randomwalks/dj

I just updated my PubSubHubbub Wordpress plugin to work with multi-user installations of Wordpress and also verified that everything still works with version 2.9.1 of Wordpress. If you haven’t installed the plugin yet, I encourage you to check it out.  It’s the fastest and easiest way to realtime enable your Wordpress blog. I’ve now had over 1,200 downloads of the plugin and I’d be stoked if you added it as well. You can grab the latest version at:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/

As always, please let me know if you have any issues with the latest version.

If you’re curious what I changed, it turns out one of the secrets to making your plugin MU compatible is to register any of the settings you want to use.  This forum entry proved to be the solution I needed.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this post about PubSubHubbub is a good place to start.

Hope you’re having a fantastic weekend.

Originally posted by Josh Fraser from Online Aspect by Josh Fraser, on January 23, 2010 4:22 PM

There's so much going on in Talk week to week that we almost can't keep up. If you're in the same boat, here's a small selection of topics and responses that have piqued our interest this week.

Introduce Yourself!

[©iStockPhoto/nmaxfield]

"This might be a good thread to suggest that Serious Eaters post at least something about their locale on their profile page. I for one find it interesting to see where some of the commentary is coming from..." —gutreactions

Sharing — How Do You Deal With It!

"@dbcurrie: as a server, I never (and trained others to do the same) brought extra forks automatically unless I overheard the discussion that the dessert(s) would be shared, and never asked, either, so the orderer would not be pressured into sharing. I always had extra forks at the ready, and often asked the orderer if they wanted a second dessert brought at that time. It's horrible to be pressured into sharing by your companions, let alone your server!" —Cary

Eating in Class?

"I can't even stand listening to people I know and love chew loudly, let alone a stranger." —deetroitMI

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot

"Definitely not Hitchhiker's. Tea, Earl Gray, hot, is the drink of choice of one Captain Jean Luc Picard, captain of the USS Enterprise, played by sexy man and recent knight Sir Patrick Stewart." —thedilettantista

Pattern Recognition

Appliance/Gadget Advice
Ice-Cream Maker Recs »
Giada's new Cooking line at Target »
KA Pro 600 6-qt: advice? »
I got a meat grinder! Now what? »
Power of the Hood: Question for the Appliance Geeks! »
Do you sharpen your own knives? »
Using a pizza stone »
Le Creuset mailing list? »
Favorite KA Stand Mixer Recipe? »
Spice mill? »
New spritz maker: need recipes »

What to Do With...
Unripe, peeled avocado »
Sliced pork belly »
Sunchokes »
36 eggs left in the car overnight »
Beef cheeks »
Oats »
Pouched salmon »
Elk meat »
Milk chocolate chips »
Root vegetables »
Sea salt »
Goat's brie »

Where to Eat or Shop...
Japan »
Hot chocolate in Florence, Italy »
Chicago: What pizza should I eat? »
Winterlicious events in Toronto »
Food shopping road trip »
Philly: Near Sofitel »
Philadelphia Center City Restaurant week! »
Casual vegetarian in Downtown Seattle »
NYC: Talk of the Town, 1/15–1/22 »

Food Shopping Road Trip!

"I'd stock my pantry: (why does it sound like you live near me...)

"Asian - black soy, black vinegar, xiao shing wine, sambal oelek, jaggery/palm sugar, Mae Ploy (sweet chili), Nam Pla (fish sauce), dried shrimp, hoisin, black bean paste, dried rice/tapioca sheets, noodles (wheat/rice/bean thread), tamarind paste...

"Penzey's - I'm so lucky I live right near one! Go nuts. I love the BBQ 3000 and I just picked up some szechuan peppercorns. I'm not too big on their "sprinkles" or things that have salt added, so I just head toward the straight up herbs/spices.

"Latino - soda! Moles, hot sauces (love Valentina lately)... jeez, what *can't* you get? If they make their own tortillas, buy & freeze.

"Polish - I love jarred stuff from here: ajvar, pickled anything, other condiments.

"Italian - sausage, sausage, sausage... and cheese. And risotto. And olive oil. And some nice canned tomatoes. Oh... the possibilities." —keltrue

I Got a Meat Grinder! Now What?

"Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie is a must. Keep everything very cold. Pate de campagne and English pork pie are great things to make which do not require stuffing. Have fun, the way you cook is forever changed." —NWcajun

If You Could Be Known for One Recipe, What Would It Be?

"Why on earth would anyone want to be known for one recipe, when being an all around reliable good cook would be better?..."

—whoot

[I think a lot of folks here probably are all-around good cooks. At least that's the impression I get reading Talk every week. —AK]

Going to Japan

"I'm with Cassaendra—make sure to try lots of ramen and other noodles since there are regionally specific ways of preparing them. also while in Tokyo and Kyoto you should go to a large department store (any department store) and head for the basement. most of the large, multilevel department stores in big cities have massive grocery stores in their lower levels, with every type of delicious, authentic food your heart could desire. much of it is already prepared, deli-style, and you just have it packed in a box...." —asianpersuasian

Point, Counterpoint: Grown-ups and SpaghettiOs

Thanks for the video link, winternutt!

"Actually, NOBODY should eat spaghettios...." [lists nutrition information] —CJ McD

"Meekly raises her hand and says quietly "I still eat spaghetti o's" and then hides her face in shame....." —Martini Me

Happy birthday to Gator Pam (and Chiffonade)!

"Thank you all for the birthday wishes. Dinner was fun and yummy. I'll post a review of what all we had..." —Gator Pam

[And here's that review...]

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on January 23, 2010 2:00 PM

[ by way of ]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on January 23, 2010 12:54 PM

via www.scoreboardgourmet.com In case you've never bought bread from the Fairway bakery, here's a great reason to start...Fairway Football Bread. SG loves it, and loves their marble rye too. They're happy to slice it for you. Great for sandwiches. SG just had roast beef, yellow picadews, avo, lettuce and butter on the delicious bread. Hey, that's a recipe. We don't do that.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 23, 2010 12:47 PM

A year or so ago, I thought I’d create a monthly email newsletter to update people on projects I’m working on, positions I’m hiring for, things I’ve written elsewhere, etc., but I never got around to it. So I’m giving it a shot again.

I’m also going to include some component that goes beyond shameless gratuitous self-promotion and is actually useful to readers—or at the very least, entertaining—but I haven’t decided what yet. But if you’d like to be part of the early, experimental SpiersList newsletter, you can sign up here.

If it sucks, you can always unsubscribe.

[SpiersList sign up]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on January 23, 2010 12:20 PM

Apple has hardcoded the Finder to open files without extension in Terminal when they are executable and otherwise TextEdit.

Starting with Snow Leopard you can however use Michel Fortin’s Magic Launch ($14) to alter the behavior. It can also be configured to open the same file type with different applications based on location, content, or similar.

Originally posted by Allan Odgaard from TextMate Blog, on January 23, 2010 11:46 AM

An update to our post last night – Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International. Facebook says they’ll be giving Harman Bajwa his /harman vanity URL back shortly:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Mike. We made a mistake in this instance and are in the process of returning the username to Mr. Bajwa. To be clear, the move was not driven by monetary reasons, rather trademark protection. We strive to protect trademarks from ’squatters’ — those who try to take protected terms with no legitimate claim. The message Harman received was along those lines, but clearly not applicable. Once we understood the nature of our error, we moved quickly to resolve it. We want to apologize to Mr. Bajwa for being overzealous in our efforts and regret the disruption to his account.

Here are the Facebook guidelines on trademark squatting. Which is fine for Nike or coca-cola, but definitely a grey area for trademarks that are also legitimately in use as people’s names. I’d pay to see the emails that must have been flying around Facebook this morning. But they did the right thing here, and that’s all that matters.

Update: An interesting twist I missed before. Harman set up a Support Harman facebook group last night after our initial post. Mark Zuckerberg joined it:

Originally posted by Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, on January 23, 2010 9:09 AM

by Kevin Frank

Originally posted by finn from Modcult, on January 23, 2010 7:40 AM

What states might look like if, as with Congressional districts, their borders were periodically redrawn to reflect population changes. Click for larger version.
 

This map is by Neil Freeman from FakeIsTheNewReal.org. It's based on a division of the country into 50 state units with more-or-less equal population -- 5 to 6 million apiece -- and preserving existing boundaries where possible. (As with the new state of "Missouri.") I love many of the other state names -- Lincoln, Joaquin, Tombigbee. My childhood home would have been along the border of Coronado and Mojave. In a reapportioned Senate each of these units would have two votes.

In the same spirit of "zero-based governance," also consider H. Res. 1018, introduced this week in the House of Representatives, calling on the Senate -- please! -- to drop the recent aberrational practice of applying the filibuster to all legislation, and instead to reserve it for rare, emergency use. Or, as its authors put it, "Requesting the Senate to adjust its rules to reflect the intent of the framers of the Constitution by amending the Senate's filibuster rule, Rule 22, to facilitate the consideration of bills and amendments." Worth a shot! 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from James Fallows, on January 23, 2010 3:02 AM

The sign pointing to Steve's Authentic Key Lime Pies in Red Hook, Brooklyn. [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

According to the American Pie Council, National Pie Day is tomorrow, January 23rd.** So, naturally, we have pie on the mind. We're curious: what's the most popular kind of pie? Of course, you can't really go wrong with pie, no matter the filling. It's pie! If happiness were a food, it would probably be pie. Tell us your favorite after the jump.

**Not to be confused with Pi Day, the celebration of the symbol denoting the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (aka 3.14). Naturally it's celebrated on March 14th, usually with pie and math geekage. Yeah, it's confusing, but at least this "problem" ends in overconsumption of pie.

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on January 22, 2010 3:00 PM

During the past couple months, the Knol team has been steadily adding improved tools to help you create better knols. Most notably, we've greatly expanded the number of embeddable objects to help you make your knols more graphical and interactive. We've been excited by the many uses we're seeing, and today we have one more to add to the list: PicApp.

We think it's important for a publishing platform like knol to provide people with the best possible tools for expression, so we've quietly added a large number of new embeddable objects for maps, docs, spreadsheets, forms, slideshows, presentations, videos, gadgets and more. Embeddable objects help you make better knols. For example, our equation object helps you add richly formatted mathematical expressions right in your knols. We really liked the cleanly embedded equations in this knol from the Public Library of Science. Similarly, our calendar object enables you to easily share details about upcoming dates, like swing dance lessons in Oregon.

Even with all these embeddable objects, there's still more to do. For example, one frequent complaint is that it is still difficult today to find appropriately licensed, high-quality imagery to include in your articles. To help solve this problem, we've worked with PicApp to add 10 million high quality stock images via our improved picture picker. The new picker enables you to search for creative and editorial images from PicApp's comprehensive, high-quality stock imagery repositories such as Getty Images. The service and use of the images is free.

Below is a snapshot of a sample search using the PicApp search API.


The feature just launched last month, and several authors have already made use of this new capability to strengthen their writings. For example, this knol about Gary McKinnon uses images found via PicApp, along with embedded videos, and even a feedback form to get input from the audience.

We hope you enjoy the image picker and other new embeddable objects. As always, you can read our release notes for a full list of new features.

Posted by Cedric Dupont, Product Manager

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on January 22, 2010 12:56 PM

Pets on PAPER, our recently resurrected blog series, features reader-submitted pictures of their pets sitting on top of, reading, playing with and generally doing their thing with a copy of PAPER Magazine.

What's your name? Cristoff, aka Moonbear
How old are you? Almost two and a half
Where do you live? On Hester Street in Chinatown
Who do you live with? My mother Nicole, auntie Emily and uncle Michel
What are your pastimes? Eating treats is my favorite thing to do! I can climb on top of the kitchen cupboard, and sneak my way into where my treats are and feast. That usually gets me in big trouble. I'm really, really into bags: paper, plastic, purses, backpacks, all of them! They are fun to hide in but I usually don't get to keep them for very long. When I really feel like being alone, I hide under my uncle's bed with all of his shoes. Another thing I like to do is escape into the hallway, I usually don't get very far but I always hope to see the two dogs that live on the first floor. Chewing on my auntie Em's color pencils is always fun. I also like to stare at myself in the big black mirror -- I like what I see!  Oh, oh and I have a birthday party every year, it's the best!
What's your favorite cover of PAPER? The Penelope Cruz October '06 and the Kelly Osbourne May '05 covers.

Want to see your pet on PAPER? Submit a photo/photos, plus answers to the above questions, to vip@papermag.com.

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 22, 2010 12:14 PM

Did you know Google's Chrome browser already has 5 percent of the global browser market? That it's bigger than Safari?

And are you aware that, despite your (or your designer's) disinclination toward it, Internet Explorer 6 still commands roughly 12-15% of the space?

These figures--and the specifics of browser traffic on one's own website--matter, a lot, when new projects get underway. Google's 5% market share means it's officially a player in the browser wars and not just a side project. That means adding it to QA plans and considering some of its innovations, like proper use of HTML5.

At the same time, the continued prevalence of IE6, however sad, means that cutting-edge site design still needs to degrade gracefully to support the many corporate web surfers that can't upgrade their browsers. Certain b2b or enterprise-positioned websites may have an even greater percentage of IE6 traffic, just as sites with a more academic or creative bent often have an outsize share of visits using Safari.

All of which just serves as a reminder that multiple browser testing and compatibility remain crucial in web design in 2010. The same hurdles the industry faced when balancing Netscape and IE in 1999 exist today, perhaps even more so. Expect the cries for standardized code to get louder this year and next as the market shifts and fragments. And in the meantime, don't forget to give your site a proper run-through. Or four.

Originally posted by David Wertheimer from aiaio - the Alexander Interactive blog, on January 22, 2010 11:25 AM

1. The last show at Jeffrey Deitch's Wooster Street gallery will be new works by Shepard Fairey.  It opens May 1, 2010, and will feature "portraits of trailblazers in art and culture" including Woodie Guthrie, Debbie Harry, the Dalai Lama, and political activist Aung San Suu Kyi. (via ArtInfo)

2. Tommie Sunshine explains the current state of music in America:  "The closest thing we have to dance music right now is Lady Gaga (who I fully support), Black Eyed Peas (who are senseless thieves) and Ke$ha (who is for 12-year-olds and housewives)."

3. Celebrate a night of music and art with Shindig vs BangOn! at the Living Theater (21 Clinton Street) tomorrow night, January 23, with 5 o'clock Heroes, Noyesno plus DJs and photos by Last Night's Party. Tickets are $15.

4. Steve "Good Night Mr." Lewis hearts Brooklyn:  "It's now a viable community, maybe even more viable than New York.  Brooklyn doesn't have to apologize for itself anymore.  It's the real deal and, in many ways, it's more cultural than Manhattan for a downtown crowd."  (via The Downtown Diaries)

5. Giant Step presents a special performance by Daniel Merriweather tonight, January 22, in the Florida Room at the Delano hotel (1685 Collins Avenue) in Miami and Gilles Peterson next Friday at Littlefield (622 Degraw Street) over in Mr. Lewis' fave hood.

6. Here's the full schedule of music events at Never Records (Broadway and 4th Street).

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 22, 2010 11:14 AM

Excellent, must-read piece by MDJ’s Matt Deatherage, reprinted at Macworld:

Analysts: you may only get one shot at asking questions, so I’m here to help you with the do’s and don’ts of the conference call. I don’t have all the answers, but I haven’t missed one of these calls in nearly 14 years, so I have some experience. Our interests are temporarily aligned here—we all want more information from Apple, without spooking the executives so they run away from your questions. Here’s the basic map for the January 2010 conference call.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 22, 2010 10:56 AM

I thought I had big news: Dooce has signed a development deal with HGTV. How cool is that?

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 22, 2010 10:53 AM

Great post from David Hornik at VentureBlog after spending time with Procter & Gamble at their "Innovation Outreach Venturing Day."

To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium -- it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information -- but as good as it is for timely information, the P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand building and advertising side. For those things that Proctor & Gamble thinks are most interesting and important, they do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook.

Worth reading in full.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 22, 2010 10:52 AM

As you know, I’ve taken a recent interest in pitching awards. (Let me pull that knife out of my back. Huh, Cardinal red, who knew?) During this year’s BBWAA meeting, the voting procedures were discussed and changed. The discussion that surrounded it brought up an interesting topic: Are modern relievers being shortchanged by the process?

There’s nothing like speaking up at your first meeting, so I proposed an award just for relievers, since the job description is the same. It’s hardly a new idea - we’ve had things like the Rolaids Award for years - but this would be an official award, equal to the Cy Young and MVP.

Just take a look at how many times Mariano Rivera has received even a single vote for the Cy. Surprising, isn’t it? Perhaps Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, and others will have no trouble getting into the Hall of Fame, but Lee Smith and Bruce Sutter sure have.

Jayson Stark does a better job explaining why this is a good idea than I ever could, so read his Rumblings on the topic. If nothing else, I hope we can add the category in next year’s IBAs.

And let me say for the record that while I hate the save rule and the management style it’s caused, I fully agree with Jayson on naming this award after Jerome Holtzmann.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on January 22, 2010 10:48 AM

Want to give your boo some jewelry by the time the 14th rolls around, but does love-themed jewelry bring up horrible tv-commercial-jingles? There's no way in hell that someone's not going to feel pangs of lovey-doveyness on Valentine's Day with this carved, sterling-silver Stump ring from Digby & Iona. And in true Shel Silverstein form (a la "The Giving Tree"), the ring comes with a carved heart that you can customize yourself with a pair of initials. Excuse us while we barf from cute overload all over our desks. Buy here for $210, please.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashion News RSS- Refinery29.com - View Models and Glamour Shots, on January 22, 2010 10:30 AM

For me, this is a lot of fun, but as a refresher, here's how these rankings are calculated. First, we find each team's expected revenue, based on their third-order winning percentage, and how big their market is. Then, you divide that by what each team's marginal revenue should have been, had they won exactly as many games as their payroll would have predicted. (Draft pick value is also factored in, so the worst teams get slightly more credit than the vanilla mediocre teams.) The end result is PER—Payroll Efficiency Rating—which tells us how well each team spent their payroll dollars. via www.baseballprospectus.com Skip to the end to see the best and worst run teams of the decade. Spoiler: The worst team traded my wife's favorite player this morning.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 22, 2010 9:50 AM

From Amazon’s Kindle Development Kit terms:

Active content will be available to customers in the Kindle Store later this year. Your active content can be priced three ways:

• Free — Active content applications that are smaller than 1MB and use less than 100 KB/user/month of wireless data may be offered at no charge to customers. Amazon will pay the wireless costs associated with delivery and maintenance.

• One-time Purchase — Customers will be charged once when purchasing active content. Content must have nominal (less than 100 KB/user/month) ongoing wireless usage.

• Monthly Subscription — Customers will be charged once per month for active content.

So for free and one-time-charge apps, there’s a monthly limit of 100 kilobytes of bandwidth. Go over that and the developer has to start paying the bill. As point of reference for just how small 100 KB is, the Daring Fireball RSS feed at this moment is 115 KB. With gzip compression, it shrinks to 36 KB. So even with compression, a free or one-time-charge Kindle app could only download the DF RSS feed twice per month without going over.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 22, 2010 8:47 AM

Self-explanatory. [WoW]

Originally posted by Dodai from Jezebel, on January 22, 2010 8:30 AM

The cover to Batman and Robin #7 by Frank Quitely

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Truth Box!, on January 22, 2010 8:19 AM

New York

Lomography Sample Sale
What: Cult-camera line Lomography is celebrating their 1-year store anniversary with a weekend sample sale. Check out discounts of 10%-50% off their fun cameras, including the Diana F+ (now $47.50) or the Horizon Perfekt, a selection of books, bags, accessories, and more.
When: Saturday, January 23, from 10:30 to 9 p.m., and Sunday, January 24, from 11 to 7 p.m.
Where: Lomography Gallery Store, 41 West 8th Street, (between 5th and 6th avenues) 212-529-4353.

Cutler and Gross Pop-up at Selima Optique
What: Selima Optique's Bond Street boutique is playing host to an exclusive pop-up for British import Cutler and Gross. For a limited time, shop a large selection of their coveted vintage frames and sunglasses as well as new collections.
When: Opens today, Friday, January 22
Where: Cutler and Gross Pop-up at Bond 07 by Selima Optique, 7 Bond Street, (between Broadway and Lafayette streets); 212-343-9490.

Click through for more NYC and online sales after the jump...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashion News RSS- Refinery29.com - View Models and Glamour Shots, on January 22, 2010 8:00 AM

‘The Pee-wee Herman Show’ is now playing in LA.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on January 22, 2010 6:32 AM

Right on the heels of fans' enthusiastic baked tributes to Lady Gaga comes the latest display of adoration. Wednesday night, at her Radio City Music Hall concert, WWD captured fans showing their love by dressing themselves in outfits inspired by the Lady. From Kermit hats to platinum-blonde hair bows, it was a full on Gaga-thon which will only continue, we expect, as her concerts extend into the weekend. Got a rad costume of your own? Send a photo to the New York Times to see your own Gaga-fied visage up on the Internet. (WWD)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashion News RSS- Refinery29.com - View Models and Glamour Shots, on January 22, 2010 6:15 AM

There are more than 6,000 bars in New York City. About 200 of them get regular press. This column is about the other ones. Robert Simonson, a journalist and blogger of the drinking life, takes a peek inside Gotham’s more anonymous watering holes, one by one.

Click the image above to view the full photogallery.

[Krieger, 1/21/10]

It's twilight outside O'Connor's bar on Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn. It's always twilight inside. The upper reaches of the narrow, high-ceiling room seem to fade into a dark night sky up near the old tin ceiling, and the lighting below is never too bright. Which is a good thing. People don't come in this old place to see things clearly or shine a spotlight of their life's progress. People come here for a respite from the daily grind, to be reminded that some bars still serve the same escapist purpose they did in the 1930s, when O'Connor's opened. A beer, a tune from the jukebox, a temporary loss of memory, a bit of weightless, nonconfrontational rapport with your fellow man.

Most of the men lining the bar on a recent evening kept their winter coats on, as if shielding themselves from the cold, cold world. They made for a slightly shabby crew, but longtime bartender Chris served each with respect, alacrity and good humor. You don't hear much about the owner at O'Connor's (who is not named O'Connor—he died a few years back), but everyone likes Chris. He looks like a figure clipped from an old photograph of a 19th century bar: tall, fit, bald and with a moustache. He hustles when, given the clientele (nobody's in a rush to go), there's no need to, and if he gives you the wrong change for the weirdly eclectic juke box (The Waterboys, Hank Williams, Syd Barrett), he makes up for it but shoving in some dough himself.

There's a line of old, beaten booths, some composed half of wood, and half of what looks like couch cushions or the back seat of a Chevy. But the regulars seem to prefer the equally beaten metal bar stools, so as to be closer to Chris and the booze and the soundless televisions. I was pretty sure some of the patrons didn't exactly have a home to go back to. Others who did, like a young husband who was expecting a child soon, weren't missing the hearth too much. When he finally got up to go, he announced his intention to hit Freddy's Bar, and that he would be back tomorrow at the usual time.

Conversation varied, but never died. One man walked in with the huge news that the new LIRR Atlantic Avenue Terminal Pavilion had finally been unveiled. "It's bee-ootiful!" he declared, as if he had just seen the Aurora borealis. An old, bent man on the way to the bathroom instructed this writer to not "give up the ship." There were amused remembrances of the youngsters who had to be instructed on how to use the rotary phone in the bar's old wooden booth. (O'Connor's has to pay the phone company to keep it.) And the owner was mocked for his plans to spruce up the place and add a kitchen and back party room, "so nice people won't have to see this dirty bar." He's also responsible for the TVs, apparently, and the new awning outside. Why would anybody buy a place like this with the idea of "fixing" it? It's bee-ootiful.
—Robert Simonson

Originally posted by Lost City from Eater NY, on January 22, 2010 6:00 AM

Remember way back when, last year, when I posted about this fabulous new BurdaStyle pattern I'd found, Heidi? I made three of them in quick succession and promised you pictures.

I finally got a battery charger for my camera (and then immediately found mine, in the last box unpacked after the move, isn't that always the way?) and so here is my first Heidi attempt:



Notice how deep the neckline is? Yeah, me too. So I wear a long-sleeved black tee under this one. After this one I altered the pattern to not be as wide and deep, and I still have more of this fabric (glad I bought a ton of it, I love it and it's now sold out!) so I'm probably going to re-make the bodice. It goes together quickly (despite being lined) so that won't be the arduous slog it would usually be.

Oh, and I changed the tucks in the original pattern bodice to darts.

And look! It has pockets!



The original pattern had very shallow pockets, but I deepened them by about three inches, which seems to work just fine. They go together very easily.

Here's the back:



For some reason it was really hard to take sharp pictures of this particular print ... I wonder why? And I'm sorry it looks so baggy -- I adjusted my dress form WAY down to take some pictures of some smaller dresses with a friend, and she's still not back to her usual fighting form. The dress itself is fairly fitted.

As you can see, I didn't even bother to try to match the print. It's giant scribbles!

Next week I'll show the other two versions!

(Sorry, I don't know where this week went. Okay, I do know -- it was trapped in busyland, with two writing deadlines, a couple of big meetings, and torrential California rain which caused minor flooding in our garage [WHICH IS STILL BETTER THAN SNOW!]. Next week, well, it doesn't look better, busy-wise, but it doesn't look like I need to start cadging ProVigil, either.)

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on January 22, 2010 5:20 AM

The latest issue of Five Dials, a free PDF-only literary magazine published by Hamish Hamilton, features reprints of tributes to David Foster Wallace given by his family and friends shortly after his death in late 2008. Included are tributes by Zadie Smith, Amy Wallace-Havens (DFW's sister), George Saunders, and Don DeLillo. The introduction is from A Supposedly Fun Thing:

Finally, know that an unshot skeet's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.

Note: if you enjoyed this issue of Five Dials, please sign up for their mailing list. (thx, david)

Tags: David Foster Wallace

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 22, 2010 4:28 AM

A schematically awesome FDL, The Engineer's Guide to Drinks. Thanks Peacay.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Coudal Partners Blended Feed, on January 22, 2010 3:32 AM

There are techies (if you are reading this blog you are almost certainly one of them) and there are mainstream users – some people call them “normals” (@caterina suggested “muggles”). A lot of people call techies “early adopters” but I think this is a mistake: techies are only occasionally good predictors of which tech products normals will like.

Techies are enthusiastic evangelists and can therefore give you lots of free marketing. Normals, on the other hand, are what you need to create a large company. There are three main ways that techies and normals can combine to embrace (or ignore) a startup.

1. If you are loved first by techies and then by normals you get free marketing and also scale.  Google, Skype and YouTube all followed this chronology.  It is startup nirvana.

2. The next best scenario is to be loved by normals but not by the techies. The vast majority of successful consumer businesses fall into this category. Usually the first time they get a lot of attention from the tech community is when they announce revenues or close a big financing. Some recent companies that fall in this category are Groupon, Zynga, and Gilt Group. Since these companies don’t start out with lots of free techie evangelizing they often acquire customers through paid marketing.

(My last company – SiteAdvisor – was a product tech bloggers mostly dismissed even as normals embraced it.  When I left the company we had over 150 million downloads, yet the first time the word “SiteAdvisor” appeared on TechCrunch was a year after we were acquired when they referred to another product as “SiteAdvisor 2.0″.)

3. There are lots of products that are loved just by techies but not by normals. When something is getting hyped by techies, one of the hardest things to figure out is whether it will cross over to normals. The normals I know don’t want to vote on news, tag bookmarks, or annotate web pages.  I have no idea whether they want to “check in” to locations.  A year ago, I would have said they didn’t want to Twitter but obviously I was wrong. Knowing when something is techie-only versus techie-plus-normals is one of the hardest things to predict.

Originally posted by chris from cdixon.org - chris dixon's blog, on January 22, 2010 1:35 AM

(via Design You Trust)

Originally posted by finn from Modcult, on January 22, 2010 12:42 AM

On an unrelated email thread this morning I got to thinking about how I quantify the Flickr engineering team, and counting things in general.

Depending on how I’m counting I tend to place the Flickr engineering team at ~20 people. In that group I include everyone on our team who writes code (including HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Java, Perl, Python, C, C++, XUL, or Objective-C). Additionally I include our operations team (aka sysadmins aka “service engineering”), our “tech support” team (technical customer care/qa/researchers), and various folks with “manager” in their title.

(a more traditional count would probably put the Flickr engineering team at 5 application/backend engineers, 4 front-end engineers, and 4 technical manager types.)

Which got me thinking about a new metric, the RPE or “roughly per engineer”. Mostly it’s a useful thought tool (for me) to think about what sorts of things scale up with economies of scale, and what doesn’t. Here are a couple of quick RPE metrics I pulled tonight.

• We’ve got roughly 2.5 million Flickr members per engineer.
• Roughly 200 million photos per engineer.
• 28 user facing pages.
• 23 administrative pages.
• 20 API methods, though only 7.5 public API methods.
• 80 API calls per second.
• 250 CPUs.
• 850 annual deploys.
• 16 feature flags.

Photo from siliconmonkey

Originally posted by Kellan from Laughing Meme, on January 21, 2010 9:35 PM

Don’t know about you, but I’m excited about the new season premiere of LOST coming up (Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 9PM EST, in case you didn’t know). Designer Ty Mattson of Mattson Creative can’t wait either. In fact, while designing an invite to the premiere at his home, he came up with several cool retro-style poster designs. I’d love to see some of these available as actual printed posters.

---

Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Design, Lost, poster design, posters, TV, Ty Mattson

Originally posted by Ward Jenkins from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on January 21, 2010 8:57 PM

Clever idea: you can measure the amount of ink required to print different typefaces simply by writing them out with ballpoint pens. The pens themselves become the usage graph:

Tags: infoviz   typography

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 21, 2010 2:36 PM

What do you say to a recent law-school graduate?

"A skinny double-shot latte to go, please."

Laid-off lawyers, cast-off consultants [The Economist]

Law school - Law - Education - United States - Pre-Law Student Resources

Originally posted by David Lat from Above the Law, on January 21, 2010 10:25 AM

Economics professor Daniel Johnson makes accurate Olympic medal predictions using a handful of indicators that are unrelated to sports.

His forecast model predicts a country's Olympic performance using per-capita income (the economic output per person), the nation's population, its political structure, its climate and the home-field advantage for hosting the Games or living nearby. "It's just pure economics," Johnson says. "I know nothing about the athletes. And even if I did, I didn't include it."

For the upcoming 2010 games in Vancouver, Johnson predicts that Canada, the US, Norway, Austria, and Sweden will end up with the most medals. (thx, brandon)

Tags: 2010 Winter Olympics   economics   Olympic Games   sports

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 21, 2010 10:15 AM

I think Will Leitch is a good writer and all, but I don't know why Hyperion thinks he's qualified to write a book about the war on terror.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Alex Balk, on January 21, 2010 9:51 AM

Jason Paul lives off of Craigslist and is documenting the whole thing on his blog.

What does that mean exactly? I have made some ground rules that I will be living by over the year. Here they are:

- I will start with $2,500 that I've saved during college
- I will have a car, a phone, a computer and cameras to document the trip
- I am not allowed to live out of my car
- I am not allowed to live with someone I know for longer than a week at the beginning of each city
- I am allowed one large bag containing clothes and a few staple foods
- I am not allowed to initiate contact with someone unless it is through an online interaction

This means, put simply, I will find jobs, housing, friends, food and other necessities entirely via Craigslist.

Tags: Craigslist   Jason Paul   weblogs

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 21, 2010 8:58 AM

They’re sending an offer to frequent book purchasers, with the offer that if they buy a Kindle and decide they don’t like it, they can get their money back and keep the Kindle. Funny thing is, the offer expires next week, a day before Apple’s press event.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 21, 2010 8:33 AM

-> See more from Workerman --> Make No Sound

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on January 21, 2010 8:02 AM

By Garry Kasparov

Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind
by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky

In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a period of more than five hours. The four leading chess computer manufacturers had sent their top models, including eight named after me from the electronics firm Saitek.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The New York Review of Books, on January 21, 2010 7:00 AM

Oh my goodness, look at this amazing hobbit house--and it's for real. A Welsh man built it himself, along with his father-in-law, and now he lives there with his wife and two little sons. What a magical place to grow up! (Can you imagine ordering a pizza there?)

(Via Lace & Tea)

Originally posted by Joanna Goddard from A CUP OF JO, on January 21, 2010 4:00 AM

After four and a half years I've decided to leave Federated Media. It has been the most rewarding work experience of my life. It wasn't always easy, but it was always worth it.

From the early, depressing days of machines falling over, Mike Arrington emailing, stuff just not working right, numbers off, and unhappy sales people—to seeing really smart people have a look at us and say, "Yes, I'll join" and then watching as these people did some brilliant work. It's pretty much everything you could hope for when joining a company on the ground floor.

When you are a founder you have something like 1/4 or 1/5 of the company under your control. The four of you are sitting in a room just pounding away on your parts, trusting everyone is doing what they need to be doing.

Slowly as people join you give up a bit here and there, pretty soon you're at 1/10 or 1/20. I don't mean actual authority, I just mean you have to trust people with some of your stuff for the company to be successful. You can't do it all, and if you can find people who will own a bit of your 1/5 then you can focus on just the bits that really need your attention.

Without a phone call from John Battelle I would have missed out on an incredible experience. I cannot thank him, or the co-founders: Chas Edwards, Jennifer Charette, and Ken Snider enough for trusting me with the engineering portion of this company.

Very recently as we were restructuring, I realized that most of my original 1/5 was pretty much covered by smart, competent people who are just killing it. And that's when the startup itch returned. Getting back to the little room, thinking about big plans, forgetting what it's like when the servers are falling over…

I'll have more on this later. For now you can go ogle the obligatory, enigmatic landing page designed by my wife and partner for the new company here: http://simpleform.com/ and I'll have more about what I'm up to in the coming month.

I am also open to the following: beers, lunch, consulting of all types (I did put an engineering team together that stayed together for over four years), and any and all advice from people who've done this before me.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 20, 2010 10:05 PM

After four and a half years I've decided to leave Federated Media. It has been the most rewarding work experience of my life. It wasn't always easy, but it was always worth it.

From the early, depressing days of machines falling over, Mike Arrington emailing, stuff just not working right, numbers off, and unhappy sales people—to seeing really smart people have a look at us and say, "Yes, I'll join" and then watching as these people come in and do some brilliant work. It's pretty much everything you could hope for when joining a company on the ground floor.

When you are a founder you have something like 1/4 or 1/5 of the company under your control. The four of you are sitting in a room just pounding away on your parts, trusting everyone is doing what they need to be doing.

Slowly as people join you give up a bit here and there, pretty soon you're at 1/10 or 1/20. I don't mean actual authority, I just mean you have to trust people with some of your stuff for the company to be successful. You can't do it all, and if you can find people who will own a bit of your 1/5 then you can focus on just the bits that really need your attention.

Without a phone call from John Battelle I would have missed out on an incredible experience. I cannot thank him, or the co-founders: Chas Edwards, Jennifer Charette, and Ken Snider enough for trusting me with the engineering portion of this company.

Very recently as we were restructuring, I realized that most of my original 1/5 was pretty much covered by smart, competent people who are just killing it. And that's when the startup itch returned. Getting back to the little room, thinking about big plans, forgetting what it's like when the servers are falling over…

I'll have more on this later. For now you can go ogle the obligatory, enigmatic landing page designed by my wife and partner for the new company here: http://simpleform.com/ and I'll have more about what I'm up to in the coming month.

I am also open to the following: beers, lunch, consulting of all types (I did put an engineering team together that stayed together for over four years), and any and all advice from people who've done this before me.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 20, 2010 10:05 PM

Every time I explain something in the Modern Perl book under development, I have to change the way I think. I've spent a decade writing Perl 5, testing Perl 5, writing about Perl 5, editing writings about Perl 5, and thinking about how to do all of those. I still learn new things, but I haven't been a novice for a very long time.

Mature projects need the perspective of determined and intelligent novices to help find gaps in tutorials and documentation. It's too easy to assume that the mental model experienced users have is obvious for novices. After all, the design is clearly an effective design for the problems it has to solve.

The problem is two-fold. First, the novice may have very different problems and assumptions when approaching the software. Second, the expert mindset may be implicit: the result of experience developing the software, not approaching the problem fresh.

Any good documentation or tutorial intending to give novices practical experience must explain essential pieces of the model while avoiding too much explanation or gratuitious details. That's difficult to do in technical writing. (That's why most technical writing is passable at best and often atrocious.)

This is a long introduction to explain how I've spent a lot of time thinking about concepts that novices need to understand to take advantage of modern Perl. There are several:

• Context: how it works, how to identify it, and how to take advantage of it. This includes both void/scalar/list context but also boolean/integer/string/numeric context.
• Using perldoc: to review syntax and builtins as well as modules
• Creating, managing, and using modules: including the packaging, testing, building, and deployment systems
• Installing CPAN modules: especially with tools such as local::lib and, perhaps, a local CPAN mirror
• Using the Perl 5 analysis tools: not limited to testing modules, Perl::Tidy, Perl::Critic, and B::Deparse

I thought about including "References and data structures", and I may do so. I left out OO on purpose. The same goes for most syntax; those are all learnable. This list tends toward the philosophical on purpose. These are necessary to understand Perl 5 and to take advantage of it (especially for further learning).

If a novice learns these five things, he or she is in good position to use Perl 5 effectively for almost any task. Leave out any one and you've added friction and frustration. Understand them and you can do almost anything in Perl 5.

Originally posted by chromatic from Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog, on January 20, 2010 4:32 PM

Shared by sippey
This is exactly why I had a delicious, juicy burger today for lunch.

Not all calories are created equal, says Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham...humans get many more calories from cooked food than from raw.

Cooked food is more digestible than raw food. And not just by a little, but by a lot. Learn how to control fire, use it to cook your food, and you free up extra energy -- plus time that would otherwise be spent masticating. Spend that time hunting, and your metabolic equation gets even better.

I'm sure this is well known within the raw food community but I had no idea. There's more in a talk Wrangham did in Seattle and his book, Catching Fire.

Tags: books   Catching Fire   food   Richard Wrangham

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on January 20, 2010 3:35 PM

Guillermo Esteves just made my day. You can even select the text as it goes by.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 20, 2010 1:52 PM

Cool Hunting profiles Tom Tom Magazine, "a print publication for, about and made by female drummers."

CH: What is it about drumming that makes it such a male-dominated pursuit? And why do women drummers need more support?

MA: Well, drums require a certain degree of physical stamina. They're big and they're heavy. They have lots of moving parts. In my opinion, women could use all the encouragement they can get because we're just not encouraged to do it, and we're not promoted when we do in the same way that guys are. If you pick up a drum magazine, there aren't any women in there. And women should play the drums because it's an empowering instrument. It's therapeutic, it's powerful and it requires a lot of confidence—all of these are great skills to have.

I grew up playing the drums, and now with two girls I want nothing more than for them to have kits to bang on. (Now, to find the space and the sound insulation...) There was nothing better over the holidays than watching the five year old pound away to Beatles Rock Band, keeping the beat and doing her best to keep up with the track.

The magazine looks fantastic; I'm especially fond of the one question, one drummer feature, which includes this bit from Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss:

We got a lot of media coverage the ten years I was in Sleater-Kinney. We were very careful about how we were photographed … we made sure we weren’t portrayed as weak, or helpless because we weren’t. We never liked sitting down in photos, or looking passive. Photographers often wanted us to be playful and sweet, and to style us in clothes that weren’t ours like we were dolls. I’m not sure guy bands get that same kind of treatment. We wanted to look like the Stones, to be cool, to be tough, to be heroes. Why don’t women get to be heroes?

Subscribed.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 20, 2010 1:03 PM

We've wrung hands before over the seeming disinterest of the "progressive" left in reducing automobile dependence. But it was still a shock to see Daily Kos enshrouded in advertising for Auto Innovation, a project of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

A self-described "leading advocacy group for the automobile industry on a range of public policy issues," the purpose of the Alliance seems mostly to sell the public on how keen carmakers are on using technology to advance the cause of environmental stewardship (though the mythological "green" car of the future, whatever it is, remains tantalizingly out of reach). The group's presence on Kos makes the usual MSM buy look subtle.

So what's the angle here? Are car manufacturers afraid of losing the lefty base? Aren't car-ad bereft Free Republic readers just as interested in innovations like soy seating foam?

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog New York City, on January 20, 2010 12:46 PM

If you're part of that minority that is in denial about Lady Gaga's world domination, get this: hot on the heels of the Lady Gaga Barbie, some new crafty souls have taken to preserving her image on cookies. Using humble cookie canvases and a couple dollops of colored frosting, these bake-meisters make Home Ec hip with these buttery paeans to some of the Lady's most iconic looks, like the Kermit dress and her bloody MTV Awards get-up. Sad story, though: The chefs were planning on giving the cookies to the singer herself, but couldn't snag tickets in time. Anyone out there with a kind heart, a sweet tooth, and two extra tickets? (ONTD)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashion News RSS- Refinery29.com - View Models and Glamour Shots, on January 20, 2010 12:45 PM

Not all calories are created equal, says Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham...humans get many more calories from cooked food than from raw.

Cooked food is more digestible than raw food. And not just by a little, but by a lot. Learn how to control fire, use it to cook your food, and you free up extra energy -- plus time that would otherwise be spent masticating. Spend that time hunting, and your metabolic equation gets even better.

I'm sure this is well known within the raw food community but I had no idea. There's more in a talk Wrangham did in Seattle and his book, Catching Fire.

Tags: books   Catching Fire   food   Richard Wrangham

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 20, 2010 12:07 PM

Curious about how to brew in your latest toy?  There’s a site for that.

Posted in training Tagged: brewing, coffee

Originally posted by Mike White from ShotZombies.com, on January 20, 2010 11:44 AM

Just a quick roundup of some recent conversations I've been having around the web:

• Fast Company interviewed me about applying the lessons of Web 2.0 to government. I'm always happy when I can mention my love of New York City and pop music while also talking about the importance of using the web for civic purposes. They also published this Rennio Maifredi photo of me, which my Twitter friends agree is very creepy.

• A One-on-One interview for the New York Times' Bits blog, discussing a bit about my work at Expert Labs while working in a reference to LL Cool J.

• Reddit did an "Ask Me Anything" thread where people could ask me whatever they want. I answered a bunch of the questions in text, and a video of me answering the most popular ones will be up shortly.

• The Morning News' interviewed me as well, and I must have been in a mood at the time, because it kind of ends with some uncharacteristic ranting.

• And CNN just published an editorial of mine where I talk about the importance of the decentralized web. What if we had all decided to rely on AOL Keywords for 911 emergency services?

Hopefully you're not all too sick of me after that; I'll try to share some of the recent presentations I've made at events I've been speaking at recently as well — I'm very excited about a lot of the conversations I've gotten to participate in lately.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on January 20, 2010 10:54 AM

I’ve made a few updates as requested for the Fan Projections.

- The Fan Projections now only require 15 votes to be eligible. This added an additional 200 or so players into the mix and I imagine that most MLB regulars and some not so regulars should have Fan Projections now.

- There’s now an UZR column in the sortable projections.

- You can now export the Fan Projections to either Excel or CSV files in the projections page.

Originally posted by David Appelman from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 20, 2010 10:29 AM

(Cross-posted with an update from the Google Lat Long Blog)

In the wake of the devastating Haiti earthquake, aid organizations have been hard at work on the ground and citizens around the world have pitched in to help in whatever way they can. On the Geo team, we've been looking for ways we can help relief efforts using our mapping tools. Last week, thanks to our partner GeoEye, we published updated satellite imagery of Haiti in Google Earth and Google Maps which illustrated the devastation and current conditions on the ground. This data was made available for public consumption and also to assist relief efforts including those by many UN organizations and the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies.

With the hope of furthering awareness and relief efforts, we arranged for a collection of the Port-au-Prince area at even higher resolution (approximately 15cm) to complement the existing imagery. Here are some examples of the kind of detail this new dataset can convey:

click to see full-size

These images were gathered on Sunday (January 17). You can currently view the imagery in Google Maps in Satellite mode. It will also be available via the Google Maps API and in Google Map Maker. As of this morning, this high-resolution imagery is now available as the base imagery in Google Earth (all previous imagery of Haiti will be included in the Historical Imagery feature) and has been published in the Haiti Earthquake KML layer. We're also making this imagery directly available to relief organizations.

We've also updated the Haiti Earthquake KML layer (download for Google Earth) with additional information, including more imagery from GeoEye, Digital Globe, and NOAA, as well as earthquake epicenters and other maps. Aid groups can also download Map Maker data as well.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior GIS Strategist

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on January 20, 2010 10:14 AM

Damian Kulash of the band OK Go has published a tremendously informative, frustrating, and important open letter about the reason that the band's videos can't be embedded on sites like this. OK Go rose to prominence on the strength of its viral Internet videos, but now EMI, its label, won't allow embedding for its videos, because no embedding is possible. Kulash is clearly frustrated by this impasse, and his ruminations on how the industry got to this place and where it might go are required reading:

The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn't pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn't get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won't let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist's glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we're - unbelievably - stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It's like the world has gone backwards.

Let's take a wider view for a second. What we're really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We're stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who'd want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we've got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It's like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.

Open Letter From OK Go, regarding non-embeddable YouTube videos

Previously:

• Boing Boing: Shrimp on treadmill -- no, not a new OK Go song.
• Boing Boing: Musician: DRM screws my fans, so it screws me

Originally posted by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing, on January 20, 2010 9:04 AM

Up In The Air (2009)

• Meh.

• There wasn’t anything really that different about this movie. I found it pretty cliché in general.

• Seriously, though, there is nothing more cliché than a non-committal guy growing up and wanting to commit.

• I appreciated the fact that many small roles had recognizable actors (for example Zach Galifianakis, J.K. Simmons).

• It could be because I watched in the wrong setting, but I wasn’t emotionally tied to this movie in any way.

• Wasn’t bad… just wasn’t that great.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from lather rinse repeat, on January 20, 2010 7:56 AM

One of The Times’ recent graphics, “A Peek Into Netflix Queues,” ended up being one of our more popular graphics of the past few months. (A good roundup of what people wrote is here). Since then, there have been a few questions about the how the graphic was made and Tyson Evans, a friend and colleague, thought it might interest SND members. (I bother Tyson with questions about CSS and Ruby pretty regularly, so I owe him a few favors.)

Most readers are probably interested in the interactive graphic, although I will say that we also ran a lovely full-page graphic in print in the Metropolitan section, which goes out to readers in the New York region. That graphic had a lot of interesting statistical analysis – in fact, it would have been nice to get some analysis in the web version, more on that later – but for this I will focus mostly on the web version. If there are questions about the print graphic, I will make sure I get Amanda Cox to try to explain cluster analysis to me again.

First is the data itself. Jo Craven McGinty, a CAR reporter, was in contact with Netflix to obtain a database of the top 50 movies in each ZIP code for every ZIP in the country. That’s about 1.9 million records. The database did not include the number of people renting the movie – just the rank. (We would have loved to have it, but Netflix said no. Understandably, it would have given competitors a perfect map of their market penetration.) The raw data looked like this:

We decided to focus on cities, rather than the nation as a whole, for a few reasons.

First: Most of the interesting trends occurred on a local scale – stark differences between the South Bronx and Lower Manhattan, for example, or the east and west sides of D.C. – and weren’t particularly telling at a national scale. (We actually generated U.S.  maps in PDF form that showed all 35,000 or so ZIPs, but when we flipped through them, with a few exceptions, we found the nationwide patterns weren’t nearly as interesting as the close-in views.)

Second: Matthew Bloch’s mapping framework is highly optimized, but it’s not necessarily equipped to handle changing 35,000+ polygons between 100 different movies as fast as would be necessary – no one likes to use a scrubber that’s slow to react.

One solution to the too many polygons problem is  scaling up the data to wider geographies, such as one based on the first 3 digits of ZIP codes.  But in this case, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t have the total number of renters in each ZIP — we only had the rank.

So, we decided on a dozen cities, determined mostly by population but also geographic distribution, which is why Minneapolis, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco are on the map, but not Houston or Philadelphia. (This apparent injustice was not lost on commenters from those cities.) We made individual GIS shapefiles of each city, then merged them into a single shapefile using ArcView’s ‘merge’ tool.

This reduced the number of shapes down to about 5,000 or so, well within Matthew Bloch’s “still super fast” threshold.

Still, the hardest part about this graphic was designing the interface. We wanted readers to be able to find a given movie quickly, but a search box didn’t really work visually. We also wanted to give readers an idea which movies were most popular and which were most critically acclaimed.

I mocked up at least ten versions. None were any good. The challenge was navigation. As a user, I wanted to be able to see one movie in a bunch of different cities, fast, or I wanted to see a bunch of movies in one city just as fast. So there are two major navigation elements – cities and movies – but the map itself still needed to be the visual focal point of the graphic.

In the end, graphics director Steve Duenes and deputy Matt Ericson came up with a sketch based on elements of my previous mockups:

which I turned into a more refined Illustrator mockup:

We tweaked this until it resembled what’s now online. It’s a complicated interface, but I don’t know if it could be any simpler.

Once we settled on a design, there was still a lot of work to do. We needed to get all the movie thumbnail images, the Metacritic ‘Metascores’, the links to The Times’ reviews and the first few sentences of the reviews themselves. We did this mostly by writing scripts. Both Metacritic and Netflix have great search-engine optimization, so just Googling a film title with the word ‘Netflix’ or ‘Metacritic’ generally gives you what you want in the first search entry:

We wrote a Ruby script that parsed the Google search results page for each movie, which typically contained the Metacritic score and Netflix ID. We used hpricot, a HTML-parsing Ruby plugin to pull out the Netflix ID and Metascore of any film.With the Netflix ID, we know the link to the thumbnail image is

"cdn-0.nflximg.com/us/boxshots/large/" + netflix_movie_id + ".jpg"

We used a similar technique to fetch links and content of The Times’ review, and  then filled in any missing movies by looking the information up by hand.

As for the making of the map itself, the concept is very simple. For any movie, each ZIP code is assigned a color based on its rank. If it’s not in the top 50, it’s not shaded. That’s about it. To optimize the map, Matthew Bloch did a bit of database work, giving each movie title a numerical ID instead of using its full title, since it’s faster to parse through numbers than text.

The result was the graphic that’s online now. We were able to get a lot in, but we still had to leave a lot out, such as different ways to shade the maps other than by movie (i.e. where people rented movies that were nominated for Best Picture or shading each ZIP code based on a calculation of the Metacritic ratings for its top 50 movies, which we did in print for the New York region), but it would have made the interface even more complicated.

Don’t get me wrong – leaving things out is critical in interactive graphics, where the default temptation is to dump all the data you have behind an interface. It’s hard to say no to that, because readers are going to find a lot of things with raw data that you might have missed. (Such as the interesting island of Andrews Air Force Base).

It’s something we know we can do better; I don’t think anyone would disagree that tidbits of analysis are usually more meaningful than massive streams of raw data. It’s nice to get both in if you can. We’re working on it.

Kevin Quealy has been a graphics editor at the New York Times for almost two years. He has a Master’s degree from the Missouri School of Journalism and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Gustavus Adolphus College. He has previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Originally posted by Kevin Quealy from The Society for News Design, on January 20, 2010 6:50 AM

Americans are cramming their kids full of snacks and that may not necessarily be a good thing.

Between 1977 and 2002, the percent of the American population eating three or more snacks a day increased to 42 percent from 11 percent.

Also, this is a great use of quotation marks:

Kara Nielsen, a "trendologist" at the Center for Culinary Development, a brand development company in San Francisco, cites the proliferation of activities, from soccer to chess club to tutoring sessions, that now fill children's afternoons.

That's actually not a "real" "job", is it? (via @megnut)

Tags: food   parenting

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 20, 2010 6:09 AM

A preview of the 1970 season....look how down in the dumps the Yankees were. Amazin'

In 1969 the Yankees drew 1,067,996 spectators, the smallest number since World War II, and more than a million fewer than the Mets. Even in their last "pennant-winning year, 1964, the Yanks were outdrawn by the Mets, and since their descent into the second division they have hardly been noticed. With the departure of Mickey Mantle a year ago, the club of Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio was left with only one outstanding player. Pitcher Mel Stottlemyre, who has won 20 games in three of the last five seasons but who has about as much glamour as Harold Stassen.


Poor performance and the absence of shiny names has badly eroded fan appeal. The so-called "limousine" crowd, the New York businessmen who sit in corporation boxes and cheer as if they are afraid of dripping mustard on their $20 ties, was once a basic reason why the Yankees were considered a cold, distant plutocracy by many average fans, but they bought tickets. Not so long ago the Yankees used to be inundated each year with requests for season boxes. Now the demand has gone down drastically as the limousines head for Shea Stadium. Something similar has happened with tourists in New York. Fewer out-of-towners are coming to cheer for the visiting team against the hated Yankees. "It used to sound as though there were more people cheering against us than for us," says Yankee Vice-President Bob Fishel. "That doesn't happen anymore."


The decline of the Yankees has not been solely a result of the Mets' presence, even though there is a lingering feeling that New York is essentially a National League city. Fishel, who has been the Yankees' public-relations director since 1954, blames it on a lack of aggressiveness. "We missed the boat between 1958 and 1961 when we had the city to ourselves," he says. "We did not try hard enough to attract the kids who had been fans of the teams that had left New York.

The Yanks Are Coming, Or So They Hope - 04.06.70 - SI Vault

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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 20, 2010 3:55 AM

I’ve got a little series of advice/guidance/wisdom/hubris for interaction design students

I’m very much involved with Adaptive Path’s hiring processes, and as such I see a ton of resumes, peruse a scad of portfolios, and discuss futures with hordes of students soon to be graduating from a range of undergrad and graduate programs. As a “hiring manager,” what interests me most is your work. Do you have the skills to pay the bills, and how comfortable and confident are you when talking about your approach to solving problems?

Among my biggest frustrations is having students walk me through bullshit school projects. Bullshit school projects are those which are solipsistic (solving a problem that a limited set of college students face), and/or uninteresting, and/or overly formal, and/or simply lack meaning. If I’m going to be hiring you to work with clients to help address their challenges, I need to be comfortable that you have an ability to engage in real-world problems.

I think much of the blame for these projects lays at the feet of the teachers, who have ensconced themselves in the academy in order to avoid the real world. But students have a responsibility to demonstrate what they can do in a way that someone who doesn’t know them can understand their thought process, their approach, and their talents.

Perhaps the single best way a student can ensure she is doing relevant work is to take internships at companies. I met one undergrad who has worked with IDEO, Frog, and Nokia, and the work she showed me was largely drawn from these experiences, and gave me the confidence that she could deliver real-world design.

I’m not saying students need to think corporatist. One of my favorite student projects is the redesigned BART kiosk by Ljuba Miljkovic and Ben Cohen. BART didn’t ask them to do this (in fact, it demonstrates that BART unwisely spent money on a user interface so poor it could be vastly improved by two smart college students in a semester), but for a class project they realized it offered a remarkable opportunity. It hit on a real-world pain point (as anyone who has purchased a BART ticket knows), and demonstrated a thoughtful and practical approach.

And it doesn’t need to be a project that appeals to a big audience. As part of his MFA work at CCA, Matthew Baranauskas has done a set of tangible computing projects to create new tools to help mentally challenged folks express themselves in a variety of creative ways. While the number of people who could use these tools is quite limited, by addressing a space very different from his normal context, Matthew demonstrates his skills and vision in such a way that it’s clear how he would approach professional work.

So, if you’re an interaction design student, please don’t do yet another mobile app that helps you and your friends coordinate getting beers (or yet another web app that monitors a building’s energy consumption), or some context-free formal exploration of gestural interfaces, or something that simply demonstrates that you’ve learned a set of methods. Identify an interesting problem *in the world*, and attempt to solve it.

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on January 19, 2010 7:21 PM

I've always been such a big admirer of Barney Frank, on so many different levels. So I was genuinely surprised, really shocked to see this statement he put out tonight that is just an embodiment of fecklessness, resignation, defeatism and just plan folly. The gist of his point is that that's it for health care reform. If a few Republican senators will come across the aisle and help maybe it will happen. But if not, that's it. Amazing. Just amazing.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 19, 2010 6:42 PM

It's one of these annoying conceits that at key moments people write editorials and posts on 'what the president should say', 'what the president should do'. But with the recognition that it's an annoying tradition, let me take a stab at it. Not because there's any reason he should listen to me but because it's a convenient way to explain what I believe is a sensible way forward.

In the spirit of bipartisanship the president admires, let's go back to President Bush in 2006 and 2007. The Republicans and the president were hit with a staggering defeat in November 2006 in an election fought overwhelmingly on public dissatisfaction with the Iraq War. The president said that he'd heard the people's message and proceeded to dramatically expand the US troop commitment in Iraq.

What you think of the surge is a separate point. But the example is an instructive one. Especially because it's an example that President Obama could follow with a far better argument that he is listening to the message of the people than President Bush ever had with Iraq.

The central problem the president is laboring under is the fact that the economy remains in a shambles. And unemployment remains at a toxic 10%. Beyond that though the Democrats are suffering because they have shown voters an image of fecklessness and inability to deliver results at a moment of great public anxiety and suffering. Big changes provoke great anxiety, especially in such a divided society. But Democrats are not just having dealing with the ideological divisions in the country -- which is what the Tea Party movement is about. They're also losing a big swathe of the population that is losing faith that the Democrats can govern, that they can even deliver on the reforms and policies they say are necessary for the national good. As I wrote earlier, this is about meta-politics. If the Democrats, either from the left or the right, walk away from reform, they will get slaughtered in November. They'll get it from the people who want reform, from the people who never wanted reform and from sensible people all over who just think they can't get anything done.

What the Democrats -- and a lot of this is on the White House -- have done is get so deep into the inside game of legislative maneuvering, this and that 'gang' of senators and a lot of other nonsense that they've let themselves out of sync with the public mood and the people's needs.

The president needs to find way to say, we've heard you. We've gotten so focused on working the Washington channels to get this thing done and we need to be more focused on the public's mood and urgency. Well, we've heard you. We're going to stop playing around and get this thing done. And then we're going to work on getting Americans back to work. We know the urgency of the moment and we know you expect results.

I've written this quickly. I would not consider it a polished version of anything the president should say. But I think the gist is right. This is the biggest testing time the president has yet faced. It could be a key turning point in his presidency. Over the next forty-eight hours the president is going to come under withering pressure to walk away from reform. It'll come from the left and the right, and in various different flavors. It will come from shocking directions. The president is going to have to find a way to say, No. We're doing this. He'll need to stand down a lot of cowardly and foolish people in his own party. He'll have to stand down the vast and formless force of establishment punditry and just say, No. We're going to do this. And he's going to have to make the case to the public, not necessarily convince all those who have doubts about health care reform but make clear that he thinks this is the right direction for the country and because he thinks it's the right thing to do that he's going to make it happen.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 19, 2010 6:41 PM

The midseason Television Critics Association press tour, which ended yesterday, was the busiest, strangest, most newsworthy tour in my 13 years of coming here - and an all-timer even for the veterans who've been coming far longer. Most of this 11-day odyssey in the world of television was dominated by a man who never even appeared on the tour: Conan O'Brien, who was on the verge of gaining his freedom from NBC as the tour was coming to an end.

Originally posted by Alan Sepinwall/The Star-Ledger from Alan Sepinwall on TV, on January 19, 2010 5:53 PM

It definitely looks like it's all down to the House. So our Brian Beutler talked to House Dems tonight before their caucus meeting (which must have been fun, right?) and it seems like quite a few of them are ready to toss health care reform and the Democratic majority on the bonfire and just watch them burn. Read Brian's report.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 19, 2010 5:25 PM

The most interesting of several infographics related to The Beatles is the first one depicting the declining rate of collaboration within the band gleaned from songwriting credit data.

(thx, bryan)

Tags: infoviz   music   The Beatles

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 19, 2010 5:21 PM

Message of the day to all Dems, Coakley, Rahm, Celinda Lake, national Dem committees, Axelrod, whoever, whatever: Shut the *$%& Up! I don't know how else to say it. I'm watching MSNBC and hearing all the key players dumping on each other. As I've said, the Coakley campaign seems to have been run just terribly. And that's just the beginning of it. But really, with all that's at stake, the White House political office left this to Coakley, unsupervised? Really? I just have very little patience hearing all the people who are by definition all to blame have an argument about who's most to blame.

What I'm seeing -- and this isn't just based on public comments but our reporting behind the scenes -- is that there's a lot more energy going into dodging blame for this unforced error of galactic proportions than there is going into the real issue: closing the loop on the health care bill. Which is the only issue in policy terms and political terms. That's it. Everything else is water under the bridge.

And the key is this: this nonsense arguing is very reminiscent of 6 months of chatter and wasted negotiations that prevented this from getting done in the early summer instead of letting it get to this point. Which was n-e-e-d-l-e-s-s.

Jon Chait has this right. The Dems need to relax, get to work, pass the bill and move on.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on January 19, 2010 3:07 PM

I can't get this out of my head, so you'll suffer too; the General was a crusader in the Atlanta civil rights movement  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 19, 2010 2:45 PM

Filed under: Rumors, iTunes, Music

We've covered speculation about Apple's acquisition of music-streaming service Lala in the past. General consensus has been that Apple is looking to use the service in a future version of iTunes, allowing users to stream their own music libraries to their computers, iPhones, and iPod touches from a remote server, thus freeing up memory space on the devices themselves.

Citing "a wide variety of insider sources," Michael Robertson, former CEO of mp3.com, claims that this speculation is correct. He says that instead of moving to a subscription-based model, Apple will indeed leverage the technology and resources of Lala to allow users to stream their music libraries from a remote server.

It will be interesting to see if Robertson and other analysts' speculations are correct. There are certainly some technological hurdles to surmount in letting millions of iTunes users stream billions of songs - my own music library is nearly 40 GB, which is twice the default data allowance on MobileMe - but licensing issues seem to be even thornier. While Robertson says that "...because users are in possession of the materials no new licenses are required from the record labels or publishers," for streaming content, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your friendly neighborhood RIAA will disagree. However, if Apple can indeed make this streaming service happen, it will be a huge win for them, and more importantly, for us users.

[Via electronista]

TUAWRumor: Lala acquistion to create "online locker" for music originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Chris Rawson from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 19, 2010 2:30 PM

Country: USA Circulation: about 250.000 http://www.courant.com/ (to bad the Web site's not as nice) --> Abduzeedo

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on January 19, 2010 2:21 PM

Sorry for the downtime, folks. What I thought would be a simple backup-and-restore to clean up our database from spam and malicious code, turned out to be a process that took far longer than intended. Thanks for your patience!

The good news is that it is far easier to leave comments and contribute to the discussion here on the site. I’ve deleted all the site’s user accounts and implemented Disqus for comments. You can now log in with your Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID accounts, or even just leave a comment as a guest.

Alright, back to business!

---

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags:

Originally posted by John Martz from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on January 19, 2010 2:10 PM

Of course Andy Warhol made a TV show for MTV called Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes.

The whole thing is a perfect snapshot of everything to love and hate about the 1980s: the art bull market, Manhattan, fashion's hardworking LGBT backbone, and the nature of celebrity in the dawn of the fractured and streaming media world we live in now.

The link above has pointers to downloads of footage from three shows. (via fimoculous)

Tags: Andy Warhol   MTV   TV   video

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 19, 2010 2:07 PM

Back in July we posted about the remarkable project that WNET (PBS of NYC) put together with Tierra to launch 50 sites in ten months using one CMS, WordPress.

Dan Goldman and Jamie Trowbridge who headed up that project, were kind enough to present a case study of how it was all done, at the recent WordCamp NYC:

Originally posted by Raanan Bar-Cohen from WordPress Publisher Blog, on January 19, 2010 1:26 PM

About two weeks ago, Six Apart release Movable Type 4.33, a release that was coordinated with the worldwide release of Movable Type 5.01 and Movable Type 4.27-ja for Movable Type 4 users in Japan.

I urge any customers planning to stay on Movable Type 4 for the near future to take another look at the Movable Type 4.33 Release Notes and to pay close attention to the following improvements:

Security Fixes

There are two significant security fixes that were included in Movable Type 4.33. The first is the closing of a series of vulnerabilities in the Content Management System (the Movable Type administrative user interface) where user privileges weren’t properly checked. Until Movable Type 4.33, unprivileged users could access several functions of the CMS by typing their URLs directly.

We also enhanced the Asset Manager, XML-RPC Server, and Atom Server to make them check the content of image files that are being uploaded. If image files contain JavaScript or HTML unexpectedly, they can be used to attempt to exploit flaws in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7 that could lead to security issues on the visitor’s PC or on servers to which that visitor has access.

New Configuration Directive

Related to the Asset Manager changes discussed above, Six Apart implemented a new configuration directive: AssetFileExtensions concurrently in Movable Type 4 and 5. This is a feature that has been requested by many Movable Type system administrators, and we want you to start getting the benefits of it immediately.

Oracle Database Fixes

There are fixes for three long-standing bugs affecting Movable Type Enterprise’s Oracle database implementation that users of that database should adopt as soon as possible. Some customers have been offered some or all of these fixes as patches to previous versions of Movable Type 4. But Oracle users should definitely consider adopting the entire set of improvements that’s contained in Movable Type 4.33. (See FogBugz Cases 103405, 103406, and 103418.)

Asset Manager Fixes

In addition to the Asset Manager security fix mentioned previously, Movable Type 4.33 fixes a logic error in the Asset Manager which occurs in some cases when an entry doesn’t have any assets associated with it.

Template Linked to File Fixes

For Movable Type users who have their templates linked to files in the file system, Movable Type 4.33 fixes a long-standing problem that caused the first change to a template to be lost. If you use templates that are saved as files, we strongly recommend that you upgrade your installation.

Movable Type 4.33 Release Notes Are Constantly Being Updated

Six Apart is making changes to the Movable Type 4.33 Release Notes that are intended to allow you to understand the significance of the fixes we’ve implemented in 4.33. This includes publication of a substantial portion of each FogBugz case that resulted in significant changes to Movable Type 4.

Known Issues in Movable Type 4.33

In addition, we are providing unprecedented access to known issues in Movable Type 4.33. These issues are provided by our Support team and broken down into three categories:

• Resolved: Issues where fixes exist that have not yet been bundled into a formal Movable Type release.
• Resolved but Needs Testing / QA: Issues where a fix has been submitted by a Movable Type user, but Six Apart Support and QA haven’t yet tested.
• Unresolved: Known issues that we need help solving.

We hope that providing this information will allow us to iterate Movable Type Open Source faster, will allow you to participate in the problem solving process, and will make everybody more productive with Movable Type.

Originally posted by Dave Aiello from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on January 19, 2010 1:07 PM

Well, not so much The Beatles as The Quarrymen, a band formed by John Lennon and some schoolmates that was the precursor to The Beatles. (via @brainpicker)

Tags: photography   The Beatles

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 19, 2010 12:55 PM

Thought writing a LISP interpreter in JavaScript would be fun. Beat me to it: http://code.google.com/p/javascript-lisp-interpreter/

Originally posted by erik from eriksmartt.com/blog, on January 19, 2010 12:38 PM

A short, funny interview with Venus' and Serena's mom:

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on January 19, 2010 11:16 AM

Pets on PAPER, our recently resurrected blog series, features reader-submitted pictures of their pets sitting on top of, reading, playing with and generally doing their thing with a copy of PAPER Magazine.

What's your name? Biko Little Bear Sample, Biko for short
How old are you? 11 Weeks
Where do you live? In Soho/Tribeca
Who do you live with? With my mom and my dad and my step brother, Reynard, who is an 8-year-old Chihuahua.
What are your pastimes? Right now my main focus is playing. I play a lot. Like all the time. Chewing is a big one. I also enjoy digging. I like to follow up the digging with burying items with imaginary dirt with my nose. I also like stealing shoes and clothing and then scurrying under the sofa to chew them where no one can get to me. Fetch is good too. Barking at animals on TV is fun. When I am not playing I am sleeping. And if you pet me while I'm sleeping I will definitely growl at you.
What's your favorite cover of PAPER? Prolly Lily Allen eating an In-and-Out Burger! Ruff!

Want to see your pet on PAPER? Submit a photo/photos, plus answers to the above questions, to vip@papermag.com.

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 19, 2010 11:03 AM

An interesting project from Microsoft Office Labs: Ribbon Hero.

Ribbon Hero is a concept test for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel 2007 and 2010, designed to help you boost your Office skills and knowledge. Play games (aka "challenges"), score points, and compete with your friends while improving your productivity with Office.

It was developed in conjunction with Dan Cook, author of the Lost Garden blog (I've blogged about him before). Cook has a great post up about how game mechanics can help users learn systems that support "more complex interactions than typing a word in a plain vanilla search box."

If you start with the idea that users are learning machines, all our observations about usability tests snap into place. Of course, people stumble when they use an application for the first time. They don’t understand the interface because it is new to them. And users will stay at that inexperienced level if we do not make an attempt to teach them how to improve. We’ve diagnosed a burbling baby as a hopeless invalid, blind to the fact that babies grow, learn and flourish.

Worth reading in full. And if I were running Office on Windows I'd be playing the game.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 19, 2010 10:29 AM

I love participatory media, collective knowledge systems, user-generated content and the like, and spent much of my life and career participating in them and making them. As I say in this post from 2005, the internet is built on a culture of generosity -- the first web page I built was when I noticed there was no page on Nabokov and realized I could just make one. Amazing! And it dawned on me that every other page on the web -- this was 1994 -- had come about for the same reason. Then the dotcom thing happened. And then Web 2.0 brought us back to the web's roots -- communication and contribution. That is why I love participatory media and must defend it.

There are so many things awry with Jaron Lanier's recent manifesto in the Wall Street Journal (excerpted from his book) that I hardly know where to begin. The self-proclaimed "father of VR" believes that people who don't get credit or compensation for their work are lesser, humiliated beings without dignity -- the work in question being such activities as saving a bookmarks to delicious, correcting spelling errors on Wikipedia, exposing one's listening history on Last.fm, and the like. As the "father of VR" and a musician who has had various other occupations he has a particular lens through which he is viewing our latter-day participative media. He seems not to have built participative web sites, hailing from a Mondo 2000-era view of the world. For a non-participant all these new types of media would naturally appear to be what he calls a great "global mush". To discerning users of social media, you see what you deliberately select. The point is to filter out the noise, the mush. Obvious, no?

Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate. These types of software and platforms are specifically designed for conversation and contribution. That is the point. There is no final product such as a book, movie, song or album. This method of creation would be pretty poor for designing a space shuttle or an ad campaign or writing a biography. There is no final product to which the epithet "design by committee" might apply. He is misconstruing goals.

He also appears to believe that quality is a zero sum game. A bunch of amateur musicians singing in someone's living room take nothing away from Lady Gaga.There's a lot of tilting at windmills in this excerpt. I've never heard anyone assert, as he appears to think everyone in the digital arena is constantly asserting, that "collectives make the best stuff" -- quite the opposite. Everyone agrees that 99% of everything is crap, and no one is claiming Wikipedia's entries are better written than those of Charles Lamb or Edmund Gosse in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (my favorite). But really, who cares? By sharing my (admittedly crappy) snapshots on Flickr, I'm not claiming to be Margaret Bourke-White. And my sister *likes* to look at photos of my dog. Who am I hurting? Should I charge a penny to look at my photo? Do I need a photo credit? No. If someone other than my sister admires my cute dog, they are welcome to do so for free.

Additionally Lanier does not understand that people do things for reasons other than bolstering their egos and making money. You shouldn't need a motivation or justification to correct spelling or factual errors on Wikipedia -- a certain desire for orderliness, good grammar, or truth should be sufficient. Those that enjoy correcting spelling and grammatical errors online -- I do -- are they thereby "robbed of dignity" as Lanier would have it? Of course not.

I could go on. I haven't touched on his claims that we're destroying innovation, or his implication that people who license their work with Creative Commons licenses or give their music away for free insist that everyone do the same. The open source software movement that could be mentioned, the free culture movement, or, frankly, any of the other many great things that are taking nothing away from auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard, and even Jaron Lanier. They're safe from the incursions of amateurs like you and me. Of course the word "Amateur" comes from the French word "to love". Good enough reason for me to participate. And you?

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on January 19, 2010 10:18 AM

All of this is to say that, used as a noun in this particular way, in this old New York Jewish way, the word "Appetizing" has almost vanished completely from its native city. Ess-A-Bagel's removal of the word from their signage is only the latest erasure. Its demise follows the vanishing of appetizing shops and the people who went there for their lox, kippers, and kapchunkas, people like Jill's grandfather, a whole generation of New Yorkers who are disappearing and taking their vintage words with them.

via vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com

I have wondered about this use of "Appetizing" and now I know, just in time to watch it disappear.

Originally posted by Alaina from alaina browne lives here, on January 19, 2010 9:59 AM

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can't write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

Enabling computers to understand language remains one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence. The goal of a search engine is to return the best results for your search, and understanding language is crucial to returning the best results. A key part of this is our system for understanding synonyms.

What is a synonym? An obvious example is that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing in most circumstances. If you search for [pictures developed with coffee] to see how to develop photographs using coffee grinds as a developing agent, Google must understand that even if a page says "photos" and not "pictures," it's still relevant to the search. While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we're very proud of the system we've developed at Google.

Our synonyms system is the result of more than five years of research within our web search ranking team. We constantly monitor the quality of the system, but recently we made a special effort to analyze synonyms impact and quality. Most of the time, you probably don't notice when your search involves synonyms, because it happens behind the scenes. However, our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

An example of a bad synonym from this analysis is in the search [dell system speaker driver precision 360], where Google thinks "pc" is a synonym for precision. Note that you can still see that on Google today, because while we know it's a bad synonym, we don't typically fix bad synonyms by hand. Instead, we try to discover general improvements to our algorithms to fix the problems. We hope it will be fixed automatically in some future changes.

We also recently made a change to how our synonyms are displayed. In our search result snippets, we bold the terms of your search. Historically, we have bolded synonyms such as stemming variants — like the word "picture" for a search with the word "pictures." Now, we've extended this to words that our algorithms very confidently think mean the same thing, even if they are spelled nothing like the original term. This helps you to understand why that result is shown, especially if it doesn't contain your original search term. In our [pictures developed with coffee] example, you can see that the first result has the word "photos" bolded in the title:


(Note that because our synonyms depend on the other words in your search and use many signals, you won't necessarily always see the word "photos" bolded for "pictures", only when our algorithms think it is useful and important to bold.)

We use many techniques to extract synonyms, that we've blogged about before. Our systems analyze petabytes of web documents and historical search data to build an intricate understanding of what words can mean in different contexts. In the above example "photos" was an obvious synonym for "pictures," but it's not always a good synonym. For example, it's important for us to recognize that in a search like [history of motion pictures], "motion pictures" means something special (movies), and "motion photos" doesn't make any sense. Another example is the term "GM." Most people know the most prominent meaning: "General Motors." For the search [gm cars], you can see that Google bolds the phrase "General Motors" in the search results. This is an indication that for that search we thought "General Motors" meant the same thing as "GM." Are there any other meanings? Many people can think of the second meaning, "genetically modified," which is bolded when GM is used in queries about crops and food, like in the search results for [gm wheat]. It turns out that there are more than 20 other possible meanings of the term "GM" that our synonyms system knows something about. GM can mean George Mason in [gm university], gamemaster in [gm screen star wars], Gangadhar Meher in [gm college], general manager in [nba gm] and even gunners mate in [navy gm].

Here are screenshots of those disambiguations of GM in action:

As a nomenclatural note, even obvious term variants like "pictures" (plural) and "picture" (singular) would be treated as different search terms by a dumb computer, so we also include these types of relationships within our umbrella of synonyms. Pictures/picture are typically called stemming variants, which refers to the fact that they share the same word stem, or root. The same systems that need to understand that "pictures" and "photos" mean the same thing also need to understand that "pictures" and "picture" mean the same thing. This is something that is even more obvious to a human but is also still a difficult task for a computer. An example of how this is difficult are the words "animal" and "animation," which share the same stem and etymology, but don't mean the same thing in standard use. Another tricky case that is very dependent on the other words in the query is "arm" vs. "arms." Arms might seem like the plural of arm, but consider how it might be used in a search: [arm reduction] vs. [arms reduction]. Google search is smart enough to know that the former is about removing fat from one's arm, and the latter is about reducing stockpiles of weaponry, and that arm/arms are dangerous synonyms in that case because they would change the meaning. These subtle differences between words that seem related is what makes synonymy very hard to get right.

Here are some other examples of synonyms we thought were interesting:

[song words], "lyrics" is bolded for "words".
[what state has the highest murder rate], "homicide" is bolded for "murder".
[himalayan kitten breeder], Google knows that "cat breeder" is the same as "kitten breeder".
[dura ace track bb axle njs], Google knows that "bb" here means "bottom bracket".
[software update on bb color id], "blackberry is bolded for "bb".
[bb cream dark], Google knows here that bb means "blemish balm".
[southeastern usa bb fitness & figure], "bodybuilding" is bolded for "bb."

Lastly, language is used with as much variety and subtlety as is present in human culture, and our algorithms still make mistakes. We flinch when we find such mistakes; we're always working to fix them. One of the best ways for us to discover these problems is to get feedback from real users, which we then use to inspire improvements to our computer programs. If you have specific complaints about our synonyms system, you can post a question at the web search help center forum or you can tweet them with the hash tag #googlesyns. You can also turn off a synonym for a specific term by adding a "+" before it or by putting the words in quotation marks.

Posted by Steven Baker, Software Engineer

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on January 19, 2010 9:51 AM

This post has two goals. One, I want to share with you something amazing; a thing that according to most views of the tech universe should not exist. Two, I want to talk about a coming revolution in application design.

The amazing thing
Imagine Microsoft Office turned into a video game. One where learning a productivity app is a delight. One where the core loop of gameplay involves using and gaining skills in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

It sounds a bit unlikely doesn’t it?

Well, I’m happy to announce the availability of Ribbon Hero, a new download from Microsoft that turns using Office into a game. I’ve been helping the fine folks over in Office Labs with the design and we are all immensely proud that this is getting released to the public. Huge kudos to Jen, Jonas and the rest of the team. CNET calls it "Brilliant".

Go download it now. You can challenge me on Facebook with your elite formatting skills.

The coming revolution
Ribbon Hero, in part, was born from a speech I gave back in October 2007 on applying the design lessons of Super Mario Bros. to application design. I made the following bet:

• If an activity can be learned…
• If the player’s performance can be measured…
• If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
• Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.

Not only can you make a game out of the activity, but you can turn tasks traditionally seen as a rote or frustrating into compelling experiences that users find delightful.

The foundations of user experience design are incomplete
Games offer a very different value proposition than what you get from traditional usability design. The essence of modern UI design is summed up by usability guru Steven Krug’s proclamation “Don’t make me think!” We are taught, as UI designers, as website developers and as software creators that our target user is a shallow dullard. The prototypical user is presented as incapable of reading, barely cognizant of what they desire and are best served by products that offer a least common denominator feature set.

This user model is well supported by empirical data. Sit in on any usability test and your subjects will flail about, click on the wrong things and ignore most obvious visual cues. We assume that users are idiots because we see them behave like idiots whenever we test them.

The results of our current design philosophy are wonderfully simple apps that allow new users to perform one or two universal tasks in as streamlined a manner as possible. These are the Googles, the Twitters and the Diggs of the world. They focus on ease of acquisition and limit their functionality to the 20% of features that serve 80% of the population.

Yet, as applications grow, the “Don’t make me think” philosophy stumbles.

• Users grow. Given the opportunity, new users rapidly become intermediate and expert users.
• Different users, especially skilled users, want to master different tasks. Finding one or two universal tasks that matches all users is nearly impossible.
• New opportunities emerge. As both the developers and the users gain experience with the software, they discover new use cases and tasks that create immense user value. Many developers are faced with the task of either bolting on new use cases or creating entirely new software, fragmenting their brand and user base.

Google Documents is slowly becoming just as much of a usability monstrosity any major text editor (Notepad excluded). Even apps that offer a more limited creative palette such as Mint.com, Ebay and Amazon try desperately to maintain their simplicity. We attempt to leverage pre-existing skills. We carefully layer beginner, intermediate and expert functionality. We use the democracy of split testing to eliminate minority use cases.

Yet, despite the fact that Web 2.0 started with a fresh new philosophy of minimalism and a clean slate, it is rapidly converging on the same frustrating and complex usability solutions found in desktop applications. The current state of the art is missing something fundamental.

Game design focuses on improving user skills
Game design, as applied to application design, brings several powerful ideas to the discussion that are either missing or underrepresented in existing descriptions of UX design.

• Users are learning machines: All users have immense inherent potential to learn and master new skills.
• Exploratory learning is fun: Given the proper environment, users will, of their own free will, explore an unknown task. They will try, fail and then finally gain enough insight that they grok the core problem at an intuitive level. When this moment of mastery occurs, users smile.
• Exploratory learning can be engineered into repeatable systems: Moments of delight and skill acquisition are highly reproducible. All you need is a well designed and balanced system of interconnected feedback loops that helps guide and encourage the formation of new skills.
• Learning in games is both modular and user directed: Once you have techniques for reliably teaching users new skills, you can modularize your application and let users decide what they want, when they want it and how much that matters to them.

If you start with the idea that users are learning machines, all our observations about usability tests snap into place. Of course, people stumble when they use an application for the first time. They don’t understand the interface because it is new to them. And users will stay at that inexperienced level if we do not make an attempt to teach them how to improve. We’ve diagnosed a burbling baby as a hopeless invalid, blind to the fact that babies grow, learn and flourish.

When users play a game, they spend hours first slowly building up basic skills. Then they assemble these building blocks into complex stratagems. Ultimately, they expertly wield the systems of the game like a finely honed tool. By the time the game ends, the player is no longer the same beginner that started. The design of the game directly helped improve their mental model of the world in a profound and measurable manner. The whole time, the player is having fun.

To me, the rich lessons of past 30 years of modern game design are lessons about human potential. Let’s start with the assumption that people are amazing. We have built pyramids. We have created clockwork contraptions that move mountains and measure the universe. Every day, we navigate a crazy quilt work world of technology, geography, language and culture. Surely we are capable of more complex interactions than typing a word in a plain vanilla search box.

Instead of only treating our users like idiots, how can we follow a design philosophy that actively empowers our users to fulfill their vast potential? The techniques gleaned from game design are one very meaningful path worth exploring.

Practice matters more than theory
Now, it is one thing to talk about how game design can improve application design. It is a completely different task to grab a hold of Microsoft Office, the epitome of traditional application design, and turn it into a playable game.

Ribbon Hero is not the best game in the world. Not yet. However, even in its basic state, it does all the wonderful things that games do in the context of one of the world’s most used, most serious applications. People learn. They improve. And they enjoy the process. Such a highly valuable class of user experience has eluded traditional design for decades.

If these miracles can be done with Microsoft Office, how might game design change the applications you want to build in the future?

take care
Danc.

References

• Download Ribbon Hero: http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero
• Description of iterative development process:http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/Behind-Ribbon-Hero
• Initial impressions of Ribbon Hero: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=29685
• Mixing games and applications: http://lostgarden.com/2008/10/princess-rescuing-application-slides.html
• What activities can be turned into games:http://lostgarden.com/2008/06/what-actitivies-that-can-be-turned-into.html
• Building fun into your software designs:http://lostgarden.com/2006/12/building-fun-into-your-software-designs.html
• Don’t make me think: http://www.sensible.com/chapter.html
• Layering: http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/one-billion-buttons-please-should-we.html

Originally posted by Danc from Lost Garden, on January 19, 2010 9:05 AM

“And here we have yet another reason for scientists to love this movie. Who has not tired of seeing scientists portrayed as either grant-greedy maniacs or naïve dangers to humanity, shouting ‘I’m sure the creatures are friendly!’ just before being devoured? In films, scientists are often assumed to be inhuman to some degree, and if they become more human as a film proceeds, it is by becoming less of a scientist.”
—Carol Kaesek Yoon writes a nice piece about watching Avatar from scientist’s perspective. “I felt as if someone had filmed my favorite dreams,” she says. There’s nothing hotter than a scientist all gushy and weak-in-the-knees.

Originally posted by Dave Bry from The Awl, on January 19, 2010 9:00 AM

Vincent Fournier has made a series of photos of astronauts training and of the interiors of the Chinese, Russian and US space agencies.

Looks alien, doesn't it?

Tags: Moon   photography   space   Vincent Fournier

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 19, 2010 8:40 AM

Geoffrey O’Brien

Jean-Louis and Maud, from Eric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969)

My immediate response to the news of Eric Rohmer’s death was the keen regret that there would be no more Rohmer films, and thus no more of those surprises he was still, at nearly 90, thoroughly capable of eliciting. Indeed, his last three films (The Lady and the Duke, Triple Agent, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) were among his most surprising, period films that ventured into political tragedy and pastoral comedy in ways that opened up new dimensions in his earlier work. Few filmmakers have been able to develop a body of utterly personal work so deliberately and methodically, and he managed it only with the most extreme budgetary discipline.

That he made small-scale films on small-scale themes (like love and trust and betrayal and self-knowledge) made him seem to many a minor master—words like “soufflé” and “bouquet” had a way of cropping up in descriptions of his films. The very pleasures his movies were full of—pleasures of youth and landscape and leisure, however little pleasure the worry-ridden characters derived from them—seemed perhaps too easeful, too much like relaxation, in the same way that Bonnard’s paintings might once have seemed too luxuriously beautiful.

I think it will become clear that Rohmer was one of a handful of really great filmmakers of the last half-century. I can’t think of a greater. His movies will be seen as aspects of a single enterprise in how they reply to one another and how each further variation deepens the effect of what came before. The rigorousness with which their pleasures are achieved will become more apparent if all the films are seen together. The near-absence of background music in Rohmer’s films has often been remarked on (although on closer examination the work is filled with illuminating fragments of ambient sound, musical and otherwise)—but symphonic underscoring was unnecessary in films so musical in their rhythms. He makes his own music with time itself. Likewise his notoriously dialogue-filled movies, from My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee on, are perhaps most remarkable for their evocation of silence. There is no pause like a Rohmerian pause.

Brialy and Claire, from Claire’s Knee (1970)

Even if there are to be no more of his movies, there will still be surprises. These are works designed cunningly to resist settling into any final form. They change between viewings. In his work with actors, Rohmer created characters who exist beyond the requirements of their particular intrigue—they persist even when offscreen. To go back to, say, Autumn Tale—the last and most elaborate of his masquerades of love—is to wonder again at the ultimate unknowability of those people who seem at the same time so familiar, not least because we may have seen them in other scenes in other corners of the Rohmer universe. Impossible to contemplate Béatrice Romand without having in mind her teenage self in Claire’s Knee almost thirty years earlier, or to imagine Marie Rivière as the ostensibly contented provincial wife without remembering the chronically unhappy Delphine of The Green Ray.

These are performances that seem not to be such, even as Rohmer’s scenarios proclaim their artifice, an artifice that would have worked just as well in the seventeenth century. At any moment in any Rohmer film there is tension between the literary structure of a narrative—even if it turns out to be a narrative in which nothing quite seems finally to have happened—and the filmic there-ness of real people in a real place in real time. In Autumn Tale we are, at any moment, equally absorbed by the twist of a devious plot, the personalities (as gauged from faces and gestures and voices) of people who are in equal measure characters and actors, and the “everything else” in which they exist, embodied by, for instance, a bunch of grapes on the vine, suddenly brought to the center of our attention. The grapes are as important as anything: with time, Rohmer’s films will also be seen as a documentation of mutating or altogether vanishing environments.

Undoubtedly we will learn more about the life that Rohmer worked very hard to keep private, and books will be written to connect the peculiarities and obsessions of the films with biographical data. But the mysteriousness will remain, even more mysterious for springing up in work so marked by rationalism and knowing wit. The banal is finally made strange. The more his characters are plainly revealed the more enigmatic they become. The “green ray” (out of a Jules Verne novel) that brings at least the promise of love at the end of that film (perhaps his most vibrant) is paralleled by the “blue hour” that casts an unearthly spell over the first episode of his lesser-known Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle, so cheaply made that at moments it has the air of a home movie. The Latin liturgy that ends Perceval le Gallois (that extraordinary exercise in total translation) rhymes with the French liturgy at the beginning of My Night at Maud’s. Yet nowhere in all this work are we released from endless questioning and doubting—starting with our doubts about our own motivations and desires, not to mention our interpretation of the evidence before us.

Rohmer’s work will be around to contemplate for a long time—to contemplate with endless curiosity and pleasure—or so one would like to think. There is much that hovers near unavailability (Autumn Tale has never been released on DVD), and one crucial work never available in the U.S., his first film, The Sign of the Lion, which is among many other things a haunting documentary of Paris in the summertime. One could even hope to see the rarest of rarities, his video version of Heinrich von Kleist’s play Käthchen von Heilbronn, as staged by Rohmer (in his own translation) in Nanterre in 1979. Now there is a work to call forth mysteries, with its blend of obsessive love, oneiric prophecy, and imperial politics, and at its center a young girl stubbornly resistant to all forms of reasonable persuasion.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The New York Review of Books, on January 19, 2010 7:28 AM

Robin Sloan writes about stock and flow as "the master metaphor for media today".

Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years?) as it is today. It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Nail on the head. Although I think you can also consider something like "trust" to be stock as well, in which case you can use quality flow to build up stock.

Tags: Robin Sloan

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 19, 2010 7:10 AM

Big types customarily bring up the rear of a type specimen book, and Catalogue No. 14 does not disappoint. The book reaches an explosive crescendo with this design at 864 point, in which just two letters fill the entire page. This typeface, which Hamilton called “No. 266,” is the design that inspired our Knockout No. 66 font. It appears on p. 119 of Hamilton’s Catalogue No. 14; check out page 120 for the biggest type of all. -> Quoted from the H&FJ News --> Coudal

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on January 19, 2010 7:02 AM

“Four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared.”

- Damian of OK Go on their record label’s stupid insistence on prohibiting embedded playback of their new video. (via Merlin)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on January 19, 2010 7:01 AM

Quick Post

These are known business terms, but Robin Sloan puts them in the context of social media. "Flow is the feed...Stock is the durable stuff." Hell yes. [via @bobulate]

http://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on January 19, 2010 6:33 AM

When you work in the advertising and creative industry long enough you come to realize that no good deed goes unpunished. This graphical representation of how some of the best creative ideas and concepts meet their big bad wolf or iceberg made my day. See the rest of the list after the jump.

Via FLIRTing with the Clouds

Originally posted by Jay B from PUBLIC SCHOOL, on January 19, 2010 5:52 AM

The other day, I remembered this old piece of #perl6 backlog from 2005:

<masak> question: what are good ways in p5 and p6 respectively, to reverse a string?
<masak> the easiest way i found in p5 was join '', reverse split // $string
<masak> doesn't look very nice, now does it?
<integral> *blink*
<integral> $string = reverse $string

It feels odd to realize this five years later, but it seems that in 2005 I didn't have a firm grip on how reverse worked in Perl 5. Chances are, dearest reader, that you do. But if not, the rest of the refreshingly frank discussion will explain it.

Meanwhile, five years earlier, I persist in my innocent ignorance:

<masak> nope
<masak> doesn't work :(
<masak> reverse only reverses lists... i think

Reading this from the perspective of five years' work with Perl 5 and 6 is... enlightening, in a slightly cathartic way. Sure, it could have been that I'm the first to discover that reverse in Perl 5 doesn't in fact reverse strings, despite thousands of people using it daily for that purpose. But the chances of that are astronomically small. My peers on the channel tell me this.

<PerlJam> masak: clearly you are insane.
<integral> perl -le '$string = "abc"; $string = reverse $string; print $string'
<integral> masak: the manual *clearly* explains all the stuff about context
<integral> and the faq

They do, you know.

<PerlJam> masak: in perl6 it would be $string.=reverse probably.

This was true in 2005, but nowadays we have flip for strings, reverse for lists, and invert for hashes. The need for different functions falls out naturally from the fact that Perl 6 doesn't depend as heavily on context as Perl 5 does.

Back in the log, I'm still trying to reintegrate into reality.

<masak> integral: your example worked, thx
<masak> but nothing worked for me
<masak> apparently i am insane :P

PerlJam and integral are one step ahead of me.

<integral> no, you don't understand scalar context. perl -le 'print scalar reverse shift' foobar
<PerlJam> masak: you were probably saying "print reverse $string"
<masak> no, but maybe something of the sort
<masak> and that doesn't work, because...?
<integral> masak: print's prototype is (@), ie list context. It's a rightwards named list operator
<PerlJam> masak: context.
* masak thinks he sees it now

These explanations are actually very good, but just in case, let me restate them in my own words: reverse has two main behaviours. Either it reverses a list of things, or it reverses a string of characters. It switches between these two behaviours based on something. You might think that this something is what type of thing you send in (a scalar or a list), but that isn't so. Instead, reverse responds to its surroundings and figure out what they expect. $string = reverse $string is a scalar assignment, and expects a scalar. print reverse $string, as integral explains, puts reverse in list context, so it reverses the list of one thing ($string), i.e. doing nothing.

Steve Yegge has this to say, in a vitriolic critique of Perl:

Perl also has "contexts", which means that you can't trust a single line of Perl code that you ever read.

I would say that it's actually not that bad, and the idea of context can be unintuitive at times, in many cases it's actually very natural and useful. reverse, in my humble opinion, is not one of those cases. I'm glad it's split up into different methods in Perl 6.

At the end, we learn that I had actually Read The Faithful Manual already, I just hadn't read it carefully:

<PerlJam> masak: perldoc -f reverse
<masak> thx, integral and PerlJam
<masak> PerlJam: I read the perldoc entry but apparently not carefully enough
* masak reads it again
<masak> ah
<masak> "In scalar context, concatenates the elements of LIST and returns a string value with all characters in the opposite order."
<masak> this somehow went past me as something i didn't want :/

In summary, I mostly wrote this blog post because I like to make myself squirm. 哈哈

But I guess there's also a moral to it all. We all start somewhere, and in a way it's reassuring to find five-year old proof of this fact. A newbie is just on a part of the learning curve you've already visited; they haven't had a chance to tweak their keyboard and developing environment to maximum efficiency yet, and they sometimes forget that the manual is there, or misread it in some way. So, don't hesitate to be be kind to them, and help them connect to the goodness that is perldoc, PerlMonks and Planet Iron Man so that they can grow and bloom into experienced wielders of Perl.

But don't hesitate to call them insane, either, when the situation calls for it.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Planet Perl Six, on January 18, 2010 11:26 PM

Caterina Fake responds to Jaron Lanier's piece in the Wall Street Journal. First, for context, the salient bit from Lanier's piece:

It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. [But] we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity.

And with that, here's Fake:

Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate. These types of software and platforms are specifically designed for conversation and contribution. That is the point.

Emphasis mine.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 18, 2010 8:32 PM

Excellent set of explicit instructions for the basics of mixing drinks (measuring, shaking, stirring, twists, etc.)

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on January 18, 2010 6:39 PM

From David Weinberger's post, The opposite of "open" is "theirs":

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular -- not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don't treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it's ours. Obviously it's not ours in the property sense. Rather, it's ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren't too many other things that are ours in that way.

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for -- preferring some content and services to others -- the Net won't feel like it's ours, and we'll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

So, if we're going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of "open" is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of "open" is "theirs."

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on January 18, 2010 4:59 PM

Or said another way, come see Apple's latest creation.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 18, 2010 3:34 PM

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

Robert Fogel writes in Foreign Policy this month:

In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000… Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now.

If we’re considering the long term future, it may seem parochial to worry about which nation is “ahead” — but the world will  be a different place if China is the country setting the global agenda for everything from climate change and the exploration of outer space to human rights and censorship (go Google!). China is rising; is the rest of the world ready?

Some recent news stories about China:

1. Last year, China passed the U.S. in carbon emissions. Not only that:
China overtakes Germany to become largest exporter
China overtakes U.S. as world’s biggest car market
China consumers to overtake U.S. in a decade

2. They’re making great strides in technology:
Nuclear power expansion in China stirs concerns
Gene rice on its way in China
China’s high-speed-rail revolution
China unveils anti-missile test
China energy efficiency “improves in first half”

3. And science:
China ascendant
Get ready for China’s domination of science

4. As the dustup with Google shows, China approaches social issues differently:
China’s says web crackdown to be “long-lasting”
China to be short 24 million wives
In China, DNA tests on kids ID genetic gifts, careers

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

Originally posted by Kirk Citron from The Long Now Blog, on January 18, 2010 2:50 PM

From Slice

Flo Consiglio adds up the receipts by hand in a back booth at Sally's Apizza in New Haven, Connecticut. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]

I thought I had lost this photo of Sally's Apizza matriarch Flo Consiglio in a hard-drive crash. But I was able to recover some files from my camera's memory card today. Flo is a real character, as I found out during a recent visit to Sally's. But more than that, she's what our man Ed Levine calls a "Keeper of the Flame," a direct link to some of our country's fading food heritage. Here, after the jump, I excerpt what Ed wrote about Mrs. Consiglio in the "Keepers of the Flame" chapter of his book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven.

According to his widow, Flo, who now runs the show at Sally's Apizza, the late Sally (Salvatore) Consiglio was "gifted in many ways. If he could have afforded it, there would have been many fields open to him."

Pizza lovers are extremely thankful that Sal Consiglio utilized his considerable gifts in making perfect pies, with a slightly chewy, charred crust and just enough sauce and cheese for balance. Sally Consiglio perfected his pizza-making craft as a teenager in his uncle Frank Pepe's pizzeria (Sally's mother was Frank Pepe's sister Filamena). Flo, who met Sally when they were in grammar school, said that he was so small when he started making pizza that he had to stand on a box to knead the dough.

Sally's, back in the day. What day? I don't know. Long time ago, though. [Photograph: sallysapizza.net]

Sally worked for Frank for four years until his father became ill, forcing Sally to become the principal breadwinner in his family. Needing to make more money, Sally opened his eponymous pizzeria in 1938, when he was 18. His mother, whose homemade pizza Sally adored, had to take the liquor license out in her name, because Sally was too young. Flo insists that even though her husband opened a couple of hundred yards from his uncle's pizzeria, there was never any bad blood between the two.

Pizzas from left: tomato-slice and mozzarella pie, plain (tomato) pie, sausage pie. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Sally and Flo worked 18 hours a day for many years, turning out pizzas in their coal-fired brick oven for the Italian-American community that settled in New Haven to work in the local factories. Until he died, 40 years after he opened the place, Sally Consiglio made every pie the Consiglio family sold, with mozzarella and sausage made locally, and fresh garlic and thyme on the tomato pies, made without mozzarella (above, middle). Now Sally's two sons, Richard and Robert, are the pizzaioli, and their pies are every bit as good as their dad's. What's truly remarkable is that in the seven decades Sally's has been in business, only three people, Sally, Richard, and Robert Consiglio, have ever made a pizza there. Talk about an owner-occupied pizzeria.

Sally's in late 2009. Click to enlarge. [Photograph: Adam Kuban]

Sally's tomato pie, made with the aforementioned fresh herbs, California canned tomatoes, and freshly grated pecorino Romano, is a revelation. It's a model of pizza flavor and texture balance. The absent mozzarella is not missed at all. And if you're lucky enough to be at Sally's in the summer, Flo and company make a great pizza with fresh local tomatoes, grated Romano, fresh basil, and just enough mozzarella.

The clam pie at Sally's, made with canned baby clams, is the only pie made there that doesn't belong in the great pizza pantheon.

"It's just pizza," Flo says, "and Sally knew that. But there was a lot of pride and passion that went into every pie Sally made, and I know we try to live up to his standards every day."

Sally's Apizza

237 Wooster Street, New Haven CT 06511 (at Olive Street; map)
203-624-5271 (warning: this number will either be busy or no one will pick up); sallysapizza.net

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on January 18, 2010 1:45 PM

Note to self: when finished with Friday Night Lights, rewatch all of Twin Peaks.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 18, 2010 1:42 PM

This is the craziest thing I've seen in a long time: a device from RCA that harvests energy from the WiFi signal.

(Via GeekWeek.)

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on January 18, 2010 11:39 AM

Beans, beans. [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

According to Restaurants & Institutions, the top 10 most-Googled recipes of last year were:

1. Chili
2. Meatloaf
3. Cheesecake
4. Banana bread
5. Pancake
6. Salsa
7. Hummus
8. Lasagna
9. Apple pie
10. Meatball

Does that gibe with your own cooking-search behavior in 2009?

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on January 18, 2010 11:15 AM

David Wright hit two homers and drove in four runs and the Mets scored eight runs in the game's first four innings and then held on for a 10-7 victory over the Yankees at drizzly Shea Stadium this afternoon. Darrell Rasner, who started for the Yankees, had to leave the game after facing just two batters. He was struck on the pitching hand by a smash back through the middle off the bat of Endy Chavez in the bottom of the first. Rasner, the fourth Yankees pitcher to leave a game with an injury this season and the second to leave after just two batters, suffered a fractured right index finger. Tom Glavine picked up the victory, the 295th of his career. via blog.nj.com There's always good news, but some times it's in the past.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 18, 2010 11:13 AM

A follow up to my Dec. 21 post about Examiner.com's success at SEO, ranking high in Google searches and ballooning traffic: It seems the site has been at least temporarily banned from Google News.

Hat tip to Examiner.com contributor Elizabeth Kelly for making me aware of that news.

I'm not sure what rules infraction got the site bumped from Google News, but I still believe traditional news media sites could learn something from watching it, particularly its ability to rank high in organic search results.

Originally posted by Jack D. Lail from Random Mumblings, on January 18, 2010 10:50 AM

Haiti, six days later.

This may be the most powerful set of photos I’ve seen from The Big Picture. Truly gripping.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Justin Blanton, on January 18, 2010 10:45 AM

Originally posted by dorothy from very small array, on January 18, 2010 10:12 AM

the story's being updated in real-time on Facebook  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 18, 2010 10:03 AM

So! I’ve finally done it and made the move to tumblr! I’ve been wanting to move to tumblr for months now. Yey!

Life in general has been pretty crazy. I’ve been working as a web designer at Six Apart Services for the past few months. Its been very busy!

This design is more of an interim-design, and I’m in the works of something new that I’ll hopefully be able to have up in a a couple of weeks. However I think it will work in the meantime…. how do you like it?!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from lather rinse repeat, on January 18, 2010 9:32 AM

General Manager: Andrew Friedman
Farm Director: William Walsh
Scouting Director: R.J. Harrison

FanGraphs’ Top 10 Prospects:
(2009 Draft Picks/International Signees Not Included)

Pitching. Pitching. Pitching. The Tampa Bay organization just keeps churning out mound prospects and the Top 10 list is littered with seven pitchers. The impressive part is that none of the players were taken in the first round; all seven were drafted in the third round or later, save for Lobstein. One other pitcher was signed internationally, while another was acquired in the Scott Kazmir trade with Los Angeles (AL). You can also see signs of excellent scouting when you look at the top prospect, Desmond Jennings, who was acquired out of a small community college in the 10th round.

1. Desmond Jennings, OF, Triple-A
DOB: October 1986 Bats: R Throws: R
Signed: 2006 10th round – Alabama Community College
MLB ETA: mid-2010 40-Man Roster: Yes Options: 3

Injuries limited Jennings to just 24 games in high-A ball in ‘08 so few knew what exactly to expect from the rusty prospect in ‘09. The outfielder did not miss a beat by jumping to double-A and he hit .316/.395/.486 in 383 at-bats. He also saw his strikeout rate drop from 18.8% to 13.6% while his ISO rate rose from .153 to .170. Jennings also stole 37 bases in 42 attempts in double-A. Promoted to triple-A for his final 32 games, the Alabama native hit .325/.419/.491 with an ISO of .167 and 15 steals in 17 attempts. He also posted a BB/K rate of 1.27 and is clearly on the cusp of the Majors. Currently more of a 10-15 homer threat, there is hope that Jennings can develop at least 20 homer power.

2. Jeremy Hellickson, RHP, Triple-A
DOB: April 1987 Bats: R Throws: R
Signed: 2005 4th round – Iowa HS
MLB ETA: mid-2010 40-Man Roster: Yes Options: 3
Repertoire: 89-94 mph fastball, curveball, change-up

Another impact prospect on the verge of realizing his MLB dream, Hellickson blew through both double-A and triple-A in ‘09. Only 22, the right-hander allowed just 41 hits in 56.2 innings of work in double-A, while also posting a strikeout rate of 9.85 K/9. He showed solid control with a walk rate of 2.22 BB/9. Of concern, though, is his 35.3% ground-ball rate, which rose by 10% with the move to triple-A. In the senior league, Hellickson allowed just 39 hits in 71.0 innings thanks in part to a crazy-low BABIP of .228. He didn’t walk anyone, either, and posted a base-on-balls rate of 2.35 BB/9. His 10.99 K/9 rate was outstanding. Hellickson could really stand to improve his ground-ball rate further but a strong outfield defense with the likes of B.J. Upton, Carl Crawford, and Desmond Jennings will certainly help the fly-ball pitcher.

3. Tim Beckham, SS, Low-A
DOB: January 1990 Bats: R Throws: R
Signed: 2008 1st round – Georgia HS
MLB ETA: mid-2013 40-Man Roster: No Options: 3

One full season into his career, it’s still far too early to get worried about this former first-overall pick’s offensive showing. The soon-to-be 20-year-old infielder hit a respectable .275/.328/.389 in 491 at-bats in low-A ball. Beckham’s power is obviously MIA at this point, and his ISO rate was just .114 – a slight improvement over his debut number in ‘08 of .102. His 33 doubles hint at future power potential. His base running also needs to improve after he was caught 10 times in 23 attempts. Beckham’ strikeout rate (23.5%) is too high for someone with little power and his allergy to walks (6.5%) hurts his potential as a top-of-the-order hitter. There is a lot of added pressure on first-overall draft picks so the wOBA of .327 is clearly a disappointment for many, but ‘09 was a solid foundation season. The organization will look for more in 2010.

4. Wade Davis, RHP, Majors
DOB: September 1985 Bats: R Throws: R
Signed: 2004 3rd round – Florida HS
MLB ETA: Now 40-Man Roster: Yes Options: 2
Repertoire: 89-94 mph fastball, plus curveball, change-up, cutter

It seemed like a long time in coming, but Davis finally made his much-anticipated MLB debut. Both Davis and Jacob McGee (slowed by Tommy John surgery) have been on the Rays’ Top 10 lists since ‘05. Davis’ stuff has leveled off a little bit since his early days in the system, but he had a solid season in triple-A in ‘09 where he allowed 139 hits in 158.2 innings of work. Davis’ strikeout rate was down a bit at 7.94 K/9 but his walk rate was around career-levels at 3.40 BB/9. He was aided somewhat by a BABIP of .289. On the MLB landscape, Davis made six starts and allowed 33 hits in 36.1 innings. He posted a strikeout rate of 8.92 K/9 and showed respectable control with a walk rate of 3.22 BB/9. According to Pitch Type Values, Davis had a lot of success with his 92 mph fastball, as well as his curveball.

5. Matt Moore, LHP, Low-A
DOB: June 1989 Bats: L Throws: L
Signed: 2007 8th round – New Mexico HS
MLB ETA: Late-2012 40-Man Roster: No Options: 3
Repertoire: 89-94 mph fastball, curveball, change-up

An eighth-round steal, Moore has posted crazy (and oddly consistent) strikeout numbers in three minor league seasons of 12.84, 12.75, and 12.88 K/9. His walk rate, though, rose from 3.15 in ‘08 in short-season ball to 5.12 BB/9 in ‘09 at low-A ball. Moore made up for the walks by not allowing many hits: just 86 in 123.0 innings of work. The southpaw did not allow a homer to a left-handed batter and posted a 71.2% ground-ball rate in limited innings. His overall ground-ball rate was 45.8%. Moore has a huge upside, but the loss of control in ‘09 is worrisome.

6. Nick Barnese, RHP, Low-A
DOB: January 1989 Bats: R Throws: R
Signed: 2007 3rd round – California HS
MLB ETA: Mid-2013 40-Man Roster: No Options: 3
Repertoire: 88-93 mph fastball, curveball, change-up

A personal favorite of mine, Barnese got a late jump on the season thanks to an injury. Once he got going, though, the right-hander pitched well in low-A ball. The 21-year-old hurler posted a 3.43 FIP and allowed 56 hits in 74.2 innings. His ground-ball rate was just shy of 52%. He showed OK control, especially considering is loss development time, with a walk rate of 3.01 BB/9. On the negative side, he was aided by a .263 BABIP and his strikeout rate hit a career low of 7.47, down from 11.45 K/9 in ‘08. His stuff isn’t electric, but Barnese has a good chance of developing into a middle-of-the-rotation starter, if he can stay healthy.

7. Reid Brignac, SS, Majors
DOB: January 1986 Bats: L Throws: R
Signed: 2004 2nd round – Louisiana HS
MLB ETA: Now 40-Man Roster: Yes Options: 2

Brignac’s prospect status has stagnated a bit in the past two seasons in triple-A as he’s posted wOBAs of .311 and .329. This past year, he hit .282/.327/.417 in 415 at-bats. His ascent to the Majors was also slowed by the emergence of Jason Bartlett, who currently mans the shortstop position for the big league club and is the superior fielder and hitter. Brignac will have to wait for A) a trade, B) a position switch (to second?), or C) Bartlett to get injured/become ineffective/too expensive. In truth, Brignac does not offer much power (.135 ISO) or speed (five steals in 10 tries), and he has hit more than .260 just once in the past three seasons. Now 24, it’s up to him to force the organization’s hand with some above-average play.

8. Alexander Colome, RHP, Short Season
DOB: December 1988 Bats: R Throws: R
Signed: 2007 non-drafted international free agent (Dominican Republic)
MLB ETA: Late-2013 40-Man Roster: No Options: 3
Repertoire: 90-95 mph fastball, curveball, change-up

A casual observer may have taken one look at Colome’s debut numbers in ‘08 that featured a 6.80 ERA… and looked the other way. However, his FIP was just 4.49 and he was hurt by a BABIP of .364 (not to mention his 5.05 BB/9 rate). After taking a year to acclimatize himself to North America, Colome also received some better luck in ‘09 with a BABIP of .277. His control also improved and his walk rate improved to 3.79 BB/9. The strikeout rate jumped from an already-good 10.10 to 11.13 K/9. Colome allowed just 46 hits in 76.0 innings and he did not have a ball leave the yard. His 50.3% ground-ball rate was encouraging, as was the miniscule 8.7% line-drive rate.

9. Kyle Lobstein, LHP, Short Season
DOB: August 1989 Bats: L Throws: L
Signed: 2008 2nd round – Arizona HS
MLB ETA: Late-2013 40-Man Roster: No Options: 3
Repertoire: 88-92 mph fastball, curveball, change-up

An ‘08 second-round pick, Lobstein did not make his mound debut until ‘09 in short-season ball and he established himself amongst the top arms in the system. He posted a 2.95 FIP, while allowing 55 hits in 73.1 innings of work. He gave up just four homers (0.49 HR/9) and his walk rate was solid at 2.82 BB/9. Lobstein also missed a fair number of bats, with a strikeout rate of 9.08 K/9. He’ll likely jump to low-A ball in 2010, where he should spend the full season. Lobstein is not a flame-thrower, but he has middle-of-the-rotation potential thanks, in part, to a solid ground-ball rate (51.2%) and good numbers against right-hander (9.73 K/9, .204 batting-average-allowed).

10. Alexander Torres, LHP, Double-A
DOB: December 1987 Bats: L Throws: L
Signed: 2005 non-drafted international free agent (Venezuela)
MLB ETA: Mid-2011 40-Man Roster: Yes Options: 3
Repertoire: 88-91 mph fastball, curveball, change-up

Obtained in the surprising Scott Kazmir trade, Torres narrowly edges first baseman Matt Sweeney in terms of present prospect value amongst those obtained from Los Angeles in the swap. Torres made three minor-league stops in ‘09, including seven double-A starts (two with Tampa Bay). He showed some rough edges, though, with a walk rate above 5.00 BB/9. Torres misses a good number of bats, though, with an overall strikeout rate of 8.49 K/9 and his ground-ball rate was excellent at 57.9%. He’s also equally effective against both left-handed (.218 average) and right-handed (.221) batters. Despite his below-average stature (5′10, 160 lbs), Torres showed his durability in ‘09 with 155.0 regular-season innings pitched.

Up Next: The Florida Marlins

Originally posted by Marc Hulet from FanGraphs Baseball, on January 18, 2010 8:00 AM

Love it - Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years" via Waxy.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Originally posted by Phillip Torrone from MAKE Magazine, on January 18, 2010 7:25 AM

I wasn't sure I had a lot to say about Haiti that has not already been said -- many times, elsewhere, better, less vociferously even -- but I think I might have a few things to say about MLK.

In past years on this day, I noted that back in grade school, when we first got told about the bus protests and sit-ins, the thing that stayed with me most consistently was the photos of King being arrested, hustled into the van, and booked. Here's a man who is now a national hero, and yet in his time he had been thrown in jail. Contradiction?

That taught me several things from a young age.

1. Things do change. The man we once threw in jail can be our hero. The change is not always within the span of our own lifetime, and not always outwardly, which is why it seems so distant and frustrating. As Barrows Dunham said: "Can we reach the goal [of a better world]? Well, maybe not you and I, who are aging under the strains of the present world. Our best hope will be to move Leviathan a little, so that our children and their children can being to see the dawn."
2. They do not, however, change automatically.
3. The effort required to make those changes comes with risk.
4. The risk involved in taking those efforts must be carefully considered, so that you are not, for instance, inadvertently spreading that risk to others. This is something that seems to have been lost on, say, the WTO protesters who smashed shop windows in Seattle. (One person I know was of the opinion that such things did more real, palpable economic damage to the city than any of the free-trade agreements under discussion.)

The problem with most social disobedience after MLK is that it assumes the form, but not the content -- and sometimes not even the form. Principled dissent is difficult, partly because it's easy for the work you do to get drowned out in favor of other, cheaper, lesser protests. It becomes tempting to adopt the same shrill voice for the sake of stealing some badly-needed (or maybe just -craved) attention.

I admired King not just for what he did, but the way he insisted that it be done with skeptical attention towards motives and end results. It has become all the harder to do that, not just because the temptations to stray are greater but because the goals themselves are all the muddier. If you want to "make change", doesn't it make sense to simply seize some power first? How else is change brought on? The problem, of course, is that once you have power of some kind it is easy to stop asking yourself what you're trying to do and why, and simply plunge headlong down the slope. You become everything you were fighting, and maybe never realize it.

Dunham, by the way, knew a thing or two as well about principled dissent. He wrote the above-quoted Man Against Myth in 1947, lost his position at Temple in 1963 for refusing to finger others in front of the HUAC, and died in 1995 at the age of ninety -- more than long enough to witness King declare that his eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. All his books save Myth are out of print; few people even know his name. I know I won't forget it, and I will savor it a good deal longer than, say, Noam Chomsky's.

Originally posted by Serdar from Genji Press, on January 18, 2010 7:20 AM

By Happycentro. Via ffffound.

Originally posted by admin from Gridness, on January 18, 2010 6:42 AM

We were so happy that three-time PAPER cover-girl Chloë Sevigny finally won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Bill's be-braided and conniving middle wife Nicky Grant on Big Love. We were not so happy, however, when an usher stepped on Sevigny's strapless Valentino dress as she went to accept her award. "I can't believe you just ripped my dress!" she said half-jokingly when she got to the podium. And if that wasn't traumatizing enough for poor Sevigny, her name was spelled incorrectly on the screen: Chloi Sevigny. Yeesh.

Originally posted by Alexis Swerdloff from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 18, 2010 6:32 AM

Note: It's time for another edition of Street Food Profiles. This week we scoot to the street food mecca of Portland to meet a Scottish lad who started a chippy on wheels.

[Photographs: The Frying Scotsman Fish and Chips]

Name: The Frying Scotsman Fish and Chips
Vendor: James King, owner and chef
Twitter: @frying_scotsman
Location and hours? My trailer is parked in the garage of an established gallery and frame shop in the industrial area of NW Portland on 22nd and Raleigh called Katayama Framing. I am open Monday through Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., sometimes later on Saturdays.

What's on the menu? Fried cod and chips (the current bestseller), haddock and chips, halibut and chips. People also like the mahi mahi and chips, but that's a new menu addition. I will most likely bring red snapper back to the line-up soon (many British folks request it). Cod and haddock are the traditional fish we use in Scotland.

How long have you been street fooding? We opened September 14, 2009. I have been a chef for more than two decades in the UK, but have always dreamed of opening my own chippy. I don't know if it would have been possible in Scotland, but it was definitely possible here!

I make my own batter from a recipe handed down from my mom in Scotland. Everyday I hand-peel and cut the chips. Lately I've been going through 70 pounds of chips per four-hour lunch shift. I also make my own tartar sauce and British coleslaw. For drinks, I like to have Tetley tea and IRN-BRU on hand although it has been challenging to find lately.

How has Twitter affected business? I have been on Twitter since day one, but recently switched to a new account, so it's just building traffic again (@frying_scotsman). I find our Facebook account to be ten times more effective for my business because it allows for more visual descriptions, it's more selective on who follows who, and I enjoy the fan interaction.

Why a mobile business over brick-and-mortar? The price was right for my biz—$3,000 for a trailer, fees here and there for licensing, some electrical upgrades, and boom—you're in business.

Who are your typical customers? Engineers from Conway, Freightliner and healthcare workers at Good Samaritan hospital on 22nd and Lovejoy, many graphic designers and animators from Laika, as well as creatives from agencies like Wieden and Kennedy.

Because we're in a gallery space, our crowds tend to appreciate art and culture and they seem to put up well with eating in their coats in a cold garage for a taste of great fish and chips.

What about the UK ex-pats? Saturdays are big for them, and we seem to get lots of families and older couples in then too. It's a real destination for some—I had one couple come in from the Gorge which is 60 miles east who came solely for my fish and chips. On Saturdays families can take their time without the hustle and bustle of the lunch crowd.

Describe a typical day from start to finish.

• 8:30 a.m. Eat breakfast with the fam and drop my two-and-a-half year old at Montessori school, check in with the family at home in the UK.
• 9:00 to 9:30 Buy fish and potatoes if needed. Start peeling and prepping. Mix batter, sauces and blanche chips.
• 10 a.m. Set out card tables with my mum's tablecloths from home (Scotland).
• 10:30 to 11 a.m. First customers arrive.
• Noon to 2:30 p.m. Mad rush for fish, taking orders and preparing meals one by one.
• 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Clean up and make shopping list.
• 3:30 p.m. Shop for goods.
• 4 p.m. Come to play with the youngster.

What were you doing before this? I was the chef-manager on an oil rig in the North Sea for almost twenty years. Before that I worked under Bill Costley at a hotel in Troon, Scotland, many times the home of golf's British Open.

When I met my wife in 2006, I was transferred to work off the shore of New Orleans on an oil rig. When they announced the rig would be leaving for Sierra Leone, Africa, we decided it was time for me to pack it in and work in Portland. The stress was becoming too hard on all of us to be apart for a month at a time. My wife has her own business so we knew some of the risks and rewards and decided to just go for it.

What makes your food so special? Can anything else like it be found in the city? You can't find really good British fish and chips in Portland for around $7. I hear this day in and day out, mostly from British ex-pats, but also from folks who have spent time eating at fish and chip shops in the UK. I don't have a huge mark-up or overhead because it's just me. I have taken a craft I learned from my home and transferred it here.

Also, we have covered seating, which is rare for a single food cart.

How would you define "street food"? Street food to me is a meal you buy from a vendor on the street who could feasibly pick up and move within an hour.

The best street food city and why. London because of the variety and openness to cultures and different foods. Then Portland for its adventurousness and Portlanders' appreciation for great things not always being the biggest or shiniest or most slickly packaged to be successful.

Your comfort food after a long day? British sweeties. I have the Scottish sweet tooth.

Advice for an aspiring vendor? A catering background in a fast-paced environment is crucial for this business. You hope that you will be so busy people will be lining up around the block, but when that day comes, you need to know how to manage it successfully, and treat everyone like a valuable customer.

Also, make sure you have someone who can market your cart, from the menus to the website to managing the Twitter and Facebook accounts to knowing when to advertise and why. Pay (or trade) for professional design and photography—don't take it on yourself unless you were a designer in a former life. You need to be a great cook to survive as well as a great people person so focus on those and let someone else do the marketing.

Finally, eat at a lot of food carts and restaurants. Pay for your meals (rather than hang around and ask for keys to success) and take good notes. Support your local vendors, reward good customers and have a good time.

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on January 18, 2010 6:30 AM

Some excerpts of the Data.gov.uk Newspaper that Russell Davies gave me last week. As described by the people who designed it, the purposes were the following:

“We’ve been thinking about the beta Data.gov.uk repository, and wanted to explore putting some of the information contained within into people’s hands in a form that is accessible, timely, and relevant.

It’s a prototype of a service for people moving into a new area. In our exercise we imagined you might receive it after paying your council tax for the first time.

It gathers information about your area, such as local services, environmental information and crime statistics.
(…)
We printed 50, and gave them out to a room full of civil servants, who seemed very excited its possibilities. Hopefully it’ll find its way around Whitehall over the next couple of weeks, acting as a demonstration of the kind of stuff people want to make with all this data that government has. And maybe that’ll encourage some more data to get opened up to the public.“

Why do I blog this? an interesting initiative to render local public data in an original way. What I find curious here is the use of paper: clearly an easy and convenient way to share content.

Originally posted by Nicolas Nova from Pasta&Vinegar, on January 18, 2010 6:21 AM

Instapaper's Kindle feature dramatically improved:

I’m very happy to announce the result of a lot of work that dramatically improves the Kindle edition of Instapaper: periodical formatting.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on January 18, 2010 5:03 AM

King.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the impossible cool., on January 18, 2010 5:00 AM

Get psyched, ladies. Heartthrob and Surf Lodge chef Sam Talbot is back on the market, according to the Post who announce Talbot is splitting with his wife of just over a year. Bonus info: "A source tells Page Six he's been seeing fellow Bravo star Kelly Bensimon (of "The Real Housewives of New York City") since the split, but his rep vehemently denies it." [NYP]

Originally posted by Kelly Dobkin from Eater NY, on January 18, 2010 3:33 AM

Apparently 2010 will be the year of the video.  Here’s another nice one featuring Kyle Glanville.

Posted in coffee, espresso, la marzocco Tagged: barista, brewing, coffee, definitions, espresso, espresso machines, intelligentsia, la marzocco, roasters, science, taste

Originally posted by Mike White from ShotZombies.com, on January 18, 2010 12:09 AM

I had kind of a bonkers trip to New York this past week. My proximate reason for being there was an invitation to Microsoft Research's annual Social Computing Symposium (SCS), an invitational held this year at NYU's ITP program. Another reason was to visit the U.S. Geological Survey's Volunteered Geographic Information workshop. A third was to pay visits to a bunch of east coast superheroes. The thing I love most about these whirlwind adventures is that you have an excuse to compress a full schedule of visiting into a very short span of time. I had a chance to meet and reconnect with a few people I like and respect quite a bit. I felt warmly embraced.

The SCS theme this year was "City As Platform", and the structure of the event was brief talks punctuated by puppet shows. About half the people gave presentations, though I wasn't one of them because I was thinking more about the USGS thing for later in the week (more on that below). Steven Johnson gave an opening talk that made me think I had accidentally bumbled into a TED or Davos, though the situation did rapidly improve.

Kevin Slavin gave my favorite kind of talk, a barnstormer that I found simultaneously fascinating and provided a lot of hooks for debate. Liz Goodman took better notes than I, and the basic gist was like this:

1. Concealment technologies, like the radar-defeating B2 Bomber, work by breaking up a shape rather than hiding it entirely.
2. High frequency, algorithmic trades work the same way, tearing larger financial movements down into microscopic dust.
3. This modern computerized finance stands in contrast to people-driven, proximity-reliant trading off the past that gave rise to today's financial district.
4. Physical proximity required for algorithmic trading is no longer a result of human distance but of microsecond ping times necessary to exploit fast, small differences in price.
5. Why can't the whole thing just float off and go away if it doesn't need people anymore?

Kevin connected to the city theme with 60 Hudson as a pivot. It's a massive telecommunications node, and physical distances along the network from this building translate to communication delays, which subsequently translate to money lost or money gained. We used to think about time in terms of distance ("The furlong was the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting"), which we've mostly forgotten since communications speeds got so fast, but the high rents directly around this building show that on some scales, velocity of communication can still be measured.

Now I don't quite agree with Kevin's conclusion. Where he sees an inhuman system that's begging to be pushed off into space where it will cease to bother its once creators, I'm looking at a natural consequence of technological speed in the service of technology. Someone's always going to want to exploit the seams with science. What we need is not to set the thing adrift off-world but to tame it with a new Glass-Steagal. Still, the core humanism of where he goes with this is touching, beautiful and deserving of some attention. Most "city as platform" talk comes in two varieties: information technology and space syntax. There was plenty of both on offer at ITP, lightly brushing the testicular, amoral war-metaphoring that views urban fabric and shared space as just scenery to play out control scenarios. I don't want to call out anything in particular, so I'll just link to an unfortunate recent BLDGBLOG post about Die Hard and the IDF walking through walls after reading Deleuze and Guattari. One of the commenters, Jim Meredith, has this response:

"However, as you note early in you piece by quoting those who maintain, live in, and trust the concept of private space, the Nakatomi/Nablus/DieHard concept is, in fact, a shocking and gross violation of a core concept of civil society."

(apologies to Marc Ngui)

Not everyone views the city as a battle suit or a maze of twisty passages all alike, and it's worth thinking about provided functions (sewage, macadamizing) in terms of what they do, who they do it for, and for what price. Anil Dash in particular described his Expert Labs concept, a project to consider and modify the motivations for geek work and the federal government. Did you know that you can't, technically, "give" things to the U.S. government? It's true and Anil's trying to change that. Which is an interesting segue to the USGS event in DC, a workshop intended to explore successful volunteer geographic data programs (like OpenStreetMap) to see how that can be applied to the forthcoming update to the National Map.

Thanks to a door malfunction on my NYC/DC flight, I arrived late to the party and unwittingly delivered a closing keynote. The full content of the talk and my slides immediately follow these other exciting things that happened:

• I visited the New York Public Library map people twice and was allowed to flip through a 17th century Dutch naval atlas.
• I got to meet the amazing New York Times graphics department, including Matt Ericson, Matthew Bloch, Amanda Cox, Shan Carter, and others. These are the people turning our ideas about interaction and mapping online utterly upside-down.
• Grand Central Oyster Bar.
• Veselka for 2:00am pierogi.
• Mark Hansen's genius installation at the NYT lobby.
• Poking my head into the Saturday Night Live studio during filming of Laser Cats.
• Played the new(ish) Mario Brothers Wii game and discovered that my muscle memory of the old game's standard controls has remained fully intact for 20 years despite no external reinforcement.

Now, my slides for the USGS thing.

Readiness.

For many years, OpenStreetMap was understood to be a project about the future, meant for productive use someday but clearly unready. Potential users still had to be convinced, and we passed over OSM as a data source for projects in favor of commercial data on a number of occasions. This phase lasted from 2004 to about 2008 for us at Stamen.

In 2008, it started to look more done than not-done.

The social structure and set of motivations that OSM thrives under can be seen as part of the broader trend towards shared development practices and better communication enabled by the open internet. We're seeing a trend toward a larger number of smaller operations unified by an ethos of participation and local scale, something that Brian Marick has jokingly summarized as "artisinal retro-futurism" and "team-scale anarcho-syndicalism". I love this description.

In our work, we're generally on the receiving end of map data, and I've got some examples showing cartography I particularly enjoy that's benefited from OSM as a resource.

Stamen's "Fresh" map style for Cloudmade, showing legible web cartography for inner London, was immediately applicable to the rest of the world upon launch. It's used by OffMaps, Noticings, and others as a default, web-native basic road map without some of the distracting recognizeability of Google Maps.

UK designer Matt Jones of BERG used Cloudmade's style editor product to apply Kevin Lynch's ideas about the city as a network of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks for heavy traveler social network Dopplr. Particular ideas about the role of information on the map can be rapidly experimented with and published to a broad audience.

Stamen also did the Cloudmade Midnight Commander map style, answering a creative brief suggesting a design appropriate to Jason Bourne's in-car GPS. Again, something that starts as a small idea or even a joke can very quickly go into full production when simple, well-understood data is available.

I've also been exploring the adaptation of paper maps like this 1996 Rand McNally SF street atlas popular among bike messengers. The result has been OSM-derived, print-ready cartography that additionally incorporates civic parcel and contour data.

Finally, Yahoo photo-sharing web service Flickr has used specific portions of OpenStreetMap data in places where Yahoo Maps has poor or non-existent coverage. The transient desert city of Burning Man is one such example, surveyed and laid-out fresh each year. OSM Foundation board member Mikel Maron contributes his mapping expertise to the Burning Man Earth project to provide visual context for the thousands of photogrpahs that come from the art festival each year.

When anti-government protests broke out in Iran last year, Flickr was able to rapidly pull in high-quality maps of Tehran to provide immediate geographic context to the sudden flood of news and imagery. I'm told that high quality road data for cities like Tehran is traditionally quite hard to come by via normal channels, since there's very little road navigation market for western companies there.

Services such as Google's and the iPhone are bringing more different kinds of people in close contact with cartographic design through their daily lives than ever before. We know that use and familiarity breeds discerning taste, and cartography has become popular, decorative, desirable, and functional.

What specific technical characteristics of OpenStreeMap motivate the creation of this broadly useful data set? I think that a few critical decisions made in the early days of the project have endowed it with generative properties, the "capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences" as Jonathan Zittrain has said.

Three specific features of OpenStreetMap have this effect.

First, each object in the system has a unique and durable identifier. Objects basically stay put, and are composed of very simple primitives. There are no curvy lines in OSM. The identity of each object in the OpenStreetMap database is exposed to the outside world, so that Flickr can let you refer to specific OSM features in your photography. Here we have a photograph of the Queen's Chambers in Manchester that's explicitly connected to the building footprint in OSM because the two entities can be tagged together. The system is useful even when not explicitly mapped.

Second, the tagging structure is free-form. You can apply your own arbitrary descriptions to features, generally conforming to the basic expectations of the community with tags like "highway", but often departing from them entirely. Andy Allan created a rendering for his OpenCycleMap project that specifically called out features with tags relevant to bicyclists, like these portions of the bike network in Oakland. New tag conventions are decided through use rather than committee. Most theoretical arguments about the appropriateness of one approach over another are moot until actual use by a number of people over time can be shown.

Finally, there is an open API. OSM's core feature is a complete, well-understood way to move data into and out of the service. This has made it possible to create numerous ways of recording and editing OSM data. JOSM is the editor for the precise, obsessive, and German. Potlatch is the web-based editor that lives under the default "edit" tab on the site, and includes simple tools for pulling different kinds of points of interest into the aerial map.

Walking Papers is my own research project, and provides a way for paper data collection to help OSM. Each of these applications takes advantage of OSM's well-documented and simple protocol to moved information through the system, with varying amounts of complexity available to different user populations.

I want to close with this napkin sketch by Mikel Maron. Many years ago, Mikel showed a possible "common operating procedure" around the project, incorporating numerous technologies not normally associated with desktop geography. Much of the methodology drawn here did not yet exist at the time, but Mikel could be sure that with healthy usage patterns it would be possible to draw double heads on each of the arrows with some reasonable expectation of future possibility.

Comments

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on January 17, 2010 10:33 PM

Walking west on 12th Street from 3rd Ave, you probably wouldn’t give it a second glance: a stone church located midway down the block.

Coming from the opposite direction, however, you might notice something decidedly wrong with it. In short, the church has no…church.

While this isn’t a secret to most New Yorkers, the remnants of St. Ann’s Church is certainly one of the city’s stranger sights. Most of the church was torn down in 2006 to make room for the gorgeous example of Soviet-bloc-inspired architecture now residing in its place. Completely sealed up, the facade sits detached on East 12th Street, an orphaned relic.

The construction of NYU’s 12th Street dorm has had a very controversial history, detailed extensively in the press (check out Curbed.com for a full recap). Short version is: Brooklyn developer Hudson Companies purchased the land from the New York archdiocese in December ‘04. Though the church itself was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, Hudson tore most of it down before the designation could be made official.

Below, a Hudson Companies executive assists in the destruction of the church:

Hudson then purchased air rights from a nearby post office, allowing the construction of a building substantially larger than the church’s former height (a questionable transaction in itself, as the laws dictate that federal agencies must consider the effects of their actions on historic properties).

The dorm now towers 26 stories over the neighborhood, the tallest building in the East Village:

Hudson decided to build 50 feet in from the street and leave the church facade to make the dorm “less imposing.” I hate to offer anything that sounds like praise to a company like Hudson, so when I say I’m very grateful they did this, it’s sort like thanking Godzilla for sparing some small section of Tokyo.

Whenever I walk down 12th Street, seeing St. Ann’s now makes me reconsider exactly what it has become. Clearly, it can no longer be defined as a church…But what exactly is it?

If it’s any consolation, I think the demolition has indirectly elevated St. Ann’s to a sort-of post-modern sculpture, forcing a completely new way of looking at and thinking about the remaining structure. When a door leads from the outside to the outside; when a window simply acts as a filter for sunlight; when the exterior wall and interior wall are one and the same, you have no choice but to completely reevaluate the meaning and purpose of such a structure.

The church was built around 1847 and over the years has served as a place of worship for Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish congregations. The French stained-glass windows were installed in the 1920’s.

The windows, as seen from the rear:

A beautifully colored cross:

No clue what happened to the steeple – all that remains is this ugly conical thing, which seems to have more in common with the building behind it:

The front doors, which are seemingly locked for good…

…as are the iron front gates:

Then again, some interior lights have been set up to illuminate the stained glass windows from within, suggesting that some access is possible.

While I get the need for additional housing for NYU students, and that fact that in NY, sometimes the only way to get things done is to just do it, the resulting building is simply not something to be proud of. I really wish the city would enact legislation that basically says: “if you tear something down, whatever you build has to be more beautiful than what you destroyed.” But you know, that would be silly, right?

-SCOUT

Originally posted by Scout from Scouting NY, on January 17, 2010 7:24 PM

Something small and essentially meaningless happened Sunday evening during the Jets-Chargers playoff game. But it’s the sort of small and not-always-meaningless thing that happens all the time in the NFL. And it drives me absolutely nuts. I probably would not have mentioned it this time either, except a friend wrote me about it Sunday night after the game, saying it drove him absolutely nuts. So maybe this is a common feeling among NFL fans. Maybe a bunch of people were screaming at their TVs.

Coaches in the NFL have no idea how to use the clock.

This is astounding to me. As you no doubt know, football coaches will spend hundreds of hours every week studying film to get the tiniest advantage in a game. They will look for almost imperceptible flaws — a lineman looking down at specific moments, a linebacker who tends to get overaggressive on reverses, a quarterback who drops his arm on certain throws, a receiver who does not run out his routes on running plays. They are looking for any edge, even an edge that, 99 percent of the time, will not matter. Coaches coach for that one percent of the time.

And yet: They treat the clock like college students treat their alarm clock. If there was a snooze button on an NFL clock, coaches would hit it repeatedly. I remember a few years ago the Kansas City Chiefs were losing, and after a first down stop, Gunther Cunningham — a very fine coach and maniacal worker — had his player call their last timeout with (if I am remembering this correctly) 2:41 left on the clock. Maybe it was 2:43. Anyway, it was around that time.

You probably don’t need me to explain why this was an appalling mistake. But to explain: If the Chiefs do not call timeout there, the opponent still has to run one play before the two-minute warning. There’s a 40-second clock in the NFL and so the opponent would have to run one play. The Chiefs would then have a timeout and the two-minute warning to stop the clock.

By calling timeout — well, the opponent STILL only had to run one play before the two minute warning. Nothing at all was gained. But something important was lost — the Chiefs final timeout. On the other side of the two-minute warning, the opponent on third down was able to run 40 seconds off the clock that the Chiefs would have been able to save had they kept their timeout. Coaching yourself out of 40 seconds of football — which could be four or five plays, depending on circumstances — is like rolling the gutter ball in the tenth frame.

The mistake was bad enough. The explanation was worse. Even a couple of days later, Gunther did not quite seem to get why this was a mistake. And as he broke it down, he said that he had to call a timeout because of the “45 second clock.” That’s what he said. Forty-five second clock. That a longtime and successful NFL coach — a smart man who could tell you man-for-man exactly what blocking schemes the Denver Broncos were likely to use on third-and-two in the third quarter — could even off-handedly confuse the 40-second clock with a 45-second clock gives you a hint how little thought goes into clock management in the NFL.

Sunday, the Chargers pulled off one of those jaw-dropping time bumbles. Like I say: It didn’t really matter, not as long as poor Nate Kaeding was missing field goals, and not as long as LaDainian Tomlinson ages a year for every quarter of football he plays. But it was indefensibly bad anyway. With 2:15 or so left in the game, the Chargers had one timeout and trailed by three. Coach Norv Turner decided to try an onside kick. It was a close call — Phil Simms* thought it was the wrong call; he thought the Chargers should have kicked off deep. You could certainly argue it both ways.

*I generally like Phil Simms as an announcer, but didn’t it seem like he was really grumpy for this game? Earlier in the game, there was a fumble called on the field and the Chargers challenged. The replay — at least from my vantage point — seemed to suggest that it was not a fumble, but instead an incomplete pass. The referees are so picky about what makes a complete pass in the NFL anymore and I thought the receiver just didn’t have it long enough. But it was really close, and Simms insisted that they got it right on the field — a catch and a fumble. He was insistent. I thought, “Well, maybe he’s right.”

Then, just before the referee made his ruling, Jim Nantz smartly suggested that maybe the fumble WOULD get overruled because the receiver did not have the ball all the way to the ground. I say “smartly” because, of course, that’s what I was thinking. And sure enough, the referee just five seconds later overruled the fumble and said it was an incomplete pass.

Simms seemed beside himself. I mean, he seemed genuinely angry. He snapped at Nantz, snapped at the decision, seemed to sulk, and wanted to go back to it several more times to prove his point. It was like combat announcing.

The Chargers did try the onside kick, and they didn’t get it back. So the Jets had the ball with 2:12 left. Remember the Chargers had the one timeout. So the game was not quite wrapped up. The Jets ran the ball up the middle, got stopped, and there was 2:09 left, 2:08 left, 2:07 left …

And the Chargers did not call timeout. They let the clock go down to the two minute warning.

Why? What possible reason could the Chargers have had for letting the clock wind down? If they used their timeout here, and they stopped the Jets on the next play, it would be third down with exactly two minutes left. But because they did not use their timeout, when they stopped the Jets on the next play, and it was third down with 1:55 left.

Why? Why as a coach would you just give away five seconds? And don’t tell me five seconds in an NFL game doesn’t mean anything … these coaches spend hours and hours scripting their schedules to make sure to not let five seconds get away from them in PRACTICE. The Chargers could not stop the Jets on fourth down so you could say it didn’t matter.

Except … it kind of does matter. Because I think clock management is one thing that the average fan really and truly understands better than professional coaches. Maybe it’s because fans create these fantastic possibilities in their minds when dealing with their own team — “OK, down 17, but they can kick a field goal here, then get the onside kick, then score a touchdown, then kick deep and use three timeouts and stop them, they should have about 48 seconds left to score the tying touchdowns …”

Fans — at least the fans I know — spend a lot of time thinking about when it makes mathematical sense to let the opponent score. Fans — at least the ones I know — spend a lot of time worrying about a timeout a quarterback wasted early in the third quarter when the five-yard delay penalty would have been the smarter play. Fans — at least the ones I know — spend countless hours thinking about crazy stuff like when you would free kick or how often it would be worth going for it on fourth and 1.

Coaches, I think, are too buried in the day-to-day to worry about that stuff. In college, they consistently screw up the two-point conversion decision as far as I’m concerned. In the pros, they often flop when it comes to time management. Even the best coaches seem to screw it up. The 5-second screw up by the Chargers did not cost them the game or anything even close, but it was just a staggering blunder — like batting out of order or forgetting to call an NBA timeout during a quarter. The fact that nobody really talk much about it on TV (Jim Nantz did briefly mention it) tells you: This is just what we’ve come to expect from NFL coaches. They’re good with schemes. They’re not so good with time.

Originally posted by Joe Posnanski from Joe Posnanski, on January 17, 2010 3:42 PM

Transcript, provided by the White House, of President Obama's remarks Sunday to parishioners at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King preached two months before his death: Good morning. Praise be to God. Let me begin by thanking the entire Vermont Avenue Baptist Church family for welcoming our family here today. It feels like a family. Thank you for making us feel that way. To Pastor Wheeler, first lady Wheeler, thank you so much for welcoming us here today. Congratulations on Jordan Denice -- aka Cornelia. Michelle and I have been blessed with a new nephew this year as well -- Austin Lucas Robinson. So maybe at the appropriate time we can make introductions. Now, if Jordan's father is like me, then that will be in about 30 years. That is a great blessing. Michelle and Malia and Sasha and I are thrilled to be here today.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from 44, on January 17, 2010 11:00 AM

I'm now in Orlando, Florida attending "Perl Oasis" Orlando Perl Workshop 2010.

It's a shame that I forgot to pack my camera so there are no photos to show but Orlando is really warm and humid and beautiful out there. I hope I can see and share photos from Karen and mdk who had excellent Canon cameras.

I did the Plack presentation again, with a lot of updates reflecting the recent changes and plans we've been discussing. I think it went well and Plack was mentioned in other talks such as Stevan's Ox::Applicaiton talk, mdk's keynote and I got mst's Catalyst book copy as his "thank-you for Plack so we can remove Catalyst::Engine that I hated" reward :)

Some of the talks I attended: Stevan was explaining his recent Plack-ful project called Ox::Application. Shawn showcased his excellent TAEB nethack bot. Cory (gphat) told us how Solr rocks and how they migrate that to magazines.com search engine. Lucas is a spy from PHP community and told us how PHP sucks which I already knew. dhoss told us his experience with Google Summer of code which was very interesting. Marty explained the functional programming which reminds me again of the goody of PSGI; since PSGI app and middleware are code references, the traditional functional oriented programming methodologies like composing functions just work. We actually have the same code Marty showed, in our Plack::Runner middleware compose sub :) mst told us his tale on his new DBIx::Data::Store.

Today is the hackathon day; plenty of things in my mind but not much time!

Thanks Chris (perigrin) for organizing this great mini-conference and Shawn (sartak) for sharing his room.

Originally posted by miyagawa from bulknews.typepad.com, on January 17, 2010 8:16 AM

New York Magazine's supposed "scoop" today about a NYT decision to charge online readers for content was no scoop at all -- just a mish-mash of previously-reported stories, along with some carefully-hedged speculation about the future.

Stories as far back as last spring made clear that the NYT was headed inexorably towards a paid model, and was facing the very choice -- between a metered system and micropayments -- that the New York Magazine story represented today as "news."

An interview with NYT president and general manager Scott Heekin-Canedy, published last July in the Daily Telegraph, made clear that the NYT had already decided to go with a paid model, and had narrowed its choices to those two options.

"The climate seems to have changed," Heekin-Canedy told the Telegraph. "There seems to be more of a willingness to pay."

Reports of an internal conflict over these choices -- along with arguments in favor of keeping the website completely free -- have been frequently covered by media journalists covering the decision-making process, most notably John Koblin's excellent pieces in the New York Observer.

And anyone who believes the story's other "news" -- that the decision will be made in "days" by publisher. A. O. Sulzberger Jr. -- should recall all the previous "scoops" that have previously forecast an imminent decision.

From the New York Observer, way back on May 15, 2009:

By the end of June, The New York Times will come to a decision on how to charge for some of its content on the Web, The Observer has learned.
From the Daily Telegraph, nearly two months later, on July 9:

In an interview to be published in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph, Scott Heekin-Canedy, the president and general manager of The New York Times Media Group, will say that he is deciding between two charging systems – a “metered” and a “membership” model. A firm decision will come by next month.

And from today's New York Magazine post, by Gabriel Sherman:

One personal friend of Sulzberger said a final decision could come within days, and a senior newsroom source agreed, adding that the plan could be announced in a matter of weeks.
Note the use of the conditional word "could." Very handy when a reporter has no idea if he's right or not!

Today's New York Magazine story did offer a few minor new details that may or may not be true: a NYT decision not to pursue an arrangement with Journalism Online, and a supposed attempt by News Corporation to link up with the NYT to fight Google's impact on web distribution of news.

It's worth noting that both those "facts" appeared in New York Magazine story with no attribution or elaboration.

As for the allegiances in the current debate that Sherman represented as news -- executive editor Bill Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson fighting for a paywall, with digital executive Martin Nisenholtz arguing to keep the website free -- any close reader of Nisenholtz's comments over the last year is already well aware of his concerns about charging for news.

"The reason it is taking a period of time to do this analysis is that if we don't do it right, a lot of money drops out of the system," Nisenholtz told a media conference in December. "That's not true of other newspaper Web sites, including those in our own company."

At that time, Nisenholtz confirmed in December the fact that the NYT was seriously considering the metered system followed by the Financial Times -- already reported in the Observer and elsewhere. Again: not news!

The other "news" reported by New York Magazine? That the NYT executives haven't been able to make a decision! Guess what, guys -- we already figured that out.

Originally posted by THE NYTPICKER from the nytpicker, on January 17, 2010 6:48 AM

A few hours ago, former NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni (we miss you, Frank!) tweeted that there's "something for everyone" on today's NYT front page.

Maybe so, but doesn't Bruni sometimes privately wish the Sunday NYT found room for that wondrous staple of American journalism, the Sunday Funnies? We do. And so, to supplement your morning diet with a dose of dopeyness, The NYTPicker presents a new, occasional feature we're going to call The Sunday Funnies!

***

Where would Michael Mandelbaum, the foreign policy expert, be without his good friend Thomas L. Friedman? Looks like we'll never have to know. The NYT op-ed columnist mentioned Mandelbaum today for the 89th time in his NYT career -- a string of promotional references that stretches back to 1989!

Friedman's so nice to Mandelbaum that he often quotes him saying the same thing twice.

Here's Mandelbaum in a Friedman column on December 5, 2004:

"This is not just a win-win," said the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. "This is a win-win-win-win-win."

And then, in Friedman's December 27, 2008 column, four years later:

A gasoline tax “is not just win-win; it’s win, win, win, win, win,” says the Johns Hopkins author and foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum.

Here's a Mandelbaum quote from a June 23, 2009 Friedman column:

“People do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must,” observed Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist.

And here's almost the same quote -- with a "they" changed to a "we" -- four months later, in Friedman's October 28, 2o09 column!

“People do not change when we tell them they should,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. “They change when they tell themselves they must.”

As for their friendship, well -- Friedman has only once, in two decades of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism for the NYT, referred to Mandelbaum as his friend. But there's plenty of proof of their closeness in the acknowledgements to Friedman's books.

From Hot, Flat and Crowded:

As for the tutors and helpers, the list always starts with the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. Our endless conversations about energy, politics, and foreign policy constantly served to sharpen my arguments.

From Longitudes and Attitudes:

I benefited equally from my nearly daily conversations with Michael Mandelbaum, the foreign policy expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Michael's original mind, and his deep knowledge of history and ability to listen to my stories from the field and help me put them in context, were absolutely invaluable.

From The World Is Flat:

And special thanks to my soul mates and constant intellectual companions Michael Mandelbaum and Stephen P. Cohen. Sharing ideas with them is one of the joys of my life.

Oh, and by the way, Steve: in case you're wondering, Tom has only quoted you 69 times! We think he likes Mike better than you.

***

Matt Richtel's page-one story about cell-phone talking-and-walking accidents may be a little short on the tangible evidence -- the only hard numbers he's got report 1,000 pedestrians visiting emergency rooms for such accidents in 2008.

Constrast that to a NYT story back in May -- buried on page 7 of Science Times -- that reported 86,000 emergency room visits last year by people who tripped over their pet!

But it's a bona fide trend. How do we know? Simple. According to the expert Richtel quotes, it's "the tip of the iceberg"!

Yes, that classic cliche -- "the tip of the iceberg." Where would lazy reporters be without it?

At the NYT, today's reference represents, well, the tip of the iceberg. It has appeared in the NYT 56 times in the past year -- or more than once a week -- and 1,160 times since 1981. (Interesting historical note: the expression first turned up in a NYT article in 1964, nearly 52 years after the Titanic introduced the notion of iceberg perils into the lexicon.)

What does the expression mean? According to The NYTPicker Dictionary, it is defined as "a commonly-used metaphor that allows a reporter to suggest a trend where the numbers don't support it."

***

She's no Alessandra Stanley -- not yet. But Ariel Kaminer, the Sunday Metropolitan section's City Critic, is showing nascent signs of carelessness that could one day put her in direct competition with the NYT's correction queen.

Today's NYT corrections column includes a four-in-one for Kaminer, fixing some unfortunate flubs in her piece last week about bus routes. Somehow, Kaminer managed to make some significant errors in reading the names of the buses she rode:

The City Critic column in some editions last Sunday, about travel routes that will be affected the most by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s planned service cuts, misidentified the bus that the writer boarded in the Bronx, the beginning of one route, and misstated the route name of the bus she boarded in Queens that brought her to her destination, 26th Avenue. The Bronx bus is the Bx16, not the B16, and the Queens bus is the Q28; there is no B28 bus. The column also misstated the name of the Bronx cemetery that she passed on her travels. It is Woodlawn Cemetery, not Woodland.

Woodland Cemetery, huh? That's in Staten Island.

Originally posted by THE NYTPICKER from the nytpicker, on January 17, 2010 5:41 AM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 17, 2010 5:01 AM

It turns out the technician who produced the picture [of an older Osama Bin Laden] 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.

via www.talkingpointsmemo.com

There are more than 4,000 results for the schadenfreude-licious "...it gets better" on TPM.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 17, 2010 4:54 AM

These guys jusst put up a cool mural in Williamsburg, check out more info at BrooklynStreetArt.

Originally posted by Josh M. from Just Seeds: Blog, on January 17, 2010 2:20 AM