendpiece: People on the "Caveman Diet" [NYT]
· Last Week for Wburg's MonkeyTown [NYP]
· KFC Sued Over Shift from Fried to Grilled [Newser]
· Behind the Landlord Ultimatum at Ray's Candy Store [EVG]
· A Sampling of NYC Winter Restaurant Week Menus [Wined and Dined]
· Eight People Arrested After Beating Man in Sunset Park Bar [NYP]
· Actor Paul Sorvino Creates Own Brand of Pasta Sauce [NYDN]
· Metromix Launches Reader "Best of" Awards for Dining [Metromix]
· Reasons Why Indian Food Will Not Be The Decade's Big Food Trend [Salon.com]

Originally posted by Kelly Dobkin from Eater NY, on January 11, 2010 3:30 AM

According to the shining beacon of journalism that is the New York Post (credo: "When the facts just aren't good enough on their own), the illustrious bachelor-hood of one Derek Jeter might soon come to an end. I knew this day would come but I just... there's only so much you can prepare for something like this.

After months of speculation that the Yankees' hunk and his sexy steady Minka Kelly are headed to the altar, The Post has learned that the super couple may have settled on a wedding date -- Nov. 5.


And while it may bring little solace to Jeter's legion of female admirers, fretful Yankees fans will be glad to note the date is at least two days after the World Series ends.


After getting a tip about the upcoming nuptials, The Post confirmed the date by spotting a curious entry in the official calendar at the ritzy reception palace Oheka Castle in Huntington, LI, for the first Friday in November that read simply "JETER wedding."

Well, at least Minka is "RAWR!" worthy, and she's definitely without the scary muscles of that other guy's first endeavor into marriage, so that's nice. And while this story is far from confirmed at the present time, you'll have to excuse me while I go cry.

Originally posted by J from 3:10 To Joba, on January 11, 2010 3:00 AM

We haven't had an actual bed since the Ikea one we bought back in 2000 or so responded to being rogered upon, not even with unusual vigor, by collapsing promptly and decisively into a pile of wood bits. Since then it has been just a mattress and shitty box spring, for nine-plus years.

Box springs are strange. They cost real money and act as if they are marvels of springy engineering, but actually as far as I can tell they're made entirely of cardboard, junkyard debris, and fusible interfacing. They do hold together better than the Ikea Slat Heap but it's all an illusion. In the end what you have is a roughly box-shaped thing holding its innards, but to no supportive purpose, rather like the frog in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek after the giant water bug has injected it with liquifying toxins but before it's been sucked dry.

Anyway, all this time we've been talking about getting a bed, eventually, some kind of platform bed, we thought, so that we could do without the box spring/frog corpse. It could look chic and support our weary backs and even provide some sort of headboard against which we might prop ourselves while reading in bed, as one likes to do. But we're picky and beds are expensive, so instead we've generally contented ourselves with looking at beds for sale, mulling over the question at length, and ultimately rejecting them, a soothing routine that has sustained us for many turns of the calendar.

But then! At last! We decided to commit! We picked out a sleek modern thing with a simple headboard and a sturdy base made of cunningly designed springy steel mesh set into a wooden frame, plunked down the credit card, and waited for delivery.

Isn't that nice? (If you hate it, I don't really want to know. Also, rest assured that our bedding will never look half as minimal and severe as this; imagine big disheveled heaps of pillows and sheets and blankets instead.)

Because solid wood and steel are rather heavy and I am rather pregnant and it is rather snowy and our bedroom is rather on the second floor, we paid the extra fee for premium indoor delivery service.

At the beginning of the week, the nice people call and let us know that it would arrive on Friday. Friday morning, therefore, we leap into action, dismantling the box spring and its frame and turning the mattress on its side against the wall all ready to be flopped onto our new assemblage of modernist slabs. We both set about working at home.

Doorbell rings; cat loses mind. Steve shuts cat in bathroom; cat flings itself against the door and howls. I go sit in the bathroom with the cat. I am helpful! It's soothing, sitting in a warm small room with a reassured small animal. It sits on the book I am trying to read.

Noises float up from below. They are not the sounds of well equipped movers smoothly bringing new furniture into the house and bundling packing materials away. They are the sounds of Steve doing something effortful. 

I emerge to learn that the shipping company has sent only one person, a driver rather than a mover, and that she and Steve have been dragging enormous, heavy boxes of bed parts though the snow. Both look exhausted.

"This box was damaged when they got it. Do you want to take a look?"

Inside are some very sturdy looking steel pipes wrapped in packing paper. Nothing looks scratched. We agree it looks okay but write "box damaged" on the manifest before signing it. Steve looks at the other, very large, box, which contains the main vast slab of wood and steel. "Do you think you might help me push this up the stairs?" he says to the driver. Her face is filled with despair.

"Oh, god, let the poor woman go," I say. "This may be what we thought we were paying for, but it's obviously not what they paid her to do."

She flees.

"We may as well put the parts together down here, where there's more space. Then maybe we can entice someone to help us move it upstairs afterwards." We clear all the furniture out of the way--gosh, beds are big!--and begin unpacking.

There are no instructions. After a phone call to the manufacturer, we obtain some online. That is when we realize that something has gone even more wrong than we knew.

These pieces are supposed to be identical. The discerning eye will perceive that they are not quite.

The shop that sold us the bed was very, very apologetic. They have refunded our shipping fees and tell us they are having the replacement piece sent as quickly as possible. In the meantime, our ground floor is rather dominated by bed parts and we are sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It's all sort of larky, though, so that's all right. We pretend it's the Kon Tiki, only with better blankets and a raftboard cat.

However, I really stand in awe of the machine responsible for munging that box. What do you suppose it was? It must have exerted considerable force, but it's done it so very neatly. There isn't a crimp or scratch in the metal, which is why nothing seemed particularly out of place when we just looked at the pieces out of context.

Gundam?

A stampeding elephant? Bender?

?

(God that was long. Sorry.)

Originally posted by redfox from Adventures in the Pointless Forest, on January 11, 2010 2:48 AM

I don't believe in life insurance. When I die, I want it to be a bad day for everybody. - Brad L. Graham, February 2002

My friend Brad L. Graham died unexpectedly last week, at only 41. It's hard to sum up someone so loved in a few words, but I wanted to say a bit about him because he had a profound effect on my life and on the lives of many of my closest friends. In short, Brad showed us that when we do something creative, we're not just making art, we're making connections to a real community.

Truth is, Brad and I didn't spend all that much time together in person. Over the past decade, we'd catch up once or twice a year, grabbing coffee one afternoon in San Francisco, stumbling into a diner in Austin at three in the morning, going out to a nice dinner in Chicago on a blustery evening. But he was a constant presence in my life online, and influenced the way that so many of us fundamentally view the online world.

If you look at Brad's venerable blog The Bradlands, it looks pretty ordinary. Sure, it's been around longer than most (Brad started blogging in 1998). And his April Fool's Day jokes were actually funny, unlike everybody else's (Brad inspired one of my most popular blog posts ever, where I ranted that nobody else was up to his standard), but it's otherwise unremarkable. Why, then, have dozens of people professed their love and respect for this man's work online in threads like this one on MetaFilter?

I think the explanation finds its roots in Brad's work in promoting theater. Brad was an eloquent and passionate advocate for the Rep in St. Louis, and a fixture in his corner of the city's gay community. In both cases, he was able to be a powerful voice because he was so charming and persuasive in his demeanor. I already miss his ability to call almost anybody "Darlin'" while being simultaneously complete sincere and totally cheeky.

But we're used to treating the folks who work at a theater as a community. What was surprising was that Brad brought this same sensibility to the early days of the personal web. Before the term "blog" was even coined, the distinguishing feature of the sites that a few of us were publishing was that these were made by real people, individuals with voices who had something to express. Yet the conventional wisdom was that the medium we were working in, the world we were living in, was somehow not real.

This manifested itself in a lot of different ways. Early reports on blogs would say "why are these people wasting their time shouting into the void? Who reads these things?" Even though I was participating in it myself, I would still be combative and antagonistic on my site at times, because I didn't always see the readers or other bloggers I interacted with as "real" people.

In that era, before meetups and tweetups and mass political movements organized by bloggers, Brad recognized that not only were there real humans interacting on these sites, but that all of us who shared our thoughts online were part of a creative community every bit as legitimate and unifying as his work in theater.

And the evidence of that belief is everywhere. Over the days since Brad's passing, amidst the heartbreak, I've seen literally dozens of people say, in their own words, "Brad was the first online person I ever met in real life." In cities all over the world, in one-on-one meetups to cities he'd never visited, or in his legendarily inclusive hundreds-strong Break Bread with Brad annual drinkfest in Austin, Brad brought together people who hadn't yet realized how they had made real, significant relationships online. A while back, I'd written about communities of creators, showing a small group of folks who were enormously and disproportionately influential in making the web more personal and social. Brad was there that night and always, more than holding his own as a peer to some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the web, even though he wasn't even really a geek. He just liked the medium because it let him connect with other people.

With Brad, it was a matter of course that you were going to catch up if you were close by. While the rest of us always intend to get around to inviting some people to go out, Brad was disciplined about it, actually cajoling and prodding you until you showed up. He invested in connection, and for me it never showed more than just a few weeks after 9/11. He had known I was feeling really alone, with few friends here in New York to comfort me after the attacks, so he flew up while others were still too terrified to get on an airplane, while the rubble pile was still burning, and spent half a day just hanging out and being there for me. And this was essentially only the second time we'd met in person, after South by Southwest where he'd invited me to my first Break Bread with Brad six months earlier. I was no less of a real friend in need of support, simply because 99% of our conversations happened online over instant messenger or in a private web community we belonged to.

By the next spring, when a few of us got caught out in the rain during an unusually powerful sudden thunderstorm in Austin, Brad's powers to bring people together were in full flower. The handful of us who'd been soggily sprinting through the Texas night bonded over our plight when we finally found refuge at a diner . I had noted it at the time as having learned the lesson that rain could make brothers out of strangers, and I didn't realize quite how true that was. I'm still in touch from time to time with the guys who were at the table. One of them even stood with me at my wedding just a few years later, as I did later at his. At that wedding, the bride and groom had first met in person at Break Bread with Brad.

Best of all, Brad used these formidable powers for good. At at time when the Day Without Art was at its peak of influence about the AIDS pandemic, Brad organized an online counterpart in Day Without Weblogs (the term "blogs" wasn't yet in popular usage) beginning in 1999, eventually evolving it into Link & Think. While many of us believed in the cause, there was a lot of skepticism about comparing blogs to art, and even more about whether a community of bloggers could raise awareness about anything. The fear, essentially, was that a day without weblogs would be just like every other day.

Instead, many media outlets' very first time ever mentioning the new medium was in their coverage of the campaign. We'd demonstrated an ability to collectively get a message out, and I'm still proud that one of the seminal demonstrations of activism in the medium was one rooted in compassion. Brad grounded our first demonstration of our collective power with his expression of conscience.

And Brad's example changed my life as well. These days, I very rarely get into pissing contests with other bloggers or butt heads with commenters on other sites. Sure, some of it is having grown up and become a bit more of an adult. But most of it is due to the example of Brad (and those whom I met through him) showing me that there were real people on the other end of the line. It's one of a million little ways in which he made my life better. Some understandably want to assign a neat headline to his work, by saying "Brad coined the word blogosphere". Though it's technically true, the coinage was an act he thought was a bit silly, more worthy of blame than credit. He generously felt the recognition could easily go instead to those who wanted it.

Rather, Brad's work was altogether more messy and funny and human and passionate and complicated, just like the man himself. I can offer no more succinct summation of the man than that he was a good man and a good friend, profoundly funny and profoundly kind. I cared about him and he introduced me to many more whom I care about. Brad made my work more meaningful and was there for me when I needed him. I can't believe he's gone.

---

You can donate to Brad's beloved Repertory Theater in his memory, thanks to Judith's efforts. A number of us are working to preserve his work online, and Matt Haughey has taken care of keeping his web hosting going. There will be a Break Bread for Brad at South by Southwest this year. While details of venue and timing are still being settled (I'll update this post when they're decided), I hope all of us who had our lives better by knowing him can gather together to raise a drink in his honor.

There are many, many tributes to Brad across the web, most linked in that MetaFilter thread. A few of note to me:

• Neale's interview with Brad from 1999. Read the whole thing.
• Skot's perfect remembrance, combining Brad's distinctive humor with the bitter realization that he's gone.
• A broader view from David Wertheimer.
• Jeff Slutzky's documenting of one of those early dinners I had with Brad, from eight years ago. This one broke my heart.
• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a more formal look at Brad's life.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on January 10, 2010 11:21 PM

I wrote a Non-Expert for TheMorningNews.org, called "Just Like Heaven": (continued...)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ftrain.com, on January 10, 2010 10:00 PM

Filed under: Software Update, Terminal Tips

In response to a Macworld article, TidBits' Chris Pepper elaborated on ways to run Software Update, Apple's means of delivering updates and patches, on your own schedule. Beginning with the fact that Software Update schedules its next update based on the time it's currently being run, setting the time for the next update is as easy as running it manually at the time you want it to be scheduled for in the future.

Later, Pepper delves into the command line method of updating, using the softwareupdate tool (which we've talked about on TUAW, too) to run it from Terminal. Taking that a step further, it's suggested that you run the command from cron, a UNIX command for scheduling tasks, to automate the command-line updates. However, while it still works fine and is perfectly capable of the task, cron has technically been deprecated in OS X since Tiger. I thought I'd mention the newfangled "Mac OS X way" of handling scheduled tasks, and demonstrate a little of its flexibility.

Launchd is Apple's replacement for several UNIX ways of doing things, including init, rc.d scripts and cron. It provides a uniform, XML configuration method and -- in many cases -- is more secure than the replaced methods. Launchd can trigger applications and scripts at boot time, at intervals or even when a file or the contents of a folder change. It can also make sure a daemon or an application keeps running, with the ability to respawn and throttle it. If that's just a bunch of nerd-speak to you, don't worry, this isn't going to be an overly technical post. You can read more specifics about launchd on Apple's developer site, if you want more geeky goodness.

Launchd configuration files, like much of OS X, are XML files. Each process has one, and they can exist just about anywhere. A tool called launchctl is used to add and remove them from launchd. While these files are technically human-readable, they're not the most fun to create and edit. In the interest of keeping this as non-technical as possible, I'm going to use a very handy utility called Lingon. The latest version (2.1.1) can be found at Sourceforge. It's no longer under active development, but it's working fine in Leopard and Snow Leopard. Grab a copy, put it in either your Applications folder or into Applications/Utilities, and launch it.

You'll see all of your existing daemons and agents in Lingon's sidbar. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, you'll generally only want to edit/add scripts in the "My Agents" section to avoid breaking anything at the system level. Create a new script using the plus button in the upper left, and name it something unique in section 1 of the edit area; I prefix my launchd scripts with my own name, e.g. com.brettterpstra.awesomescript, but anything will work.

Section 2 is where our command goes. In this case, we're running the softwareupdate command, and we want it to automatically download any available updates in the background. We'll use /usr/sbin/softwareupdate --download --all in that field.

Section 3 gives us the various options for running the command. In Lingon's interface they're pretty self-explanatory, so I won't go through each one. We'll just use "At a specific date:," "Every Day," and whatever time works best for you (and your bandwidth allowances). Make sure the enabled checkbox in the upper right is checked, hit the save button at the top, and you've got your own Software Update scheduler. Change the time at will, or use one of the other options to control how often it runs. If you enable this, you'll probably want to disable the automatic checking in Software Updates panel in System Preferences.

There are other possibilities, too. For example, if you wanted to be notified as soon as possible about available updates, you could write a script that ran softwareupdate with the "-l" option (to list available updates without downloading them), parse the output and have it send you an email or a direct message if it found any updates. Run it about every 15 minutes and you could be among the first to know about an update! You can also use the launchd manager (launchctl), or Lingon to disable background processes that other programs have added, but that you don't want running. Whether you're a UNIX user still hanging on to cron, or are just a regular user who wants something besides iCal for scheduling scripts and launching applications, this will hopefully get you started with the 'new' OS X way of doing it.

TUAWManually schedule Software Update 'the OS X way' with launchd originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Brett Terpstra from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 10, 2010 2:00 PM

We just sent out a new release of the Pixlr Editor, this time we focused on the selection tools and updates to filters and adjustments.

Since we have added anti-alias and feather all of the tools, filters, cut/paste, mask etc had to be updated.
Now if you want to make a cutout or filter a specific part it will be smooth sailing.

This is whats new:

- Feather in Lasso and Marquee tool.
- Anti-aliasing in Wand, lasso and paint bucket tool.
- Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast and Threshold adjustments are now shown in real time.
- Cross-process, desaturate and Tilt-shift are much faster.
- A bunch of small tweaks and fixes.

That' all for now :)

Out!

Originally posted by dgtart from pixlr online image editor, on January 10, 2010 1:37 PM

One of the problems I have with Memcache is this cache is passive, this means it only stores cached data. This means application using Memcache has to has to special logic to handle misses from the cache, being careful updating the cache – you may have multiple data modifications happening at the same time. Finally you have to pay with increased latency constructing the items expired from the cache, while they could have been refreshed in the background. I think all of these problems could be solved with concept of active cache

The idea with Active Cache is very simple – for any data retrieval operation cache would actually know how to construct the object, so you will never get a miss from the cache, unless there is an error. From existing tools this probably lies out best on registering the jobs with Gearman.

The updates of the data in this case should go through the same system so you can get serialization (or other logic) for your data updates.

You could also use the same functions updating the data when it expires. This could be exposed as explicit logic, something like expires in 300 seconds, start refresh in 200 seconds as well as automated.

The logic for automatic handling could be as follows – after the key has expired we can purge its value but keep it in cache with “expired” flag. If we can see for the same key we get a lot of requests when it is expired cache could decide to refresh such keys based on available bandwidth.

Another extension to common caching methods I’d like to see is having max_age specified on GET request. In many applications expiration is not data driven but rather request driven. Consider for example posting the blog comment on this blog. If you’re the user who posted the comment you have to see it instantly to avoid bad experience. At the same time other users can continue reading stale data – if they see comment appearing 10 seconds later they will not have any bad user experience.

Finally I think Active Cache could be very helpful handling write back scenarios. There are many cases when there is a lot of updates happening to the data – counters, last login, scores etc which do not really need to be reflected in the database instantly. If cache itself “knows” how to update the data you could define the policies on how frequently the data object needs to be synced to database.

I’d like to hear some feedback if you think such concept would be helpful for your applications and if you think there are existing tools and technologies which can be used to conveniently build things like this.

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Originally posted by peter from MySQL Performance Blog, on January 10, 2010 11:27 AM

From a recent Next New Networks photoshoot.

Above: Meg Allan Cole, Amber Ettinger, Andrea Feczko, Mark Douglas, Alan Kaufman, Michelle Deforest, and Daisy Edwards.

I’m sure we’ll put out glossier versions of all of these (and there are tons more), but I really like the way these photos look unretouched.  All photos by Jared Roessler.

Full Flickr photoset.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on January 10, 2010 9:35 AM

My parents’ new puppy.

I’ve asked them to name her ‘Ridonkulous’.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on January 10, 2010 8:57 AM

Designed by David Pearson, whom you may remember from this cover.

(via caustic cover critic)

Originally posted by ry from Modcult, on January 10, 2010 6:58 AM