Best Use of Mac Genie Effect. EVER.
via @mattmira
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February 6, 2010
Joe Stump: Fail fast and often
And this isn’t just for startups, the times when we’ve lost track of our ability to fail have been the most difficult times at Flickr.
Zero Rupee Note Combats Indian Bribery
Petty bribery is common in India, but the introduction of a zero rupee banknote has given some would-be bribers pause.One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.
[ via kottke]
February 5, 2010
Zero rupee note combats Indian bribery
Petty bribery is common in India, but the introduction of a zero rupee banknote has given some would-be bribers pause.
Tags: crime economics IndiaOne such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.
Quotes! Quotes! Quotes
My iPhone buzzes every 28 seconds. This is not popularity. Obviously. This is the NFL emailing me another Super Bowl quote sheet. And another. And another. Remi Ayodele! Raheem Brock! Jeff Saturday! Queen Latifah!
Super Bowl quote sheets are one of the many things that stunned me when I started to cover the Super Bowl. If you cannot talk to the players (or get to the all the players you needed), the league will go and talk to the players for you. They would get you quotes. Free. Incredible. Now, true, these were not always the most compelling and enlightening quotes …
Sample quote from Indianapolis tight end Dallas Clark quote sheet:
(On how the Colts adjust during the game)
“There’s a lot of adjusting and making moves on the go.”… but, seriously, how could you beat this? They would get quotes for you … from virtually every player on both teams. Plus coaches. Plus celebrities. One of the things I would do at every Super Bowl I ever attended was collect all the quote sheets — I do go back to that era when we would read things on this substance called “paper” — and read through them to see if I could learn anything about the game. I did not learn anything* but it was fun.
*It was also dangerous. The thing about reading all the quotes is that, at some point, you start to buy into the cliches and the hype and you can begin to lose touch with reality. I remember the San Francisco-San Diego Super Bowl here in Miami in 1995. Coming in, everybody KNEW the 49ers were going to wax the Chargers. That game had no chance to be close. I knew this on Monday. But during the week, I talked to a lot of players and I read all the quote sheets and by Thursday, I started to think that, hey, maybe the Chargers had a chance. By Saturday, I had so much knowledge and perspective that the game seemed to be a toss-up.
Then, on the first play on Super Bowl Sunday … San Francisco’s Steve Young threw a bomb to Jerry Rice, who was open by about 45 yards. And I thought: “Hmm, I guess I was right the first time.”
They still have the actual Super Bowl quote sheets — they cover about 10 picnic size tables — but now the league magically transmits them right into my phone and … hold on, my phone’s buzzing. Hey, it’s a Super Bowl quote sheet from New Orleans coach Sean Payton. Let’s see what it says.
(Opening Statement)
“It’s been a good week of practice. We have two more; one today and a walk through tomorrow at the stadium.”Riveting. OK, so now I’m going to attempt the ultimate Super Bowl magic trick … I’m going to write a Super Bowl XLIV story with XLIV quotes in it. Please, don’t try this at home.
* * *
Well, we know the cliches. We know, as New Orleans receiver Courtney Roby says, “Special teams will be very, very important.” We know, as New Orleans backup quarterback Mark Brunell says, the teams have to “go out there and execute.”*
*Or in the words of Indianapolis defensive back Antoine Bethea “Go out there and make plays”.**
**Or in the words of New Orleans linebacker Scott Shanle “I think you make your own luck”.
We know that turnovers will play a major role in the game because both offenses are so good. “The name of the game in football, especially for defense, is creating turnovers,” Saints cornerback Jabari Greer says. It’s an interesting twist adding that “especially for defense” in there.
Colts defensive back Kelvin Hayden is even more direct. “We want to force turnovers,” he says.
But these things are basically true of every Super Bowl — of ever football game, really. Special teams. Turnovers. Make your own luck. Whatever. The question is: What makes THIS Super Bowl special? What defines this matchup between a Saints team that on its first 13 games this season and a Colts team that won its first 14 games? What makes Super Bowl XLIV different from the XLIII games that came before?
Well, you have to start with Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. It’s a funny thing: When the season ended, people were discussing who should be MVP. Seriously? What would the Indianapolis Colts’ record be this year if they had even an average NFL quarterback? Before you answer, remember: The Colts finished dead last in the NFL in rushing offense. They had one proven wide receiver — Reggie Wayne — and a couple of young guys with unlikely football names: Pierre Garcon and Austin Collie. Their defense finished 18th in yards allowed and 18th in forcing turnovers and 17th in sacks.
And that team won its first 14 games and is in the Super Bowl. Peyton Manning isn’t just the league’s MVP this year, he might be the league’s ALL-TIME MVP.
“Unlike everybody I’ve been around,” Colts quarterback coach Frank Reich says. “He knows everything that’s going on, on the field. Everything.”
I believe Manning will go down as the greatest quarterback in NFL history. He might already be there. And while, yes, it does something seem that Manning is overexposed — you can’t escape Peyton Manning — he is probably the best spokesman for any sport in America right now. What’s not to like? He’s classy, he’s funny, he’s an incredible player. A lot of that, of course, comes from his father. I really like this quote from Peyton on what it was like Archie Manning would come off the field after a game.
“My dad would always come out and get us on the field and take a little time to be with us,” Peyton says. “He always would sign his autographs for all fans after the games. Most of these times after tough losses. But I couldn’t tell at the time. I didn’t really know if they won or lost at the time. I was 3, 4, 5 years old. He was always the same. So that always had a positive influence on me.”
Manning, of course, is unlike any other quarterback. He knows. He maneuvers. He may be funny in commercials but not on the field (“He’s not really cracking jokes in the huddle,” Colts Offensive tackle Ray Diem says). Before every play, it seems, Manning points this way. He yells that way. He waves his arms. He shouts what sounds like nonsense.
“Everything Peyton does means something,” Collie says.
“Ninety-five percent of the time, it’s real,” running back Joseph Addai.
Yes, even Colts teammates disagree about how much of Payton’s motions are significant. There are many people — Saints included — who think A LOT of Peyton’s act is a bluff, empty audibles, football fog.
“You can try to play that chess game and go back and forth with Peyton,” Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma says. “I don’t know how long you want to do that.”
“I don’t know how you match wits with the guy,” Saints safety Roman Harper says. “The guy is all over the place.”
Well, one thing the Saints hope to do is hit Manning — early, late and often. When the undefeated Patriots faced the Giants in the Super Bowl two years ago, it was widely believed that no team could intimidate Tom Brady or slow down New England. But the Giants pressured Brady relentlessly, and under that kind of heat even the best offenses and most brilliant quarterbacks can wilt.
“We need to deliver some remember-me hits,” New Orleans defensive coordinator Gregg Williams said on a radio show … a bit of Super Bowl bulletin board material that inspired Saints coach Sean Payton to send him a shut-up breakfast of peanut butter and sand. But Williams is exactly right. The Saints have built a reputation as a defense that plays on the edge, maybe even over the edge, maybe even dirty …
“I wouldn’t say we’re dirty,” Saints defensive end Will Smith says. “I’d just say we’re a team that plays hard.”
Well maybe dirty is overstating it a bit, maybe there’s a better word …
“We don’t know if we want to call ourselves dirty,” Saints safety Darren Sharper says, “but … it is like taking a shower when you get up in the morning and are going to cut your grass. You are nice and fresh when you cut the grass. But at the end you have a little griminess to you. We want to call ourselves a little grimy.”OK, fine, grimy. Whatever the word, the Saints best hope of slowing down Manning is, like Gregg Williams says, to knock down Manning.
“Look, everybody talks about disrupting Peyton’s rhythm, getting him hit, making him nervous, making him get happy feet, all of those things that you would say about every other quarterback,” Colts center Jeff Saturday says. “The good thing is that Gregg doesn’t play.”
Of course, there are so many other stories besides for Manning. There’s the city of New Orleans — lots of talk this week about how important the Saints have been to the city rebuilding itself after Hurricane Katrina. “All the time, they’re telling us we inspire them,” Saints center Jonathan Goodwin says. “And they inspire us.”
Yes, the Saints players have talked a lot about their chemistry. New Orleans guard Jahri Evans summed it up: “We hang out together – go to the mall together, chill out together, play video games together. We do it all.”
Hang? Check.
Chill out? Check.
Go to mall? Check.
Play video games? Check.
Yep, that’s just about everything.The Saints also have a female owner, Rita Benson LeBlanc, who has been quotable this week. “I wasn’t very athletically inclined,” she says. “I was a manager, that kind of thing. So, I would be involved, but I have very interesting peripheral vision. I’m one of those people that will duck away from the ball.”
But the two big stars on the Saints side — for two very different reasons — are quarterback Drew Brees and running back Reggie Bush. Brees has been one of the tall-time overachievers. He was lightly recruited out of high school, told many times that he was too small to play in the NFL, and suffered a shoulder injury that many thought could end his career. Only here he is, a superstar quarterback leading the Saints to the Super Bowl. I think you can learn a lot about Brees by just reading a quote he gave when asked about the fleur-de-lis symbol on the Saints helmet. That’s one of the Super Bowl questions that usually gets a quick and dismissive answer. Brees offered a history lesson instead.
“The fleur-de-lis symbol dates back to the French monarchy,” he says. “So much of New Orleans’ culture comes from the time when we were under French rule. That’s just a big part of the culture. It’s a big part of what New Orleans is all about. So when you look at that symbol, it is the symbol of the city.”
That quarterback can lead my team anytime.
Reggie Bush, on the other hand, has been a chronic disappointment. He came out with, what Brees calls, the highest expectations of any player in the history of the NFL. And I think that may be right, or its certainly very close. Bush, mainly, has not met those expectations. He has had injuries. He does not seem to have the durability or makeup to be an every down back. Hey, he can be a gamebreaker. He’s fun to watch and an exciting player as a receiver, third-down back, kick returner. But as of right now he seems more in the Eric Metcalf mold than Barry Sanders mold.
“I kind of imagined that I’d have a couple Super Bowl rings by now and a couple Pro Bowls,” Bush admits. “It’s a tough league.”
On the Colts side, much of the talk has been about pass-rusher deluxe Dwight Freeney, who has a nasty ankle injury and may or may not play.
“You want him,” Colts defensive end Robert Mathis says. “If he is not in there it has to be next man up.”
“Freeney’s got some voodoo witch magic,” Colts linebacker Gary Brackett says.
“I think this is part of the game,” Freeney himself says. “You don’t really want to reveal everything.”
Yes, secrecy is another part of Super Bowl week. Or as Saints tight end Jeremy Shockey says, “Even if I had the answers for you, I would never tell you.” The coaches — particularly Sean Payton — would like to keep things quiet. With Payton, this could be because his particular genius seems to be his ability to line up and create match-up problems for the other team.
“Coach Payton does a good job of different formations and plays every week to create the match-ups that we are looking for,” Saints tight end David Thomas says.
“He knows how to scratch where it itches, so to speak,” says Colts defensive coordinator Larry Coyer — a quote so good I don’t even have to understand what it means to use it.
Yes, Payton seemed to turn around the Saints using his strategic skills and his remarkable memory for detail. “He was telling a story about when he first got into coaching,” Saints GM Mickey Loomis was saying. “He was talking about the breakfast that he had eight years ago, and he knew exactly what he had for breakfast. If he could remember exactly what he had for breakfast eight years before, then I knew he was detailed because I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. ”
Indianapolis coach Jim Caldwell is a bit tougher to explain. He was a longtime college assistant who coached at Wake Forest for eight years, posted a 26-63 record and got fired. That hardly seems to lead to Super Bowl glory. But Caldwell’s particular strength seems to be a certain steadiness … the players feel like they can count on him all the time. Listen to his quote when someone asked how he would feel if the Colts lost:
“Would it be okay if I didn’t answer that in that regard,” he asked back. “I’m a big believer in self-fulfilling prophesies. There is a Chinese proverb that says ‘be careful if your life is shaped by your thoughts.’ So, I stay away from that kind of ending. I haven’t seen that ending in my mind or am I contemplating or thinking about it at this point in time.”
There is something about being positive … something about never letting small problems slow you … something about a constant force of optimism that can make good teams and veteran teams respond. Tony Dungy had it. Jim Caldwell, apparently, has it too.
So, what else have players been talking about. Well, they have been talking about how important vision is for a football player.
“The biggest thing is your eyes,” Saints corner Tracy Porter said about being a shutdown corner.
“Vision is imperative,” Colts running back Donald Brown says. “Holes don’t stay open for long so you need to be able to see everything.”
OK. And, of course, many players have been talking about the hype of the Super Bowl, the significance of it, the honor of playing here.
“It’s the Super Bowl,” Saints defensive end Bobby McRay says. “There is really nothing that can overcome that.”
“I have been trying to soak it up without acting like a tourist,” New Orleans guard Carl Nicks says.
“Let me tell you something,” Colts receiver Reggie Wayne says. “I turned my phone on this morning, the first thing that popped up was 40 text messages. I immediately cut it back off.”
Then, there were these two quotes that seem to play well off each other. Someone asks Colts linebacker Clint Sessions about fame. He shrugs.
“People really don’t know who you are when you play defense,” he says. “Unless you are Ray Lewis or Darrell Revis people don’t know who you are.”
OK, fine. But someone asks Colts defensive tackle Daniel Muir how he gets fired up.
“Looking up,” he says. “Looking up in the stands you see thousands of people and you’re just like, ‘Man, they’re all here watching me.’”
Of course … you know all those people in the stands are probably NOT watching Daniel Muir. But I prefer his line of thinking.
And finally, there are a few straggler quotes to help up get to the 44 we need to finish off this baby.
Here’s New Orleans receiver Marques Colston on his philosophy of playing receiver: “I like to see myself as a guy that can be open even when I’m not open.”
Here’s Indianapolis’ ancient Matt Stover — who is actually two years younger than I am — on what kind of pressure a kicker feels when trying to make a game-winning kick: “If you’ve ever had a 10 foot putt for 100 dollars with a close friend, multiply that by 1000 and that’s what it’s like.”
Someone asks New Orleans tackle Jermon Bushrod to grade his performance: “The only grades I need to know is a ‘W’ or an ‘L’.”
Many people ask Indianapolis receiver Pierre Garcon, who is of Haitian descent, how he feels playing here with the devastation in Haiti. This answer, I think, sums up his thoughts: “It means a lot. To make it to the Super Bowl is very tough, but too be here with everything that’s going on in Haiti, it means a lot for me and the Haitian people that are dealing with it. It is probably bringing a bit of happiness to them dealing with what they’re dealing with right now.”
Here’s Colts defensive end Raheem Brock on the Colts playing outdoors: “They have a good field here in Miami. It is nice to play outside. Hopefully it is not raining.”
And finally, a quote from Colts legendary offensive line coach Howard Mudd. He has been coaching offensive lines in the NFL since 1974, and he has seen everything, coached every kind of player, had every kind of success. If you can follow the scheme of this quote, I suspect you too could be an offensive line coach:
“You have to be willing to throw the ball in the dirt and go punt if you have to. That is a characteristic, if you can’t get them all blocked, you have to be able to do that. If you stand there and hold it that is when people have the most problems with that team is when they have unblocked guys. Maybe the quarterback thought he was going to be blocked or they have them all blocked and they aren’t. You can see play after play with other teams. Not all other teams, but in situations they get caught without knowing who wasn’t blocked and they raise havoc. In a different, but similar way, that sounds contradictory but it is not.”
Well said. Yes, well said.
Google Apps highlights – 2/5/2010
This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
Developments over the last couple weeks really showcase how Google's other innovation focus areas — including Search, Mobile and Chrome — help make Google Apps even more useful.
Updates to Google Search in Gmail Labs
On Tuesday we made some helpful changes to the Google Search feature in Gmail Labs. The search gadget now runs some of Google's most popular search features, like dictionary definitions, spelling suggestions, calculations, local results, weather info and news. You don't even need to type your search query anymore; just highlight text in the compose area and click the multicolored "g" button to run a search on those terms.
Gmail Chrome extensions
Several convenient extensions for Gmail are now available to Chrome users. The "Google Mail" extension adds a small button next to Chrome's address bar that displays your unread mail count. "Send from Gmail" makes Gmail your default mail program, and opens a Gmail compose window when you click an email link on a web page. The button for this extension helps you quickly share the web page you're viewing over email.
Easier file location in Google Docs
Last week we introduced a pair of improvements to make finding files in Google Docs easier. First, we launched an option to show file thumbnails in your Documents List, which is great for quickly spotting what you're looking for. Just click the view option buttons in the toolbar to toggle between thumbnails and the standard text layout.Also released last week: search spelling suggestions help you find the file you're looking for, even when your typing is off. The Google Docs search spell checker is powered by the same technology that helps you get better search results on google.com.
Scripts for Google Apps Standard Edition
At the end of last week we launched application scripting for Google Apps Standard Edition. (Before it was only available to businesses and schools using Premier and Education Editions.) Scripts can be triggered from spreadsheets to perform automated tasks and calculations, but scripts go far beyond spreadsheets; they can be used to fire off automated email messages, create appointments in Google Calendar and accomplish other actions across the whole Google Apps suite. We've written up a few script tutorials if you have the itch to give scripting a try.
Mobile device management
Just yesterday, Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers got a boost in their ability to manage mobile devices synced with Google Apps. Right from the online control panel, IT admins can remotely wipe data from lost or stolen mobile phones, configure devices to lock after a period of inactivity and set password strength requirements. These new capabilities are available for iPhones, Windows Mobile devices and Nokia E-series phones. Stay tuned for similar features for Android devices.
Who's gone Google?
It's been another very active couple weeks helping more businesses and schools move to the cloud. The team is happy to welcome the latest crop of Google Apps customers, including Complinet, The Open University, Villanova University, Small World Financial Services, Tuskegee University, Clemson University and the New Zealand Post.
Saline Area Schools in Michigan has an especially impressive "gone Google" story. They're saving $400,000 in the first year, spending much less time on server administration, keeping spam at bay and fostering better collaboration among faculty.
Fairchild Semiconductor also recounted their experience switching 6,000 employees spread across 20 countries off their legacy Lotus Notes installation, selecting Google Apps and Postini over hosted email alternatives from Microsoft and IBM. Barry Driscoll, Senior Director of IT for Fairchild summed it up best: "Now we are providing our employees with a lot more functionality for a lot less money."
Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new capabilities, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with work colleagues, or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
Elements of Stale: Having Had Been Buffaloed
A friend emailed me last week. The subject line read: "Have you seen this?" The body of the email was without text—just a pasted in Wikipedia entry for “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”
This is what the body of the email looked like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo.
What the fuck, I thought, before actually clicking on. Who was mocking my city like this? Buffalo, NY has a proper Wikipedia entry; I’d read it countless times before. This “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” entry then must be a joke.
But a joke about what? Was the Wiki entry mocking how people who are from Buffalo always tend to find a way to bring up their city in conversation? Or was it a virus meant to trap people who are from Buffalo, NY? Surely the only people to click on such a ridiculous link are those with a severe complex about where they are from. Those who remember with pride, for instance, that Governor Mario Cuomo announced he’d be rooting for the Buffalo Bills in the 1991 Super Bowl, a historic game, where we’d play the New York Giants. Mario’s reasoning was that the Giants played their home games in New Jersey, and as such the Bills were New York State’s home team. Well?
Finally I opened the link. (Not to real talk, but even if it wasn’t safe for work, I don’t have a job anyhow, so no harm in boldness.) And it turns out the eight Buffaloes actually comprise one grammatically sentence. It took be a really long time to understand how this was so. Apparently my attention span is so warped that a string of eight words, even if they’re all the same word, is difficult to read.
To read the sentence properly, it helps to know that “buffalo” can function as a verb. When it does, it means “to bully” or “to intimidate.” For example, the bar exam I will be taking later this month still buffaloes me.
Also know that in this particular sentence when “buffalo” is capitalized it functions as an adjective, and not as the city Mario Cuomo considers part of New York State. As an adjective it means “from Buffalo.” Think Buffalo Bills, or even Buffalo wings. (That is, by the way, why they’re called that.)
If you wedge an imaginary “that” (or a “who,” if you really want to anthropomorphize the buffalo) between the second and third words of the sentence, it reads better. Which is to say, Buffalo buffalo [who] Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. However, the sentence remains slightly odd: the city of Buffalo doesn’t have buffalo of its own. In fact, the ones at the Buffalo zoo are actually American Bison. (Note though that in the preceding sentence, “Buffalo” is functioning as an adjective.)
It would be really useful to diagram this sentence. Luckily, we learned how to do that in 10th grade. Unfortunately, like many things about high school, I don’t remember how I did it. Just that I did. For instance, that year we also read Macbeth, but all I seem to remember was that the emo kids were all “out, out brief candle.” This too, even after we had to read it and then listen to it read to us, and then read it again. There was possibly something about a porter who took a whiskey drink and then a vodka drink. And a Banquo. But how to visually conceptualize a sentence? That memory faded quicker than Mario’s presidential prospects.
OK so if you are in fact able to wrap your head around the sentence, you’ll see it’s quite the circle jerk. Buffalo who get bullied by other buffalo bully more buffalo. It’s kind of similar to how one kid bullies another kid and then that kid who just got bullied goes and bullies me. Lord of the Flies meets Western New York, if they were buffalo native to this corner of the world. A pecking order of bullshit, that exists primarily within a made-up universe.
That’s sort of what grammar is. Right?
Luke Mazur is getting back on the bar exam bandwagon, by George!
Iced Out: Hey, Did You See Lindsey Vonn's Butt? Plus: Speedskaters!
At first I was fairly heated up about the Sports Illustrated cover shot of shredding sensation Lindsey Vonn. Absurd from every angle—and boy, are there ever angles—it's got her all glammed up in a pretty power princess kind of way, all glossy hair and painted lips. You have to squint your eyes toward the base of her Red Bull-endorsed headthing to see, but I'm pretty sure she's wearing diamond hoop earrings. All that aside, there's other bait: consider, as someone pointed out, the unfortunate juxtaposition of a certain set of letters.
But now I'm pretty much over it. For the real crime, as it turns out, is the blandest of all: unoriginality.
For just as the 90's are BACK in high fashion and literature, so too have we trawled them for cover design. From 1992:
He's wearing a helmet, but still, fair enough.
(Props to the mag, by the way, for the slick and searchable "SI Vault"; it's amazing the number of outrageous ski-themed covers from the 50's and 60's. Should you be so inclined, do check out 1957's "New American Look in Ski Clothes". Ooh, I like this lady's lipstick! And I know 1968 wasn't the brightest of years, but come on: Jean-Claude Killy sure makes up for a lot.)
It's always so awkward when athletes doll up. Was there anything worse than Kerri Strug in street clothes? Vonn pulls it off mostly, but for all of her marketable polish she remains kind of a goof. A goof who likes to go 150 on the autobahn!
But enough about skiers. I've covered that ground, which is more than can be said for the snow in Vancouver. Things are getting so bad that they're building jumps with hay bales and trucking in snow. Olympic officials (who must be freaking out) are gritting their teeth and making harried statements. "It's beautifully white and clean and it looks great on television," said Renee Smith-Valade.
She meant the snow, not Joe Biden, who will be leading the US delegation in Vancouver. Given his considerable foreign relations expertise and his ongoing involvement with the Special Olympics, I can't think of a more suitable man for the job.
As far as I have been able to ascertain via Google, this particular diplomatic assignment involves hanging out with Mike Eruzione and Peggy Fleming, and oh my God, is Biden going to wear a warmup and march in the parade!? This column on the wonderfully manic Brian Burke seems to suggest as much, but I'm not going to get all my hopes up just yet.
Given the lack of meteorological cooperation—cue the "shoulda had the Olympics in DC!" yuks—many athletes must be glad they're competing indoors. And while someone has already got the Johnny Weir beat covered, less attention has been paid to some other blade-wearing athletes.
The US speedskaters, who along with Vonn are the country's top medal contenders, got bad news in October when large sponsor DSB, a Dutch bank, went kaput. The speedskating federation, faced with a $300,000 hole in its budget, was bailed out by an unlikely benefactor: Stephen Colbert. No stranger to odd publicity stunts, Colbert used his powers for good in asking viewers to donate to the cause. In the first week alone they raised $202,000.
It was not without controversy. Shani Davis, who holds several world records in long track and is widely expected to take home some gold medals, went on record against the talk show host. "He's a jerk," he told a reporter in early December. "You can put that in the paper." No one, including Davis's pal Apolo Ohno, was quite certain of the reason for the rancor; as it turned out, Davis was likely reacting to a 2006 bit in which Colbert faux-chastised him for not skating in the team pursuit event in Turin.
It was a touchy subject. The team pursuit "flap" in Turin resulted in a public feud between Davis and teammate Chad Hedrick that overshadowed Davis' gold medal in the 1000m (the first gold to a black athlete in an individual Winter event in Olympics history) and culminated in a press conference so horrifically painful that it moved ESPN writer Eric Adelson to reach deep into history for a suitable comparison:
It's funny. This type of rivalry goes all the way back to the beginning of U.S. history. More than 200 years ago, a Northerner named Alexander Hamilton and a Southerner named Thomas Jefferson disliked each other so intensely that a new nation nearly crumbled in their wake. And even though that rift still exists today, we have both of them to thank for the role they played in building America.
We can only hope to eventually say the same about the fallout from SkateGate II.While Davis and Hedrick have yet to forge a new republic, they now exist on civil terms. And the rift with Colbert is a thing of the past—Davis even agreed to appear on the show.
Still, Davis remains a bit of a lone wolf, self-coached and self-represented. He has no ties to the US Speedskating Federation, and by request does not even appear in the media guide. His mother handles his press, which is to say: she is the one who denies the requests. (This go-it-aloneness, apparently, is like catnip to the Dutch: this ABC piece introduces us to characters like Ruud Bakker—no relation—the "leader of Kleintje Pils, a [Dutch] band that travels to most major skating meets and has serenaded the American for years.")
The issue of Sports Illustrated pictured above contains lengthy profiles of Davis as well as Vonn; expect them, along with Ohno, Evan Lysacek, Shaun White—and who knows, maybe the bobsledder dudes?—to dominate coverage.
And in spite of my reluctance to reward the SI cover designers for their uninspired choice, it's worth getting a copy of the Vonn-fronted SI, if only as a guide to who's who in all the random sports, but also so you can flip to a second photo of her on page 52.
Because while much is the same as the cover shot—Red Bull screams prominently from the front of her head, her legs splay in impossible angles, and she's still wearing pink; no word on the earrings though—in this one she is actually in motion, leaning into a turn, glaring out from behind her goggles, pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth with the concentration of a four-year-old learning to write out her letters.
It's a much better look.
Katie Baker writes mostly about sports and weddings and so the Winter Olympics just kind of seemed like the next logical step.
Timothy McSweeney, RIP
Timothy McSweeney, after whom the McSweeney's literary magazine and web site are named, died late last month.
As a young man, Timothy was an artist of tremendous talent. The canvases he leaves behind are filled with haunting and beautiful imagery. They are also filled with a palpable desire-to be heard, to connect, to be understood better by others and himself. The letters that inspired this journal's name were a continuation of that same lifelong effort to more intimately know the world and his place within it.
Dave Eggers tells the story of the real Timothy McSweeney and why he named the magazine after him.
Tags: Dave Eggers McSweeneys obituaries
Jeffrey Zeldman's free advice: show up early
Pretty obvious but bears repeating: "How can a client blame you for a cab driver's mistake? How can a conference organizer hold you accountable for an airline's cancelled flight? They can do it because lateness is part of the order of things, and grownup professionals plan for it, just as they plan for budget shortfalls and extra rounds of revision. If you plan to arrive early, then you are covered when circumstances beyond your control conspire to make you late."
“Python for Informatics” Open Textbook Remixed in 11 Days
Chuck Severance, clinical professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, recently published a new textbook in 11 days because he was able to remix an existing textbook. The book, Python for Informatics: Exploring Information, is currently being used in his winter semester Networked Computing course. The textbook is based on the openly licensed book Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist by Allen B. Downey. Students are able to take advantage of the University Library’s Espresso Book Machine to print on-demand copies for approximately $10. Python for Informatics is available under a CC BY-SA license.
Severance explains, “the book is a cool example of a situation where I’ve finally got to the ‘remixing’ bit of the Open promise.” The first 10 chapters are done and eight more are planned for completion by April 2010. Read more of Chuck’s thoughts about remixing an open book.
Creating this open textbook was a part of a larger effort by Chuck to support his course with openly licensed content, and current versions of lecture slides and videos are published via the PythonLearn website. In a past iteration of the course, Chuck went through the dScribe process developed by Open.Michigan to create an OER version of SI 502, available under a CC BY license.
Goodbye Gemini Will Drive You To Twinsanity!
Out on DVD is the bizarre Goodbye Gemini (Scorpion Releasing). Set in swinging London in the '70s, precocious twins Jacki (Judy Geeson) and Julien (Martin Potter) arrive at their father's flat and get rid of the meddling housekeeper by craftily placing their toy teddy bear on the stair landing. She takes a header and is carted off in an ambulance. They are then left to their own demented devices and head to a pub full of decadent swingers and a drag queen disrobing on the bar. There they meet a dissolute couple who unwisely attach themselves to the troubled twosome. The twins are weirdly incestuous and afterJulien is tricked into having a threesome with drag queens in a seedy hotel room the plot unravels into madness and murder. Jacki wanders aimlessly on the streets with a bloody sheet only to be rescued by a slumming politician (Michael Redgrave). Directed by Alan Gibson (The Satanic Rites Of Dracula) and with gorgeous cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001: A Space Odyssey/Cabaret) this was also known as Twinsanity on VHS. The DVD unleashes its true beauty and enjoyably nutty oddness.
The New Yorker: Behind the Cover
I enjoyed this look at the editorial making of a New Yorker cover starring the magazine’s art editor Françoise Mouly, and artists Dan Clowes, Zohar Lazar, and Mark Ulriksen.
Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Dan Clowes, Francoise Mouly, Mark Ulriksen, New Yorker, Zohar Lazar
The auteur's Super Bowl
What if the Super Bowl was directed by Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino? You'd get something like this. The Werner Herzog bit at the end is great.
Tags: football movies Quentin Tarantino sports Super Bowl video Werner Herzog Wes Anderson
Link: Jason Bay is Kevin McReynolds
Amazin Avenue: Bay = McReynolds? We Should Be So Lucky
…i agree with james, in terms of production, mcreynolds may get a bad rap… but, it was clearly his melaise that rubbed people the wrong way… i am not sure why everyone is rushing to compare him to Jason Bay, though… at least let bay play first, so he can find his own way in New York…
Pluto Is Going To Rocket Through Space And Kick Our Ass
Pluto is turning red. Apparently the funny little 1,467-mile-wide ball of rock and ice that snobby earthlings named after a cartoon dog before stripping of official "planet" status four years ago is entering a new phase in its 248-year-long seasonal cycle. "These changes are most likely consequences of surface ice melting on the sunlit pole and then re-freezing on the other pole," said NASA, in a statement issued by its Space Telescope Science Institute. Other astronomers, though, aren't so sanguine. Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas says, "It's a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast. This is unprecedented." We'll see what people say when the supposedly negligible "dwarf" starts to quiver and shake and lines itself itself up on a direct angle with New York.
Rebirths: Coney Island's Totonno's To Reopen One Year After Fire
[Totonno's last March (left) and today (right, via Slice)]Slice reports the happy news that Totonno's, the longstanding Coney Island pizza joint that was felled by fire last March, is reopening next Wednesday after months and months of delays. There have been a lot of a lot of false starts since owner Lawrence Ciminieri began building the place back up, but the pizza nerds promise it's for real: "We're confident that this is the real deal this time. Ciminieri says he's got all the permits now and the pizzeria is ready to go."
· Totonno's Reopening Wednesday, February 10 [Slice]
February 4, 2010
An Apology To Our Readers
On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.
After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post.
The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated.
This was not one of our full time writers, and so the frequency of posts was light. Nevertheless, we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs. We are fairly certain that most of the posts weren’t tainted in any way, but to be sure we’ve removed every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network.
Our attorneys have advised us not to disclose the name of the individual because the person is not a legal adult. We also think that, given the intern’s age, it may not be appropriate to make their identity public.
We are all shaken here at TechCrunch – this is someone who was our friend and who we trusted to be honest with our readers. Our hope is that the intern learns something from this experience and grows into the kind of person that will be more welcome in this community.
I apologize to each one of you. I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.
Update: Daniel, the intern in question, has decided to talk about this situation publicly on his blog. I’m glad that he has. You can read his thoughts here.
Reasons To Adore Saints Linebacker Scott Fujita - Scott fujita pro choice - Jezebel
Shared by Andy
And from the "Hello, I'm Japanese" ESPN post linked below:
There's another of his paternal grandmother, Lillie, who once overheard him introducing himself like this: "Hi! I'm Scott. I'm 4. And I'm Japanese."
"I swear I'm not delusional," Fujita says, chuckling at the memory. "I know I don't have a drop of Japanese blood in me. But what is race? It's just a label. The way you're raised, your family, the people you love—that means more than everything else."
Love this guy. And I love California.
For one thing, he doesn't care if anyone calls him a "Pinko Communist Fag from Berkeley." Also:
1) He diplomatically but firmly opposed the message of the Tebow ad, which will air during the Super Bowl Fujita is playing in Sunday. "The idea of focusing on the family - who wouldn't agree with that?" he told The New York Times. "But the means of doing so, he and I might not see eye to eye all the way." Fujita was adopted, and his biological mother was a teenager when he was born. "I'm just so thankful she had the courage and the support system to be able to carry out the pregnancy," Fujita said. "I wouldn't expect that of everybody."
2) He lent his name to the National Equality March and has been outspoken about gay rights issues.
3) He supports an orphanage in New Orleans and started speaking out on gay rights in part because of his objection to laws limiting gay adoption. "What [such laws] are really saying is that the concern with one's sexual orientation or one's sexual preference outweighs what's really important, and that's finding safe homes for children," he has said. "It's also saying that we'd rather have kids bounce around from foster home to foster home throughout the course of their childhood, than end up in a permanent home."
4) He's active on behalf breast cancer awareness (his mother is a two-time survivor), filming PSAs for Susan G. Komen New Orleans Race for the Cure and wearing a pink hat during interviews.
5) He's not afraid to speak up for his beliefs in a respectful, reasoned way. "People tell me, hey, that's pretty courageous. You come out in favor of gay rights. I don't think it's that courageous," he told The Times. "I think I have an opinion, that I wish was shared by everybody, but I honestly believe that it's shared by more [football players] than we know because a lot of people just won't speak out about it."
6) His teammates say his outspokenness has fueled debates in less-likely quarters. Says linebacker Scott Shanle,"We all like when he brings out his opinions. Debates get started."
7) He left the Dallas Cowboys for the post-Katrina New Orleans Saints because, according to The Boston Globe, "he told himself, 'This could be bigger than football.''"
8) He often talks of drawing inspiration from the example set by his strong-willed Japanese-American grandmother, who was interned during World War II.
9) He has a political science degree from Berkeley and a master's in education. He has said he wants to be a public school teacher after retiring from football.
Bill Murray visits Bourdain’s show. Can you imagine two...
Bill Murray visits Bourdain’s show. Can you imagine two cooler dinner companions?
via molly lambert, anthony de rosa.
Refinery29: Oscar Nominee Carey Mulligan's Easy Hair and Makeup Win Our Vote
We were thrilled to hear about Carey Mulligan's Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in An Education. The honor confirms what we knew all along: The girl's got talent. But we fell in love with her first and foremost because of her amazing look. On- and off-screen, Carey wears a clean, natural look that focuses on the basics: A dusty rose lipstick, lightly blushed cheeks, and strong, clean eyebrows. Her bare-bones approach to beauty complements the retro-chic look she's known for to create an effect that is at once fresh and classic. Top it all off with an adorable pixie cut and we've got ourselves a modern-day Audrey Hepburn. Bravo Carey! Here are our suggestions for achieving Carey's easy look at home.
Above, clockwise from top left: Carey Mulligan, image via The Hollywood Reporter; Carey Mulligan, image via WireImage.com; Anastasia Go Brow Dual Brow Shaper, $21, available at Sephora; J.Crew Dogwood Decadence Necklace, $135, available at J.Crew; Bumble and Bumble Sumowax, $24, available at Bumble and Bumble; Shu Uemura Glow On Blush in m amber 82, $21, available at Shu Uemura; Guerlain Rouge G de Guerlain Jewelry Lipstick Compact in Gemma 64, $45, available at Sephora.
A Perl Programming Maintenance Checklist
Polemic: anyone who believes that any specific general purpose programming language is inherently unmaintainable has opinions on software development worth ignoring.
Many people claim that the design of Perl 5 has such significant flaws that render it far too difficult to write and maintain useful programs. Many of the supporting arguments are syntactic preferences. "I don't like sigils!" "Context make no senses to my!" "Real men don't need your sissy curly braces to accompany our manly indentation!" "Isn't
blessa little bit cutesy for our Serious Enterprise Business Application?"Other arguments... well, you've heard them.
Perl 5 has some design flaws, but I believe that syntax is such a small part of maintainability that only the most facile discussions focus on syntax to the exclusion of more important concerns. The next time you have trouble maintaining a Perl 5 program, ask yourself:
- Have I learned the language by reading documentation and working through tutorials, or am I fiddling with changing things by trial and error and guesswork and intuition based on experience in other languages?
- Do I know how to use
perldocto look up builtins and language features?- Have I skimmed the Perl FAQ included in every Perl 5 distribution?
- Have I used Perl::Tidy to unify the formatting into a consistent style?
- Do I know the difference between void, scalar, and list context? Can I identify them?
- Do I know how to use B::Deparse to explain the evaluation plan of complex constructs?
- Does this program have a set of automated tests I can trust?
- Did the original programmer understand the problem domain? Do I?
- Did the original programmer "borrow" this code from elsewhere, change a few lines, and add a modified copyright statement?
- Did this program grow from a throwaway idea into a critical business component without planning, design, or refactoring?
- Is the original author available to answer questions, whether in person or through some sort of design notes?
- Is the program well-factored?
- Does the program include appropriate documentation for its purpose, its major systems, its APIs, and any surprising design decisions?
- Do I have a clear understanding of what the program does and why?
- Does the program have a modular design, with well-enforced encapsulation boundaries between components?
- Can I configure and build the program on my local system?
- Can I deploy it?
- Does the code show examples of idiomatic programming from authors fluent in the language, or is it a pastiche of styles cribbed from documentation and witch-doctor expermentation?
- Did the original author know how to program in any language?
- Did the original author take advantage of obvious strengths of the host language in appropriate ways (or did he distrust arrays and continually write to and read from a temporary file instead—I have seen this with my own eyes, and the host language was not Perl)?
- Does the program take advantage of well-known and trustworthy external libraries?
- Does the build process spew compiler errors and warnings? Does the program spew warnings and errors when deployed?
- Does the program contain obvious repetition and near repetition?
- Would you be proud of writing the program in six months?
Note how few of these concerns have anything to do with Perl—and, of those that do, trivial rewording would make them appropriate for other languages.
Real America: The Linemen
Maybe you have heard of football and the game's championship "Super Bowl" this Sunday? And maybe you see football as the most American of games. But baseball is America's game. Not football. And yet, so many identify football with America. This is so wrong. Football is American only in a few disparate, sometimes contradictory, ways—even while football may be the least American team sport. Now, football cheerleaders, they are American. I dare you to identify something more American than football cheerleaders. But football itself is practically European. It is a sport controlled by money-sharing, redistribution-of-wealth agreements and a strong labor union. No team is allowed to get too wildly rich. Everyone needs to work together to accomplish a goal. It's downright socialist. The only way in which football is American is that coaches, like executives, always get new jobs after failing miserably and that Keith Olbermann ruins everything.
Football is also the most team-oriented major sport. No single person can carry a football team. Teams are made up of a large number of men who specialize in highly specific jobs, with almost none of them able to do any other one's job. And their physicality is evidence of the specificity of their work. In what other sport can you find a 6'5" 365-pound dude and a 5'11" 198-pound dude on the same field and on the same team?
Now, in the lead-up to Sunday's Super Bowl, there will be a lot of story-lines. Haitian player supports the homeland. Peyton Manning plays dad's old team. A Saints win means New Orleans has finally fully recovered and we can all openly stop caring about its plight (which of course we all did back in 2007). One narrative that will not bubble up to the surface, because it never does, is that of the offensive lineman.
Offensive linemen are statistical phantoms. Penalties are the only numbers offensive linemen ever accrue. Yet their duties are the foundation of every star's on-field success, from the quarterback to the wide-receiver to the kicker. If the linemen don't play well, the household-name players with endorsement deals fail to be superstars at all. And yet the cameras almost never show them, unless, once again, they screw up.
There is no fantasy football offensive line. And even fervent football fans such as myself can name very few linemen. The Baltimore Ravens' Michael Oher is now probably the best-known lineman—and not because of his on-field play but instead because of the story of his hard-knock life. And even then, the protagonist is the woman who saves him, Sandra Bullock. Oher just blocks for her.
Drew Brees is a superstar quarterback who can find receivers and make tremendous throws. But what would announcers say about Brees if the Saints line had given up more than just 20 sacks this season? And what of the Colts' hall-of-fame-bound Manning, who was sacked only half of that?
I asked Bob Bostad, the offensive line coach for the University of Wisconsin Badgers, what makes offensive linemen different than other players. "I will be short," he said. "I believe that offensive linemen have a higher level of accountability. They don’t 'make plays.' They must allow others to, so assignment and consistency within the game plan is essential."
One paradox of being an "offensive" lineman is that you are often on defense. That is to say, you are often trying to prevent a result. In pass blocking schemes, this means taking your drop step and then waiting to get hammered by a bull rush over and over again. Success is not measured by what you did but by what you kept someone else from doing. With the job that essentially boils down to "protection," is it any surprise that so many offensive lineman are married family men?
Coach O'Brien is head coach of the Fall River Pirates middle school program in Wisconsin. Last year he went 9-0. He says it was maybe his best O-line:
There are two major misconceptions about linemen. That they are unathletic and that they are not smart. Asking the backside guard to pull all the way across the formation and kick out an outside linebacker is no easy task. Pass blocking is akin to playing defense in basketball… only rougher. At higher levels of football o-linemen are often asked to make calls and adjustments at the line of scrimmage and relay the changes to their linemates. The center is probably the most cerebral of the positions. In fall camp, I always try to pick my center first and find a smart kid to fill that role. And while coaches are always using cliches and metaphors, one of my favorites is five separate fingers on a hand are weak. However when all five of those five fingers work together to make a fist they can do some serious damage. The same goes for your offensive line.Going into the deal, they know they will never get any of the credit and will do most of the work. The only time they get noticed is when they screw up. It takes a special kind of person to be a good offensive linemen… O-linemen need to have a 'big picture' view. Good linemen are often your hardest workers and humble, add in a little mean streak and you have someone special. I have always said linemen are the heart and soul of a team.
Before he was Coach O'Brien he was just Andy O'Brien, and I played offensive line with him. I was a pulling guard and later a center. A fairly bad one too, on a succession of teams that were not great. The Seattle Seahawks of our conference. But I contend that there is no more "team" feeling than being part of an offensive line as you break huddle and swagger up to a 4th and goal, shoulder to shoulder.
My only lament about being an offensive lineman is not the lack of recognition or the mangled fingers from being "cleated" or the play-after-play brutality, which even for a lover of physical violence such as myself, can grow weary and tiring by the 4th quarter (especially when the defense won't do its job), or the defensive ends hands to your face that the ref never sees, or just the simple, annoying fact that you fall down on almost every damn play.
No, the biggest problem is off the football field. Offensive linemen are perceived as fat. But most really are not. That's right, the offensive lineman has body image issues.
Bodies like an oil drum stacked atop another oil drum with another oil drum atop that; no fashion looks good on them. Thighs thicker than waists; no pants fit properly. Calves like two-gallon milk jugs. A sport coat is an absurd waste of a cotton field. Offensive lineman—especially great offensive linemen—are freaks of nature towering the height of some NBA players but with muscle on top of muscle on top of bone the thickness of baseball bats, and then some fat padding atop that. Banana Republic, J. Crew, Express—their cuts are hopeless. When one can even find a stylish size 46 (or 56) jacket, the arms are too narrow. Shopping at H&M is an absurd farce for any proper guard, tackle or center. Skinny jeans and the hipster aesthetic are a conspiracy against people who can lift their own body weight straight up over their heads, and then do it again.
So as you watch the Super Bowl this Sunday, take a moment to consider the offensive linemen. They would appreciate it… even though they wouldn't expect it.
Abe Sauer really has a hard time shopping.
Jonathan Schwartz Tweets His Resignation in Haiku
Schwartz ran Sun into ground.
Now cracks cute, with jokey haiku.
Ignominious.
Comcast Rebranding as ‘Xfinity’
Bob Fernandez, reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Comcast Corp. said yesterday that it would re-brand its TV, Internet, and telephone services as Xfinity on Feb. 12 to signal to customers that this isn’t the same old company. […]
This re-branding comes as Comcast has struggled to rebuild its reputation because of poor service and problems with its network that resulted in telephone and Internet outages. Its customer-satisfaction rating is among the lowest in the industry, but it has improved slightly in the last year. Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said the re-branding was not an attempt to distance the service from the Comcast name. “This is about our product. It is about providing our customers with products that just keep getting better.”
Many companies walk away from household name brands just for kicks. Sure.
Not your father's evolution
Recent evidence of horizontal gene transfer -- in which genes are exchanged from other organisms, not from ancestors -- has some scientists thinking that the dominant form of evolution for most of the Earth's history was between non-related organisms and not among ancestors.
In the past few years, a host of genome studies have demonstrated that DNA flows readily between the chromosomes of microbes and the external world. Typically around 10 per cent of the genes in many bacterial genomes seem to have been acquired from other organisms in this way, though the proportion can be several times that. So an individual microbe may have access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it, including those of other microbe species. "It's natural to wonder if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level," says Goldenfeld.
Read on for their hypothesis about how horizontal evolution drove innovation -- development of a universal genetic code and genetic innovation-sharing protocols -- in life forms early on in the Earth's history. Fascinating.
Tags: biology evolution genetics science
Pizza Wars!: How Motorino Beat out 15 Northeast Rival Pizzerias
Over on Slice, Adam Kuban confirms yesterday's report that he and boss Ed Levine scoured the country to find the best pizzeria for Every Day with Rachael Ray. And the kids over at Grub Street have the awesome visual of how the brackets broke down, showing that Motorino had to beat out NYC pizza heavy hitters Di Fara, Co., Keste, Grimaldi's, Franny's, Fornino, and Lucali and a handful of out of staters. And while it seems Kuban and Levine were the real decision makers here a piece in the News today hints that the 30 Minute cook may have had an influence. She lives right by Motorino's East Village location and frequents it with her husband all the time: "She had a party of 15 here on Saturday, and she comes a lot with her husband." Di Fara, you didn't have a chance.
· Best Pizza in America: The Visual [GS]
· What Pizza Madness 2009 Was all About [Slice]
monopoly revolution
monopoly revolution
the classic board game monopoly will get a new look for its 75th anniversary edition version, named
revolution. the new game will feature a circular board as opposed to the traditional square. the game
will also no use the paper money that was so closely linked to the original version. instead users will
make payments through the central digital bank using credit cards. in addition to these major changes,
the new version also has different names for the colour coded properties.
http://www.hasbro.com/monopoly
classic monopoly
Eight Items or Less: Hot Chip and Hot Chocolate
1. The countdown to the February 14th opening of the second NYC location of Opening Ceremony in the Ace Hotel (20 West 29th Street) has begun.
2. There's a release party for Hot Chip's new album One Life Stand tonight, February 4, at Baddies (20 Greenwich Avenue at West 10th Street, 10 p.m.) with DJ sets by Boy Crisis vs. Das Racist. Free with RSVP to: baddiesrsvp@gbh.tv.3. The 18th Annual Hot Chocolate Festival at The City Bakery (3 West 18th Street) runs until February 27 with new flavors every day.4. NME says that the Scissor Sisters have collab'd with Mark Ronson on a track for his next album, The Business, due out this spring.5. Art Fag City reveals changes coming to this year's Whitney Biennial (945 Madison Avenue, February 25 to May 30): Exhibited works must not have been seen before, the museum's third floor will be devoted entirely to film/video, the fifth floor will showcase works from past biennials and there will be no exhibits at the Park Avenue Armory.6. Has there been a shake-up at DFA Records?
Agency is the Intelligent Design of the Internet
Aaron Cope: "Can you really imagine the people heavily invested in the real estate markets in cities like New York or London or Tokyo operating a shared mesh network that would offer an advantage or even just a level playing field to the people they are competing with? No, me neither. Which isn't to say it can't be done. In fact, we've done it before. We've built a publicly funded and supervised shared infrastucture that private citizens and commercial enterprises can use: It's called the sewage system and we're the better for it. Say what you want about municipal governments or unions but your toilet still works."
The past is another country.
They say "boner" differently there.
What a happy circumstance it is for us here in the present that "boner" once meant "stupid blunder." I own a copy of this collection of Batman stories featuring the Joker. It contains the infamous "Joker's Comedy of Errors," in which the titular villain goes on a crime spree organized around history's greatest boners. A very partial list of its delights:
Only a sense of humor like the Joker's could think of tranlating boners into crimes!
When the clown prince of crookdom sets out to re-create the classic errors of history for personal gain--and in addition readies a special boner just for Batman--it all adds up to one of the most exciting adventures ever to befall the dynamic duo.
The Joker's Collection of the Great Boners of History.
So! They'll laugh at my boner, will they?! I'll show them! I'll show them how many boners the Joker can make!
This emphasis on boners has given me an idea for a new adventure in crime!
I will take the great boners of all time and turn them into crimes!
See this picture? It shows a big boner of modern vintage.
Soon, Batman will make the boner of the year!
I'm worried about the boner he's readying for YOU!
It represents one of the classic boners of all time.
Confound that Batman! It is well that I am ready to trick him into HIS boner.
Gotham City will rue the day it mentioned the word boner!
Quite. The past also gives us this:
Vintage collections of howlers, illustrated by Dr Seuss! And this:
No excuse for draft boards to pull boners now (Jan 1949).
You might think that the 1980s were too recent to produce a prime-time character unblinkingly named Boner, but history disagrees.
What's more, the actor, Andrew Koenig, appeared as the Joker in a popular fan-made short film called "Batman: Dead End." Can this be a coincidence? Surely not.
That's right, Simpy. Never apologize, never explain.
Boner.
Obama's Problem With The White Working Class
I thought were done with this after the election. Evidently not. Here's John Judis:Here is a fact: Barack Obama has trouble generating enthusiasm among white working class voters. That's not because they are white. He would have had trouble winning support among black working class voters if they had been unable to identify with him because he was black. He has trouble with working class voters because he appears to them as coming from a different world, a different realm of experience, a different class, if you like. And that's because he does.Judis continues:Obama's parents were professionals--his mother was an anthropology PhD and his father was a Harvard-trained economist. How much money they made was immaterial. His grandmother, who raised him in Hawaii, was a bank vice-president. He went to a fancy private school and to prestigious colleges (Occidental and Columbia) that turn out professionals and managers. He clearly was not obsessed with making money, but with performing a public service--yet that doesn't distinguish him from other professionals or other Columbia graduates. It does distinguish him from a working- or middle-class American for whom being a civil rights lawyer or professor or politician is at best a passing fantasy...I don't really understand this. By Judis' own definition--professional parents, private schools, prestigious college, aspiration to be a politician--George W. Bush was a yuppie. I haven't ran the numbers, maybe Bush's yuppie background kept him from relating to the white working class also.
Yes, there have been some gifted politicians of an upper class or professional background who have been able to do so. Some, like Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, or Ronald Reagan, could draw upon their working class childhoods; others, like Franklin Roosevelt or Edward Kennedy, could evince a kind of upper-class paternalism. This made them great politicians. It didn't necessarily make them great men or great Americans. Barack Obama is, by any fair measure, a great American, and he could turn out to be a great president. But he is not yet a great politician. He has not been able to transcend the political limits of his own social background. And that has been one of his problems as he attempts to extricate America from the mess he inherited.
Judis then charges that Obama, as a yuppie, "has not been able to transcend the political limits of his social background." I call this moving the goal-posts. I think it's fair to say that in 2008, Judis thought those "limits" included winning the presidency, to say nothing of winning Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio.
I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way, but I think one of two things--and maybe both things--have to be true after the election. Obama, a black man among other things, actually did transcend his "social background" by winning in 2008. Or we need to stop ascribing near totemic power to the "white working class."
Imaginary iPad conversations with critics over the last week
But you can't program on it! It's locked down. I'd never be a programmer if this was my first computer.
There are thousands of programmers working in the world of gaming, making tomorrow's next big console hit. Heck, most every web professional knows at least one old buddy working at EA or doing texture mapping at Blizzard.
What does a new xbox360 do these days besides simply play a disk you paid $60 for? Sure it's got some networking but doesn't come with a keyboard and you can't see the source code for any games, but you know what? The industry seems to be healthy and doing fine, and those kids that grew up playing black-box consoles with no root access still decided they wanted to make new games and found the tools and job to make that possible.
It doesn't support Flash!
A lot of ink has been spilled on this one and it baffles me. Aside from the rare times I waste some time with flash games, this is really no big deal. In 2.5 years using an iPhone, I've learned that missing out on content thanks to being in flash is a rare event and usually only found on badly designed restaurant websites (where I end up getting the info from Google instead) or advertising. I've never been stuck somewhere due to flash blocking my way to information, plus thanks to sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo adoptiong HTML5, I can even view web video directly in my iPhone. The iPad will be just fine without Flash.
The app store and OS are too closed, you can't run any program you want on it!
My first thought when seeing web browsing in the iPad demo was delight that this was more of an appliance than a computer and that it could just plain Get Shit Done.
I have a Mac Pro as my main machine at home but I travel occasionally with a MacBook Air. I pull out the Air once every couple weeks and realize I have a whole other computer I have to manage, with multiple Software Updates to download and install, programs to keep in sync with my desktop, and applications I need to download and install to match my desktop work environment. It's a hassle that adds time to packing and preparing for trips and often I wish the Air worked more like an iPhone where everything was in sync all the time and I could just pluck it off and shelf, and head to the airport.
Also, have you ever used an unlocked iPhone? There are good reasons why closed systems like the App Store work. Unlock your iPhone for a few days and find that battery life turns to absolute shit, programs randomly crash and lock up your phone and are generally unreliable after you load more than 3 or 4, and finding new apps on the unlocked app directories is all about needles in haystacks. In the end, I gave up on unlocked iPhones when I installed a display theme that bricked my phone. Let me repeat: changing the appearance using a springboard replacement app made my phone inoperable and had to be fully restored from scratch. I began to appreciate controlled closed programming environments after that.
No support for multitasking!
Again, I have to refer to my 2.5 years on an iPhone where I've found this a problem only once or twice, where I needed to switch from an app to the web to look up info, went back to the app only to find it reset itself and lost my state. Among the tens of thousands of times I've launched and used applications on my iPhone, I've only run into this a handful of times and managed to figure workarounds out anyway. This is not a problem, especially for the kind of simple email/web/etc apps run on the iPhone/iPad.
So far, the iPad looks like the ultimate device to have on a plane (no pesky keyboard to get in the way of cramped coach seat spaces + 10hr battery life while watching movies?!), it's the ultimate web surfing device to use on the couch and around the house, it'll make toddler games with my four year old even better than an iPod Touch/iPhone, and it'll be great to have in the kitchen to look up recipes without the huge footprint of a laptop (while also being easier to read than a phone). I'm planning to get one (wifi only) and looking forward to how it'll work when traveling versus a laptop. I suspect it will be a laptop replacement for travel in almost all circumstances (photo/video editing is about the only away-from-home use case I'd need a laptop for).
LXXXVIII Lines About XLIV Super Bowl
One of the things about getting older is that you get used to things. I’m not saying jaded. I’m a big believer that you have to try very hard in life to not get jaded. But you do get used to things. Take the Super Bowl. This is my 13th Super Bowl. I’ve had one more Super Bowl than wedding anniversary. Whatever that means.
Well, one thing that it means is that I’ve seen all this before. Many times. And after a while, it all just begins to feel … normal. The hype. The absurdity. The ridiculous questions. The cliche answers. Normal. At my first Super Bowl, one of the big questions to players was this: “How are you dealing with the Super Bowl hype?” As time went on, the question turned on itself: “How are you dealing with all the questions about the Super Bowl hype?” And now, the question has added another layer: “How will you dealing with the hype of media day where people will ask you about how you are dealing with the hype of the Super Bowl?”
It’s only a matter of time before people ask how players are the dealing with the questions about the questions about the questions about the questions.
That’s OK to me, though. It seems to me that when you name a game “Super Bowl” and place Roman Numerals after it and bring back The Who from the crypt to play halftime, you are pretty much letting everyone know in advance that you consider this a pretty big game. Hype is part of the Super Bowl just like sensory overload is part of a trip to Las Vegas and the “It’s a Small World” song is part of the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World. If you’re going to write about the Super Bowl, you better embrace the hype.
What’s not OK to me, though, is that after being a few of these Super Bowls, it’s easy to lose the thrill of it all. You can’t help it. Media day loses its weirdness. The back and forth banter loses its charm. The hype loses its hype. I remember the first time I went to a Super Bowl banquet hall press conference. You probably know that every Wednesday and Thursday of Super Bowl week, they will rent out these giant banquet halls and they will get every player from each team and put them at a table somewhere in the hall. And then — seriously — they will give reporters treasure maps* so that will know where to find the players we want. It’s like journalism and an Easter Egg hunt all at once.*
*I have always thought they should make these maps really complicated so that we have to solve Da Vinci Code type puzzles in order to figure out where, say, Jeff Saturday is sitting. So far, they haven’t done it that way, but I hope.
Anyway, the first time I went into one of these banquet halls, I thought it was just about the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Here were all the players and all the coaches, each one with his own story, his own journey, his own feelings about playing in the biggest game in American sports. I was just blown away.
And, to be honest, I don’t get the same feelings walking into that banquet hall now. This is probably because I have been in the Super Bowl banquet hall so many times I understand that, yes, they all HAVE their own stories and journeys and feelings. But they mostly SAY the same things, which includes how:
1. It’s a dream come true.
2. They have to treat this like any other game.
3. They have a lot of friends who want tickets.
4. They will take it one play at a time.
5. They will find time to enjoy the moment.
6. They have the ultimate respect for their opponent.
7. They think they will win.Virtually everything that is said in the banquet hall will fall under one of those seven categories. And so, yes, it’s so easy to get used to the banquet hall press conferences, to grow deaf to the same quotes, to get exhausted by Super Bowl week. But, I think that’s dangerously close to becoming jaded. And that’s not good.
So, this year, I am taking the quotes very seriously. I am writing down every single thing I hear, whether I think it’s interesting or not. I am reading every single quote sheet.* I am going to try to see this game with the same wonder I felt when I went to my first Super Bowl.
*There have been 103 … and counting.
And so this is the plan: Tomorrow, I will write a Super Bowl XLIV column with XLIV quotes in it. And today, in honor of The Nails’ classic song “88 Lines about 44 Women,” I am offering LXXXVIII lines about XLIV Super Bowl.
If nothing else, this should give all the people too busy to follow the Super Bowl something to talk about at the office on Friday.
1. Colts quarterback Peyton Manning always looks like he’s changing plays at the line.
2. Many people think he’s bluffing.
3. The Colts teammates insist he’s not bluffing.
4. But those Colts teammates could be bluffing.5. People in New Orleans have been inspired by the Saints.
6. The Saints insist that it’s the people of New Orleans who have inspired them.
7. It’s like a big inspiration circle.8. Saints’ coach Sean Payton is a mastermind at creating matchup problems.
9. This leads to the inevitable comparison between coaching football and playing chess.
10. In chess, though, it doesn’t really help if you yell at your bishop.11. Colts receiver Pierre Garcon is from Haitian descent.
12. This has led to many questions about the devastation and suffering in Haiti.
13. This is a very difficult line to walk. On the one hand, Garcon’s heart obviously aches for Haiti and he hopes his Super Bowl performance can bring just a little bit of light into the terrible darkness. On the other hand, he’s a football player playing a game; what can he say that will sound right when dealing with this sort of tragedy?
14. Still, the question keeps coming at him.15. Colts coach Jim Caldwell seems like a very nice and very boring guy.
16. Colts tight end Dallas Clark went to Iowa as a walk-on linebacker.
17. As a junior, he won the John Mackey Award as America’s best college tight end.
18. He then left for the NFL.
19. Dallas Clark has to be the only player in college football history to start as a walk-on and then leave school early to join the NFL.20. The Saints want to cause turnovers.
21. The Colts want to cause turnovers.
22. You get the feeling neither team feels too confident in their ability to actually STOP the other teams offense. They need fumbles and interceptions.23. The Super Bowl media center is only a couple of miles away from where Chris Evert learned how to play tennis.
24. People have underestimated Drew Brees all his life.
25. People are still underestimating him and this Saints team.
26. Brees likes being underestimated.27. Special teams will play an important part in the game.
28. The offensive lines will play an important part in the game.
29. Defensive intensity will play an important part in the game.
30. Luck will play an important part in the game.
31. But good teams make their own luck.32. Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney might not play because of a bad ankle.
33. Colts defensive end Dwight Freeney might surprise people and play even with the bad ankle.
34. The next 3,497 questions heard at the Super Bowl will revolve around Nos. 32 and 33.35. Florida quarterback Tim Tebow did an anti-abortion commercial that will appear during the Super Bowl.
36. Many think Tebow will be flop in the NFL because of his flaws as a quarterback.
37. Many think Tebow will be an NFL star because of his competitiveness and athletic ability.
38. After the Freeney questions, the next 1,734 questions will revolve around Tebow.39. Brees says that nobody ever came into the NFL with the expectations of Saints running back Reggie Bush.
40. Bush has not yet rushed for 600 yards in an NFL season.
41. Bush admits it’s disappointing that he has not yet achieved stardom.
42. But after playoff run — three touchdowns in two games — he thinks he is on the brink.43. The Who is playing at halftime.
44. Nobody seems to know if Pete Townshend will smash his guitar after the performance.
45. The guess seems to be that, yes, he will smash his guitar.
46. Townshend smashing his guitar at halftime of the Super Bowl will show you just how much of a cliche that tired bit of music rebellion has become.47. The Colts cannot run the ball at all. They finished dead last in the NFL in rushing yards.
48. The Colts DO NOT run the ball. They were second-last in rushing attempts.
49. The Colts insist they will try to run the ball in the Super Bowl.50. A few people suggest that the Saints defense “plays dirty.”
51. The Saints’ defenders insist that they do not play dirty at all.
52. The Saints prefer to call it “playing hard.”53. The Super Bowl Media Center is about three miles from the Swimming Hall of Fame.
54. Does Michael Phelps have to wait five years after his last Olympics to be eligible?55. Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams said that his players need to hit Peyton Manning early and often.
56. Of course, EVERY defensive coordinator says that before the team plays the Colts.
57. Manning was sacked 10 times all year. He was sacked 14 times last year.
58. The Saints are probably not going to hit Peyton Manning a whole lot.59. Colts coach Jim Caldwell seems like a very nice and very boring guy.
60. Oh, wait, I already said that.61. Matt Stover at age 41 will kick for the Colts.
62. Matt Stover has never led the league in scoring.
63. But Matt Stover, over his career, is fourth all-time in the league in scoring.64. The Saints offensive line won the Madden Most Valuable Protectors Award as the best offensive line in football.
65. The award was accepted by Saints great Archie Manning which is striking on two counts.
66. One, Manning is of course the father of Colts quarterback Peyton Manning.
67. Two, Manning never got much offensive line protection in his Saints career.
68. Archie Manning was sacked 49 times in 13 Saints games in 1975.
69. Peyton Manning has been sacked 45 times the last three seasons. Combined.70. This looks to be the last game for Colts legendary offensive line coach Howard Mudd.
71. Mudd was at the first Super Bowl as a fan.
72. Mudd has coached offensive lines for six NFL teams (seven if you count the Seahawks twice) going back 36 years.
73. He’s been around so long, his official Colts’ title is “Senior Offensive Line Coach.”74. This is the first time since 1993 that No. 1 seed in both conferences will face each other in the Super Bowl.
75. People recite this stat mechanically. But doesn’t it mean something? Doesn’t it mean that being a No. 1 seed — being the best team in your conference — does not provide enough of an advantage come playoff time?76. Saints receiver Marques Colston, at 6-foot-4, 225 pounds, is expected to cause match-up headaches for the Colts.
77. Colston went to Hofstra and, perhaps because of that, was a seventh-round draft pick. He was chosen 252nd overall.
78. Don’t you wonder: How do NFL teams who spend countless hours and millions of dollars scouting players — and all desperately need big receivers who cause matchup problems — miss players like Marques Colston?79. The Saints players embrace that they’re the underdog.
80. The Saints players insist that they’re not the underdog.
81. The Colts players embrace that they’re the favorite.
82. The Cols players insist that they’re not the favorite.83. Neither of these teams have played outdoors since the beginning of January.
84. Because of this, there has been way too much talk about the weather.
85. The weather right now looks like it will be 71 and sunny.86. The highest-scoring Super Bowl was in 1994 when San Francisco beat San Diego 49-26.
87. The highest-scoring COMPETITIVE Super Bowl was 1978, when Pittsburgh beat Dallas 35-31.
88. There’s every reason to believe and hope this will be the highest scoring competitive game in Super Bowl history.
Iron-plated snail
A snail that lives near the hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean has developed an unusual defense mechanism: it uses the iron sulfide in the surrounding water to make an iron-plated shell with some interesting properties.
Part of its ability to resist damage seems to be the way the shell deforms when it's struck: It produces cracks that dissipate the force of the blow, and nanoparticles that injure whatever is attacking it
Refinery29: Charlotte Gainsbourg Talks to Flaunt About Her New Album, IRM
Flaunt magazine describes Charlotte Gainsbourg as "France's favorite daughter" in its current issue. Graceful, weird, and defiant, Gainsbourg is exactly the type of quirky offspring that France would be fiercely proud of. Her latest effort is a new album, IRM (MRI in French), produced by Beck and written and recorded in the months following a water-skiing accident a few years ago that resulted in emergency brain surgery and numerous sessions inside an MRI machine. Read more about the conception of the album and take a gander at the lovely editorial in this month's Flaunt, on newsstands now!
Computers shouldn't make people feel like idiots
Predictably, some argue the iPad doesn’t do enough. It needs a keyboard or a removable battery or multitasking ability or whatever.
But there’s an interesting backlash to that backlash. (Meta-backlash!) The discussion has people openly discussing an ugly truth that doesn’t typically get a lot of play among tech geeks: People don’t know how to use computers. And not just stupid people. Millions of people. People who are adults. And that’s pretty damn lame.
(Bold emphasis in the following excerpts is mine.)
Fraser Speirs writes this in “Future Shock”:
I’m often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they’re thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges…
The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.
Steven Frank says:
Since the days of the Apple ][, C64, and Atari 400, all we’ve done is add, add, add. Add more features to sell more computers. We’ve never stopped to take anything away.
I’m weary of this notion (even when presented as satire) that anyone who can’t master a computer must clearly be mentally retarded.
So while we trump up our skills at designing “easy to use” interfaces for our applications, millions of people are still trying to figure out how to get our beautifully designed application out of its zip file or disk image. Or where in fact the Downloads folder is. Or what, exactly, a folder is. If we hadn’t been there for every step of the personal computer evolution since the days of DOS and AppleSoft, I wager we’d find it pretty bloody confusing as well.
Jared Lewandowski “On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing”:
My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”
I was utterly flabbergasted. She NEVER talks about computers or technology. She tolerates them at best. Her attitude is typical of most baby boomers I’ve talked to regarding computers. She wants to benefit from them but is frustrated by the wall she must climb in order to do so. She’s learned how to use email and a couple of other things on the Internet and that’s about it…
I’ve long felt that computers were too hard to use, that the filesystem should NEVER be seen by the user. That human-computer interaction should favor the “human” side.
That these conversations are even going on is a good sign. For those of us surrounded by the minutiae of computers all day, it’s easy to forget there’s a world of people out there who just don’t get it. And it’s not their fault. It’s ours.
Apple has decided it’s worth throwing out advanced features in order to get these people onboard. Anyone who builds apps would be wise to consider taking a similar path. (Note: It’s not just about making a computer or an app more accessible for people who don’t get it. It’s also for people who do get it because this way is better.)
You can spend so much effort tweaking code or a specific part of the UI or adding a new pet feature that you forget the most important thing of all: People need to be able to START using your product. If they can’t do that, who cares about the rest?
You can crank up the snow machine. You can set up the slalom course perfectly. You can shape all the moguls so they’re just right. But if people can’t ever get on the ski lift, there ain’t gonna be any race.
Vegetative state not so vegetative
Using brain scanning equipment and a cleverly designed interrogation technique, scientists have been able to ask questions of so-called vegetative patients; one of them even answered yes or no questions:
Tags: brains neuroscience scienceSeveral times when Subject 23 was asked to imagine playing tennis, Monti said, the region of the brain most closely associated with complex motor planning became highly active, and stayed active for 30 seconds after researchers prompted such imagery by saying "tennis."
Similarly, when researchers asked the patient to imagine walking through the house where he grew up and then said the word "navigate," Subject No. 23 responded with bursts of activity in the region of the brain involved in constructing and navigating a mental map.
The young, French-speaking man was the only subject who was then trained to answer simple yes or no questions -- whether his father's name was Paul (yes) or Alexander (no), whether he had siblings and how many -- using the imagery technique he had already learned.
Checking the patient's responses for accuracy and comparing them to the yes-no brain responses of a group of healthy volunteers, researchers discerned that Subject No. 23 was not only still "in there," but capable of purposeful thought and communication.
Anthony Bourdain - Schooled By A Young Fan
I favorited a YouTube video: Tony is schooled by a young fan on a brand new episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. The new season continues Monday at 10pm E/P on Travel Channel. http://travelchannel.com/bourdain?refcd=abnr-yt
What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps
Trouble is, implementing the best scaling practices is not free, and is often overlooked early in a product's lifecycle. Small teams use modern frameworks to quickly develop useful applications, with little need to worry about scale: today you can run a successful application on very little infrastructure... at least, you can up to a point. Past this point lies an uncomfortable middle ground, where small teams face scaling challenges as their system becomes successful, often without the benefit of an ideal design or lots of resources to implement one. This article will lay out some pragmatic advice for getting past this point in the real world of limited foresight and budgets. via arstechnica.com and kellan
Listage: Baristas Test The Slayer, $18,000 Espresso Machine; Disappearing Fresh Nut Stores
Ward III [Flickr Photo Pool/eateryROW]· Baristas Test The Slayer, $18,000 Espresso Machine [SE]
· Profile of Boston's Bocuse d'Or Hopeful, Christopher Parsons [BG]
· Restaurants Continue to Close, But Rate Of Closure Has Improved [NRN]
· One Fan's Wacky Alton Brown Encounter [FNH]
· Head-Scratching Restaurant Names [SFC]
· Super Bowl Favorites from Batali, Lagasse, Fieri, Cat Cora, Etc. [Parade]
· Fresh Nut Vendors Disappearing in Manhattan [NYT]
· Man Blames Pot Cookie After Attacking Crew Mid-Flight [HuffPo]
Baristas Test The Slayer, the New $18,000 Espresso Machine
Note: Please welcome our new coffee columnist Erin Hulbert, a New York-based barista originally from the coffee homeland of Seattle. Every Thursday morning she will be checking in here to let us know what's on her (caffeinated) mind. Take it away, Erin! —The Mgmt.
[Photographs: Erin Hulbert]
As a fulltime barista for well over a decade, working with various reputable roasters, cafes, and on countless machines, I can honestly say that the moment Slayer hit the market, fourth wave coffee arrived. This beautiful machine with its majestic wooden accents are reminiscent of Seattle's boating industry and was best described by David Schomer, the owner of Seattle-based coffee shop and roaster Espresso Vivace: "The action and wooden paddles give the feel of being at the helm of a fine yacht" (a yacht so fine, fewer than 20 of them exist at coffee shops).
Fourth wave coffee has arrived.
Most baristas (myself included) are working diligently within the realm of third wave coffee, paying close attention to dosing, distribution, tamp, temp, cleanliness, and of course grind. As extraction occurs, we look for flow rate, color, and appropriate volume within approximately a 25-second period. These third wave rudiments are still present in fourth wave extraction, though are allowing the barista to enhance or manipulate flavor profiles, creating an entirely new experience.
Cora Lambert, the director of coffee for New York-based RBC (where one of these fancy machines sits) was kind enough to invite me behind the counter to better acquaint myself with The Slayer.
Upon first gaze, the design alone is mesmerizing. The ergonomics of the machine, reminiscent of the Synesso, provide smooth movements much easier for your body to withstand. The short height of the machine (17 inches) allows ample visibility for the barista and client to connect, creating better relationships. Most ingenious is the thin mirror angled along the grate, giving the barista a perfect view of their shots without moving an inch.
Now that The Slayer and I shook hands and formed our first impressions, I was dying to know more.
As I watched Lambert dose, distribute, tamp, and load the portafilter into the group head, she explained that the machine was equipped with not two, but five boilers all with individual temp control devices, one for each group and two for the steam wands. She then slid the wooden paddle to the left activating the pre-brew, also called pre-infusion, a blooming process for the espresso.
After about 20 seconds of watching the pressure gauge reach approximately four bars she then slid the paddle all the way to the left, or what I like to call at full mast. A succulent reddish-brown syrup started to appear. Its viscosity slowly increased and eventually introduced a blond shade which Lambert noticed and decided to slide the paddle back to the previous setting, what I like to call half-mast, decreasing the pressure to subdue any sour flavors.
Slayer creator Eric Perkunder explains,"if a coffee is too bright you can reduce the effect by moving back to lower pressure at the end of the shot. " Lambert then halted the extraction at what was clocked at around 50 seconds.
These movements—adjusting the pressure to enhance or subdue specific flavors—are all done manually by the barista. A level of skill is mandatory to understand the subtle nuances of what you are striving for in a flavor profile. But Perkunder's concept of The Slayer lies in the barista's control of the pre-brew.
"The idea and experience that espresso shot flavor benefits from the analog quality of saturation brewing (like a French Press) is the theory behind the machine. That being said the control of this functionality, the timing, the adjusting during the shot, etc is the baristas alone," he said.
Lambert pulled shot after shot of a Single Origin Ethiopian from Dallis Coffee Roasters located in Queens. "Here, taste this," she would say, noticeably amped by her caffeine intake for the day.
Vietnamese coffee.
The shots themselves tasted full, with delicate accents of deep berry, dark chocolate, and some lemon peel. Each one slightly different, like espresso snowflakes gently falling over my tongue.
Her intense involvement in each shot—when to pull back and when to push onward—was now clear upon tasting. I would watch her intently and think "nice move" as if she was playing chess against a master.
The power of the barista and the industry's new potential growth is endless with this machine. As a final drink, Cora made her special Vietnamese Coffee, a lightly sweetened macchiato perfectly adorned with a velvety circle of creamy microfoam: a perfect end to an exhilarating voyage.
Again, Copeland
Bjorn Copeland, Tiled, 2005 Collage on paper
(via old fecal face interview)
February 3, 2010
Hitwise: Facebook Sends More Traffic to News Sites Than Google News
Hitwise has some interesting findings: It turns out that Facebook sends more traffic to news and media Web sites than Google News. According to a post on the site of the online intelligence company, last week Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits to those sites; Facebook was responsible for 3.52%. According to Hitwise, only Google (search, we presume), Yahoo, and MSN sent more traffic to news sites than Facebook.
"Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category," writes analyst Heather Hopkins.
Which, of course, raises the question: Since news organizations have been beating up on Google and Google News to share revenues from the advertising they post alongside summaries of the organization's news stories, are those organizations soon going to start hitting up the social networks?
Graphic: Hitwise
(Via GigaOm)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
The Failure of Empathy
As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service. via weblog.muledesign.com My thoughts exactly!
The Failure of Empathy
I went back for a second helping of Avatar this Sunday. There’s a scene early on in the movie where one of the scientists walks across the lab carrying the “mobile computer slab of the future.” We’ve seen one of these in almost every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years. It comes free with a jetpack, I suppose. Except this time, one month later, my 12 year old son turns to me and whispers “Look Dad, it’s an iPad.”
As many others have noted, the release of the iPad might be the cannonball into the consumer device pool the iPhone dipped its toes in. It’s also been referred to as a thing that sits between that iPhone and your laptop. I see it as more of a fork in the road. It’s the thing many people will get INSTEAD of a laptop.
The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.
It’s the payoff to all the work done by multiple industries over the last 20–30 years. It’s the subtraction of 20lbs of textbooks in my son’s backpack, and the device I finally feel comfortable buying my parents.
That’s why I was surprised by the reaction the iPad got the day it launched. Following along on Twitter I was seeing things like ‘underwhelming’, ‘meh’ , ’it’s not open’, ‘it’s just a big iPhone’, etc. And most of this stuff was coming from people who design and build interactive experiences. As designers, and technologists we’re very much aware that the interfaces we build are for people who are “not us,’ but we still haven’t made that leap about the concept of “computing.”
The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.
They want the thing in the movies.
As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.
What Second Life can teach about scaling
Just read Ian Wilkes’ What Second Life can teach your datacenter about scaling Web apps article.
It’s packed full of really great radically pragmatic advice. Go read it. Couple of times I literally shouted out “Yes!”, so I pulled a few choice quotes out.
herein lies a trap for smaller ones: the belief that you can “do it right the first time.”
Wanted to jump up and down when I read this. Building it “right” the first time is one of the best guarantees of failure I know. Scaling is always a catch up game.
a recurring billing system needs to touch each user annually, and the product is only available to Internet users in the US and Europe, and by the biggest estimates will achieve no more than 10% penetration, then it needs to handle about 2-3 events per second (1bn * 75% * 10% / (365 * 86,400)). Conversely, a chat system with a similar userbase averaging 10 messages/day, concentrated during work hours, might need to handle 20,000 messages per second or more.
Events per second is usually the first and more important metric I calculate when designing a system. Even if you only have the roughest of notions, orders of magnitude are important. (and remember you’re the cynical geek on the team, there are folks on the team paid to dream of world domination, don’t let them influence your numbers too much)
can the system be shut down at regular intervals?
Because change is inevitable, and anything resembling perfect uptime is more expensive then you can afford.
Another often-overlooked component of a scaling strategy is the makeup and attitude of the team … the entire development team needs to be aware of at least the basic implications of working on a large system … . This is especially a risk if a centralized resource (say, a database) is heavily abstracted and somewhat invisible to the developer (by, say, an ORM).
So true! Abstractions kill.
the ultimate solution is typically to partition databases into horizontal slices of the data set (typically by user), but this approach can be very expensive to implement.
Not sure why partitioning is thought of as so expensive. It’s annoying, and not for the lazy, but it’s not that difficult/expensive.
Instrument, propagate, and isolate errors
Flickr’s mantra is graph, graph, graph everything that moves.
It pays to thoroughly embrace the exception model
I can only say I wish I had this, haven’t scaled it, but living without it is instructive. And painful.
“Fix all the bugs” is rarely a realistic plan.
Similarly advice to “close bugs first” will leave your product dead in the water.
Batch jobs: the silent killer
Yup.
Beware the grand re-write
Oh my yes.
Have a Plan B
Someday I’ll publish some of our “plan B” documents. Plan Bs are critical to moving fast.
Don’t be afraid to change the product. Sometimes, a small number of features are responsible for the lion’s share of bottlenecks.
Twitter is the master of this.
All around great pragmatic advice.
World Heritage Site - Humayun's Tomb - A site that is a sight to behold, restored nicely, and a place I feel proud to be Indian
Humayun's Tomb could easily have been that trendsetting architectural design that has changed how we see the world today. It is luckily a UNESCO World Heritage Center, and that has helped it gain much grandeur in the last several years. Like the more famous Taj Mahal (which many believe was inspired by this tomb or at the least is a logical progression of this tomb) it is an edifice that symbolizes love for ones spouse. In this case, the devoted love of a wife for her husband. The Taj Mahal was the other way, built for the devotion to a wife, by her husband.
For some reason, or rather, because of the wondrous energy and beauty of this much more accessible tomb (in comparison to the very well recognized Taj Mahal), Charlie and I visit Humayun's Tomb on every visit to India. Partly because we both miss it when back home in the US, and also to see how the restoration work is going. It seemed like it was pretty close to completion this time around. What is most beautiful, like at the Taj, built later, are the two wonderful lofty, double storied gateways through which you arrive at the main tomb. These people knew just how to create drama and oomph! The photo above is taken after we enter the first gateway, and are looking at the second, and those that come first time, feel what they see ahead, is the tomb in entirety, little do they know the architectural mirages that were created by these architects in old India.
Above is the sight you behold as you enter the second gateway. And this is just the beginning of an amazing adventure. It is only after you have arrived at the tomb area, that you realize just how VAST and huge an undertaking this tomb must have been. It was commissioned after the death of Humayun (1556) by his beloved wife, Hamida Baanu Begum. Construction began in 1569. This tomb is considered to be the first example of what has become known as Mughal Style of architecture. It is a mix of Persian and Indian styles of architecture. It is believed that perhaps Humayun may have helped Hamida Baanu Begum design this tomb in his memory. Of course his inspiration came from his exile in Persia.
The main tomb stands in the centre of a square garden, divided into four main parterres by causeways (charbagh), in the centre of which run shallow channels of water. These channels function employing the gravitational pull of the earth. No electric pumps here. Does one see the muse for many later gardens and landscaped parks? I do.
The crows and pigeons of Delhi seem to enjoy the tomb as much as we do. And of course they have a sense of ownership of the place that only those that are settled for a long period in one place have. They are blessed to have such a magical home, and we are blessed to be able to enjoy their merriment.
The street dogs of Delhi (New Delhi) do not have it easy. Seeing them is one of the most difficult things I deal with. Really? What about the hapless poor? Yes, they also pose a significant amount of questioning, soul searching, anxiety and shame in my psyche. How could it not? What right do I have to be comfortably placed, when so many have nothing? But that is nothing I can answer, and certainly is something I ponder over often. I am always grateful to the poor, for being so much more generous of spirit, and being so kind as to allow me to live as I do, even as they suffer as they do. I thank the powers that be for the comforts I have, which often I take for granted, every time I see a beggar in Delhi. But I would be wrong if I did not say I also grieve for the street dogs. Not to say either equals the other. They each just happen to provide residents and tourists with sights around the street, that are not always easy on the eye, or the soul or the mind. But at Humayun's Tomb, the dogs seem to be at peace. They are still scrawny and gaunt. Would the physique of the dogs change as they become nouveau riche? Start eating at KFC and Ruby Tuesday? Has it changed already? I am sure the street dogs are getting plenty of their share of such fast foods already. Has anyone studied how that is affecting their diet? Above, you see the dogs grazing and snoozing in the grass around the tomb.
The flora also speaks of a certain planning and plenty of a lack-thereof in planning. You can see the old ficus trees, saying we belong, we had a purpose, we provide shade, we add to the personality and we have seen mankind through the ages. And then you have the loud and vocal, even if in silence, Palm Trees that speak of a new generation, that hardly cared that the palms could seem somewhat out of place, but as the trees have matured, it seems they have lost some of the garishness that comes from being new and feeling flush. They seem to almost belong, or at least not be too much of an aberration. They have made their peace about who they are. What purpose if any they have. And what they have lacked from the beginning. It is perhaps this knowledge in the trees, that gives them some semblance of a belonging in the complex that houses this fabulous tomb. What would happen if we too can understand who we are, what we should not be, what we ought never to think we can be and what we ought to do after realization that ego alone or good looks alone, do not guarantee success or acceptance? The answers to these certainly would vary from person to person, and within each community. But one who has the strength to take the answers, and then live accordingly, is almost as wise as the trees, and will make a home wherever they are - a home that gives them comfort and peace. Where they shine even in austerity, and they seem circumspect in opulence, and in harmony even when speaking loudly. That is the magic of a savvy mind and person. And it is this sophistry in design, in planning and in pageantry that these Moghuls knew, that seems never out of fashion.Below are images that I hope you will enjoy. Images of the Humayun's Tomb, of the other ruins that are part of the complex. And there are images of Charlie and our friend Deborah from Wales. You can se from their faces, how happy and at peace they are. There is an image also of the neighboring Gurudwara (Sikh Temple) as well. They say enough on their own. And of course as you google Humayun's Tomb, you shall find plenty of history to read and enjoy. If you have visited it years before, make it a point to visit again. You will find it even more wonderful. If you have never gone, make sure when in Delhi, this is one of the last places you see, and give yourself plenty of time. It is well worth seeing last, for you are guaranteed a certain unexplainable peace of mind and comfort when you arrive here. And if you are lucky, some mad man like me, will be singing around the tomb, in the chambers that house the tombstones of the nobles. The echos the music creates, especially if it is of the classical bent, or sufi in style, will float you away to another time, another planet even, even if only for a brief moment in time.
In this last photograph above, you can see the dome of the Sikh temple (Gurudwara). The trees when were were there this last time, at sunset, were laden with the brigh green Indian parrots, who chirp and shine like few birds ever do. Parrot Green is electric in textiles of India, and the electricity seems nuclear on the parrots themselves. No wonder Charlie and Deborah, seem smiley and happy, even as they are being photographed towards the end of a couple hours spent amongst tombstones. It is after all a graveyard. Just a glorious and striking one. One where love and happiness are celebrated as if the dead are still living and sharing, singing and dancing, flirting with each other and life, in luscious ways, in boundless glory.
2009 Favorites
I made a gallery of my favorite photos taken in 2009 for my Mobile Me account. Do check it out.
Haiti poster fundraiser
Like to give your charity efforts some political oomph as well as just money? This is a poster you can download at various resolutions from the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland, California. They are also hosting a free “Cultural Celebration and Educational Event about Haiti” this afternoon, Feb 3, at 4:30 PST. You can also buy nice silk screen versions of the poster from Dignidad Rebelde, and all proceeds go towards relief efforts. Thanks to Robert Trujillo for passing this on to me.
Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: haiti, political art, poster, silk screen
PAPER Does Etsy
I love me some Etsy. So I was very, very honored to be able to "guest curate" a selection of my favorite knick-knacks and doo-dads, picked from the hundreds and thousands of items on the site. It was sort of a daunting task, but I found it a wonderful procrastination tool; a good excuse to not do my actual work!
Check it out. And enjoy!
Pizza Wars!: Rachael Ray Names Motorino the Best Pizzeria in the East
In the upcoming March issue of the magazine Every Day with Rachael Ray, the Food Network queen and talk show host names Motorino as the best pizza place on the East Coast. So, deal with it Lucali, Frank Pepe, Co., Artichoke, and all the rest. The lady has spoken. And, she's a respected arbiter of taste right?
Actually, as it turns out usual suspects Adam Kuban and Ed Levine from Slice had the honor of choosing the winners—which also include Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, Great Lake in Chicago, and Pizzeria Mozza in L.A.—after whittling it down from 64 contenders across the country. The winner between the four finalists will be announced soon.
· All Motorino Coverage [~ENY~]
Refinery29: Olympic Figure Skater Johnny Weir's 8 Craziest Fashion Moments
It's almost Valentine's Day, which reminds us of our many love-hate relationships: Adam Lambert, Victoria Beckham, John Mayer, and perhaps most turbulently, American figure skater Johnny Weir. Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding (with a dash of Chris Kattan's Mango) all wrapped up in one fabulous pint-sized package, Weir has had enough WTF Fashion Moments to make Bai Lin blush. With the Winter Olympics 2010 just around the corner, the nation is poised to see a lot more Weir, complete with his chihuahua named Bon-Bon, a wardrobe of Lady Gaga outfits, and a Sundance TV series entitled Be Good Johnny Weir. Love him in Rodarte or hate him in fox fur, it's one affair too fierce to give up.
Above, from left, Johnny Weir photos via WWD, BlackBook
Don't Punish Everyone
Two recent posts about punishing a large group over one person (or company's) actions:
First Derek Siver's post titled "Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person's mistake".
Next John Scalzi's post about Amazon's actions this past weekend regarding the Macmillan pricing disagreement. Don't let the unfortunate use of the word "fail" here discourage you from reading it.
Answers, Part 2
Okay, time for another installment of answers series. I did part 1 last week, and the original questions post the week before. I’m planning to do one more installment and then get back to regularly scheduled programming. If you have a question that I haven’t answered so far, you can always reach me at npbtracker@gmail.com. I may use your question in a future post.
Time is of the essence, so let’s get rolling.
ryan says: January 22, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Welcome aboard!
1) Are there any rule differences between American and Asian baseball? Is the DH used?
2) Is there an arbitration process, and how does team control and free agency work?
3) Can you comment on the skill level differences between Japanese and American ball? How would you expect a .300/400/500 hitter to perform coming here from Japan?
Regarding item #2, as others have pointed out, there actually is an arbitration/inter-mediation process for teams an players, but it is rarely used.
Colonel Kurtz says: January 22, 2010 at 1:31 pm
I was wondering the difference of playing levels between Japan-Korea-Taiwan and now China. And if there’s an American equivalent talentwise i.e. Taiwan = Single-A
Also, there was a very good Korean player who was playing in Japan, lefty bat, great swing (maybe a Young or Kim <– yeah, I know). Will he come to the States?
A number of readers asked about the how the levels of play compare to MLB/MiLB ball. I find it somewhat problematic to make a direct comparison, because the intent of professional teams in Japan and Korea is to win games and championships, while MiLB teams focus on developing young players as well as win games. But that said, the main difference to me is depth. There is certainly MLB-caliber talent in Japan and in Korea, but the talent level drops off quickly as you move down teams’ rosters. It’s pretty generally accepted that the level of skill in Japan is somewhere between 3A and MLB. I haven’t seen nearly as much of the Korean League, but based on the fact that quite a few foreign players who don’t do well in Japan find their way to Korea, I’ll say the talent level is a step lower.
The Korean player I believe you are referring to is Seung-Yeop Lee, who is a lefthanded power hitter (here’s a video of him facing Yu Darvish in the 2009 Japan Series). Lee had a great pro career in Korea and a fantastic 2006 season in Japan, but has struggled the last two years. He’s made overtures toward MLB in the past, and his contract expires after this season, but his best days appear to be behind him and he’s not much of an MLB prospect at this point.
Sean D says: January 22, 2010 at 1:33 pm
What do you think of Tsuyoshi Nishioka? In the 2006 WBC he seemed like one of the better prospects among Japanese players. I read that he’s been banged up over the last few years. Is he injury prone or is there a chance he overcomes those types of injuries some day? Is he the type of guy that would be interested in playing in MLB? Japanese players have 10 year contracts, so that would make him a free agent in 2013?
He’s a talented player who runs and fields well, and has developed some power and patience at the plate over the last two years. I haven’t paid close attention to his injuries, but my brief research suggests that he’s had some nagging leg, wrist and neck problems, so we’ll see how he does in 2010. It’s worth noting that the playing surface at his home Chiba Marine Stadium is notoriously bad. I could see him making a move to MLB, probably as a utility guy, but haven’t read or heard that he’s specifically interested in making the jump.
Joe R says: January 22, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Are Japanese teams beginning to run and model themselves in the same way that MLB teams have, sabermetrically? I ask this due to the number of monsters from Japan that average-ify state side.
Eric says: January 22, 2010 at 1:46 pmThis is more about the baseball community than the game itself, but is there a sabermetric community over there like there is here? By that I mean are sabermetrics more/less prominent over there, and if they are, is there similar hesitation to accept more advanced statistics like there is in the US? It might be ignorant to think that the world of statistics would differ from here to Japan, but I’m curious as to how player evaluation compares.
There certainly wasn’t the scouting vs sabermetrics argument that we had in the States a few years ago. I don’t great visibility into the inner-workings of NPB teams, but from the outside it doesn’t appear that they are specifically implementing sabermetric systems. One of the big differences between NPB and MLB is that there are many, many fewer player transactions in Japan than there are in MLB. So Billy Beane’s moneyball approach doesn’t really exist at all. When a league’s free agency market is only a couple of guys and there are only a handful of trades per year, there are no market inefficiencies to exploit.
Player salaries are, for the most part, negotiated yearly. I think defense and team performance plays a bit of a bigger role in player evaluation in Japan than it does in the US, but aside from that NPB teams have a lot of the same tendencies MLB clubs have — highly valuing metrics like wins, saves, and batting average.
At a fan/media level, it feels like there is more data available in Japan via traditional means. Newspaper box scores usually show what happened in each at-bat, and it’s normal to see batting average with runners in scoring position and shutouts with no walks allowed listed with all the normal stats MLB fans are used to. There are also a lot of observations in the media that you wouldn’t see in US. One example that sticks out for me was reading about which player reached safely in the most games one season.
Dan says: January 22, 2010 at 2:16 pm
I’m curious about what an expert on Japanese baseball would have to say about Yu Darvish:
1. How does his stuff translate to some of the best in MLB? Is there a similar ML counterpart we can compare him to?
2. When can we expect him to come to the US? if at all?
3. If he does post, what kind of fee will the winning team have to pay?
4. How big a contract can he get?
1. Darvish has a fastball that he threw around 90-94 mph most of the time in 2009, a slider, a curveball, a forkball/splitter, a two-seam fastball, and the occasional change-up. You can get a sense of his repertoire and velocity on my data site. The first five pitches I listed are all well above NPB average, particularly his slider. As for an MLB comp I’d probably go with Tim Lincecum or Jake Peavy, though Darvish is taller than both and skinnier than Peavy.
2. He has adamantly denied any interest in moving to MLB, but I suspect he’ll change his mind. He has four more years of service time left to go before becoming eligible for international free agency. If he were to be posted it would almost certainly be his last year before free agency.
3. That’s pretty impossible to predict. The Japanese media was talking about $30m for Daisuke Matsuzaka, and he wound up going for $51m. The interesting thing about the posting system is that it’s a blind auction, so it forces teams to evaluate players in isolation of the overall market. So it only takes one high bid to drive the price way up, yet the teams can’t knowingly bid against each other.
4. It obviously depends on his health and performance, and the economic climate when he signs. If he had been a free agent this offseason though, I think he would have easily beat out the $30m Aroldis Chapman got.
That’s all for today. I’ll have more next time, then start working these back into regular posts.
Outdoor Bar on Upper Level of Dolphins / SunLife Stadium
Still a LandShark swimming around the Sand Bar at Miami's football stadium. Why is the naming and renaming and renaming so entertaining to SG? Check out all those flags to the right, that's because this photo was taken before the ProBowl. Thanks again to Centerplate and Steve Cahoon for making me wish I had a plane ticket and a game ticket.
New Computer
I had to turn in my computer from my old job, so this weekend, against my better judgement and facts, I bought a new Macbook Pro. Here's a list of things I had to install on it:
- Textmate
- Querious
- 1Password
- Dropbox
- Google Chrome
- Colloquy
- Jumpcut (crucial)
- Chicken of the VNC
- Tweetie
- Paperface (My own SSH tunneling app I need to release someday)
- MarsEdit
- NetNewsWire (lost my license, had to pay again)
We Love Patterns
Just clicking through this bevvy of gorgeous and incredibly fun pattern designs from the very talented, young, Argentinian illustrator Gastòn Caba (and others) is just plain joyful. I know everyone thinks I’m all about grids and minimalism and monochromatic palettes and being very serious (okay, guilty), but it doesn’t mean I don’t also find this stuff to be totally great, too.
Backing out of a term sheet
Venture capital term sheets are not legally binding (except certain subclauses like confidentiality and no-shop provisions). That said, there is a well-established norm that VC’s don’t back out of signed term sheets unless they discover something really, really bad – fraud, criminal backgrounds of founders etc. The best VC in the world, Sequioa Capital, whose companies account for an astounding 10% of NASDAQ’s market cap, has (according to trustworthy sources) only backed out on one term sheet in the last 10 years.
Yesterday, one of the 40 or so startups I’ve invested in (either personally or through Founder Collective) had a well-known VC back out of a term sheet for no particular reason besides that they decided they no longer liked the business concept. It’s the first time I’ve seen this happen in my career.
In later stage private equity (leveraged buyouts and such) it is a common trick to “backload diligence” – you give the company a quick, high-valuation term sheet, which then locks the company in (the no-shop clause prohibits them from talking to other investors for 30 days or more). Then the firm does their diligence, finds things to complain about and negotiates the price down or walks away. If they walk away, the company is often considered “damaged goods” by other investors who wonder what the investor discovered in diligence. This gives the investor a ton of negotiating leverage. In later stage private equity, this nasty tactic can work repeatedly since the companies they are buying (e.g. a midwestern auto parts manufacturer) are generally not part of a tight knit community where investment firms depend heavily on their reputation.
I learned the basics of VC when I apprenticed under Jeremy Levine and Rob Stavis at Bessemer. It was at Bessemer that I learned you never back out on a term sheet except in cases of fraud etc. I never saw them back out on one nor have I heard of them doing so. In fact, I remember one case where Rob signed a term sheet and while the final deal documents were being prepared (which usually takes about a month), the company underperformed expectations. The CEO asked Rob if he was going to try to renegotiate the valuation down. Rob said, “Well, if you performed better than expected I don’t think you would try to renegotiate the valuation up, so why should I renegotiate when you performed worse than expected.” That’s how high quality investors behave.
Besides simply acting ethically, firms like Sequoia and Bessemer are acting in their own interest: the early-stage tech community is very small and your reputation is everything. Word travels fast when firms trick entrepreneurs. What happened yesterday was not only evil but will also come back to haunt the firm that did it.
Thumbs up. I wish more companies used Tumblr this...
Thumbs up. I wish more companies used Tumblr this way.
tanya77: Check out the hot new FM78.tv site that the awesome Peter Vidani whipped up for us.
Go Saints
33. When the Saints beat the Jets at Shea Stadium in Week 15 in 1980 to avoid a winless season, it started snowing as they marched down the field for their game-winning TD. For Saints fans who thought hell would freeze over before they would win a game - well, it did. If you're not already rooting for the Saints this weekend, you will be after you read (or skim, I'm easy!) this history of the franchise. The Shea reference gets the lead pullquote, but the Saints' creation myth is also excellent: 1. Entrepreneur Dave Dixon, who had lobbied the NFL for a team, asked Archbishop Philip Hannan if he thought the name "Saints" would be considered sacrilegious. Hannan replied: "Not at all. I think they're going to need all the prayers they can get. You've got to remember, most of the saints were martyrs." How prophetic. Amazingly, Hannan, 96, will attend Super Bowl XLIV andsit with owner Tom Benson. via www.americanchronicle.com and loge 13
Pets on PAPER: Meet Melville
via www.papermag.com What's your favorite cover of PAPER? My hair is curly and very floppy, so I love Andy Samberg's wash-and-wear look on the August 2007 cover. I also appreciate Gael Garcia Bernal's side part on the cover of your May 2009 design issue. I am a sucker for the Pets on Paper series!
Great Public Spaces for Midtown
Mayor Bloomberg has seen some of the data from the city's trial of car-free, pedestrian-priority spaces in Midtown, and it looks like the changes in traffic speeds are not as impressive as hoped for. This, I daresay, is good news.The new Times Square versus the old Times Square -- worth a few seconds of motorist inconvenience on a few streets. Photos: berk2804 and midweekpost via Flickr
As the Times' Michael Grynbaum has reminded us the past two days, Broadway's new pedestrian spaces were sold with a heavy emphasis on easing Midtown gridlock. Safety and economic activity were important indicators from the beginning, but the name of the project said it all: Green Light for Midtown.
The numbers aren't out yet, but Bloomberg revealed at a press conference yesterday that, in terms of moving vehicles, "some of the roads are better; some of the roads are worse." It seems like the trial results haven't quite delivered a win-win-win scenario where pedestrians, merchants, and motorists all received substantial benefits. Instead, we're probably heading for a result that's closer to "win-win-tie."
If you care about livable streets, I think this is a welcome development. It means New York City gets to have a more substantial discussion about what our streets are for and the priorities we assign to them. Ambiguous traffic data leads straight to the question, "What matters more -- safety and livability, or moving cars?"
Bloomberg is already framing the project in terms of safety. "It's not just traffic," he said at yesterday's presser. "One of the things that has happened is pedestrian deaths have come down dramatically in this area. And I don't know how you equate a few lives with a few more seconds of inconvenience."
The Broadway project is worth doing for several reasons that have nothing to do with vehicle speeds. It's saving lives and improving the public realm for hundreds of thousands of people who used to squeeze onto the sidewalk like poultry in an industrial chicken coop. New Yorkers have noticed, and they approve. Judging from anecdotal merchant reactions and the position of the Times Square BID, it's been good for business too.
The most important graphic from the city's initial presentation on this project came under the "additional benefits" section, a few slides after the one about "green signal time allocation."
I, for one, can't wait to read the next Steve Cuozzo column ripping apart the life-saving transformation of Midtown.
Pets on PAPER: Meet Melville
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? Melville
How old are you? 14 years young
Where do you live? Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Who do you live with? My mother Maddie and my dad Adam
What are your pastimes? Getting pet, looking for chicken bones on the street, sleeping, sitting on laps, relaxing in my Snuggie for Dogs, stalking my feline roommate's life, and blowing people away with my impressively bad breath.
What's your favorite cover of PAPER? My hair is curly and very floppy, so I love Andy Samberg's wash-and-wear look on the August 2007 cover. I also appreciate Gael Garcia Bernal's side part on the cover of your May 2009 design issue.
Want to see your pet on PAPER? Submit a photo/photos, plus answers to the above questions, to vip@papermag.com.
Better Super Bowl Nachos, per The Washington Post
Nachos are championship party food, to be sure: cheap, easy and sociable. But once the best bites come off the top and the cheese congeals, things get ugly. We agreed that a better game plan was in order.
Read more Super Bowl smackdown: Nachos vs. nachos by Bonnie S. Benwick and Joe Yonan
What happens if you check Alex Ovechkin
(By Elise Amendola - AP) About seven minutes into the third period Tuesday night, Bruins rookie defenseman Johnny Boychuk had the temerity to hit Alex Ovechkin and knock the MVP onto the ice. The Boston fans stood and cheered. In the next 30 seconds, Ovechkin launched three hits of his own onto Boychuk, eventually leaving the rookie on the ice in almost the exact same spot. It was humorous, if nothing else, and just about every Boston media outlet mentioned the exchange. D.C. Landing Strip brilliantly pulled the video (embedded below); here's a play-by-play.
Jirachi is Coming to Gamestop
The next event has been announced in preparation for the upcoming release of HeartGold and SoulSilver. It will be the wishmaker Jirachi that will unlock the Edge of the Night Sky PokeWalker course in those games. These will be given away at Gamestops in the U.S. and Puerto Rico from February 27 to March 13th, 2010. Click here to find the location of the nearest Gamestop to you. These Jirachis will be at level 5 and will be holding an rare Liechi Berry that will boost its attack when its HP is low. They will come with a Classic Ribbon and know the following moves:
Wish
Confusion
Rest
Draco Meteor, which is a very powerful Dragon type move that cannot be taught to Jirachi any other wayAs per usual you will need to have:
- Room for the wonder card (can’t have more than three)
- A North American version of Diamond, Pearl or Platinum and a DS
- Have obtained the Pokedex
Remember, you can only get one Jirachi per game chip. You can, however, trade them to another game and restart your game thus allowing you to get as many Pichus as you can want if you are willing to grind through the intro part of the game over and over again.
Gamestops are also giving away figurines with pre-orders of HeartGold and SoulSilver while supplies last prior to their March 14th release date and don’t forget to pick up your shiny Pichu which is available until February 14th.
Kings Theatre To Return From The Grave??
Will Brooklyn’s decaying Kings Theater finally be saved? According to this NY Times article, a developer has made a $70 million dollar agreement to renovate, with plans for it to become a live performance venue. Finally!
Check out my post on the theater for more info. Opened in 1929, the theater (one of the five Loew’s movie “palaces”) closed its doors in 1977 and was abandoned to rot.
Over thirty years later, things haven’t been looking so pretty at the Kings.
But $70 million is a lot of money. How much will be saved of the original theater? According to a rep from ACE Theatrical, the developer, “We’ll be able to recreate what it looked like when it was first put into use,” he said. “We’ll be able to very accurately recreate what is no longer there and restore what is there.”
Fingers crossed!
-SCOUT
When The Saints Went Marching In To Shea Stadium
The Super Bowl is a few days off but sports fans have already been gorging on pre-game banalities.
However, this was a good piece on the ugly history of the New Orleans Saints. If the Jets hadn't been born, the Saints would probably be the football cousins of our Mets.
Former Jets beat writer Peter Finney conjures up 43 Saints memories - one for each year of the team's existence. Number 33 occured at our old home:
33. When the Saints beat the Jets at Shea Stadium in Week 15 in 1980 to avoid a winless season, it started snowing as they marched down the field for their game-winning TD. For Saints fans who thought hell would freeze over before they would win a game - well, it did.
You’re Kitchen Needs a Scale!Special Opensky Offer $1.99
My scale, measuring 7 grams or 1/4 ounce of yeast, photo by Donna
Over the weekend I made a recipe I tore from the recent issue of Saveur. I don’t use many recipes but I’ve been looking for a flavorful, soft, comforting roll to make and this one enticed.
Maddeningly though, it called for 5 cups of flour. Normally when I make bread, I set the mixing bowl on the scale and pour in whatever weight I want. But here I found myself scooping out cups, scraping off the top, flour drifting over the counter and cutting board. But more than the mess, was the variable amount: given that flour can weigh 4 ounces a cup or as much as 6 ounces, I didn’t know if I had 20 ounces of flour or 30 ounces—a 50% difference. According to the standard bread ratio, if it were the former, I’d have needed 1-1/2 cups of water, if the latter, 2-1/4 cups of water. This particular dough turned out to be unusually stiff, and because the recipe didn’t give me the flour by weight, I had no idea if this were what the author had intended.
It’s a predicament caused by the fact that most home kitchens don’t have scales so almost all recipes involving flour give volume measurements. To aid me in my quest to get a scale into more American kitchens, my friends at Opensky Project are offering three scales for $1.99. Go to the Opensky scale promotion page to enter; Opensky will choose the winners at random. I own several scales and this EatSmart scale, pictured above, is what I use most because its size is so convenient, it has a tare button, and measures in grams and ounces. Everyone who enters the drawing for the $1.99 scale will get a 10% off coupon, so even if you aren’t chosen you can still buy it for a great price, one of the most important and useful kitchen tools you can own.
Tonight, I’m roasting a leg of lamb and I’m going to remake those rolls using my scale. Will post later in the week—it’s a promising recipe! Will be even better when it comes with weights!
How computers changed the way people play chess
Garry Kasparov discusses the very interesting history and evolution of machines playing against humans in chess.
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
The section about people using computers *during* matches is particularly interesting.
Tags: chess games Garry Kasparov
Forte 100% Spoken For!
Well, that was crazy quick! The unsold units at the Forte condo on Ashland, which were transferred from developer to lender this summer and then put back on the market at massively reduced prices in November, are now all either sold or in contract. Adam Pacelli, the lead Corcoran broker for the building, says that six of the units available for sale have closed, 52 are in contract, and the remainder have pending contracts. Pacelli says Corcoran inherited 70 units to sell. (Streeteasy records confirm the numbers save for one condo the site says still isn't in contract.) When the condo went back on the market, most units were priced around $500 a foot. Surprised?
Forte Reboot Priced to Sell [Brownstoner] GMAP
Forte Officially Goes Back to the Bank [Brownstoner]
Clarett, Goldman Lose Control of Forté [Brownstoner]
Also, Go Saints!
Nice piece on New Orleans Saints linebacker Scott Fujita and his support for gay rights. It'll be even nicer when a story like this is so commonplace as to be unremarkable, but for now it's important to recognize those who are willing to stand up for something important. @9:20 AM 3
(via ryanbrown) I give Cho a lot of shit, because it’s...
(via ryanbrown)
I give Cho a lot of shit, because it’s one of the most fun parts of my “job,” but he did amazing work on the redesign. Considering the resources with which he had to work (none) and the incredibly whiny complaints and demands he put up with from his business partners (too many to count), it is nothing short of miraculous that he was able to pull this off. Really, really well done. And now back to giving him shit.
This gave me a good laugh this morning. (via thedailywhat, digg)
This gave me a good laugh this morning. (via thedailywhat, digg)
'Lost' Cookies
Clockwise from top left: Time travel bunny rabbits, polar bears, the doctor, Kate. [Photograph: Res-o-puh-please]
Inspired by last night's return of ABC's Lost, Kendall of the food blog Res-o-puh-lease baked a batch of Lost-themed cookies. Because what's the only thing better than the season six premiere of Lost? Geeky fandom cookies based on the premiere. Kendall baked every character except Ben. "Because he's terrifying. And I forgot," she said.
Related
LOST! [Talk]
P.J. Clarke's Serves 'Lost' Star Jorge Garcia's Favorite Burger
'Top Chef Masters,' Episode 2: The 'Lost' Dinner
Ace of Cakes' 'Lost' Cake
1-run victories (or, How the 2000s are just like the 1930s)
As I promised yesterday, here is the breakdown of 1-run wins since 1900.
I decided to group decades together because there was a lot of year-to-year fluctuation that made the graph hard to read with so many data points.
Three notes on how to read this graph:
- The legend tells you how many runs the winning team scored. Therefore the "1" line represents games that were 1-0 while the "5" line represents games that were 5-4.
- I have grouped each decade's data at the first year of that decade. So, data at 1900 is the sum of all the data from 1900 to 1909, and the data at 2000 is the sum of all the data from 2000 to last season.
- The calculation is the fraction of such games out of all 1-run wins over the given period. In other words, you can see that in the 1900-1909 period, roughly 21% of all 1-run victories had the final score of 2-1. This graph does not include any consideration of the total number of games played.
We can see that the decade just completed (shall we start that debate again?) yielded more 4-3 games than any other type of 1-run victory, and only the 1930s can also boast that same leader. In fact, the overall breakdown is quite similar between the 2000s and the 1930s.
The trends over the last 5 decades mirror the general increase in scoring in the games. One-run victories with 1, 2, or 3 runs have been in steady decline since the 1960s while one-run victories with 4 runs have been pretty almost totally flat. The one-run wins with 5, 6, and 7 runs have been significantly increasing over the same period, as generally have been the wins by even larger margins (at least until the 2000s.)
The data from this graph was generated using the Situation Record tool.
Quote: F-Mart wanted Beltran’s Job
In the first game of the Caribbean Series last night, Mets OF Fernando Martinez went 0-for-3 in Escogido’s 2-1 win against Puerto Rico.
Martinez told Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com that he thought he might get the chance to start in center field for the Mets, when he first heard news that Carlos Beltran would miss the start of the season due to knee surgery.
“But they get Gary Matthews Jr., and now I’m not sure where I am,” Martinez told Sanchez. “I just can’t give up.”
…i think the job was always going to be Angel Pagan’s to lose, but i like fernando’s attitude… for what it’s worth, i talked with a team official the day the Mets acquired matthews, and it didn’t sound to me like fernando was ever considered an option, if for no other reason than i don’t think they see him as a center fielder… this is not to say the team must feel he is incapable of handling the job… i just think they really want him to get a full, healthy, uninterrupted, productive season under his belt in Triple-A, while feeling no pressure to produce in the big leagues… just play, kid, play and produce…
Martinez hit just .191 in the regular season this winter, but hit .387 with two home runs in the playoffs.
“I know I’m a big league player, and I can perform at a high level,” Sanchez quotes Martinez as saying. “It’s in my hands, so I have to keep working hard and maybe earn a spot. Maybe I make it to the big leagues with the Mets or maybe another team, but I know I can do it. I just have to keep working and waiting for my opportunity.”
To hear from Martinez’s coach in Winter Ball, Ken Oberkfell, who also coached Martinez in Triple-A Buffalo last season, read Sanchez report for MLB.com, here.
Draw Your Own Thrilling Space Adventure
Trials, Troubles, and Contributations
Recently, McSweeney's released, Panorama, an homage to the endangered species of publication that is the newspaper. Also just as recently — in fact, at exactly the same time — I had the honor of having my art appear in this prestigious endeavor.
My particular contribution, "Draw Your Own Thrilling Space Adventure", was in the Comics insert, specifically in The Rear End section. This section, edited by Mac Barnett, was designed to entertain both young and old alike, a daunting task. Luckily, I was once young; and as my fresh, new prescription to Simvastatin confirms, I am now officially old. And in both phases of life, I found the art of Ed Emberley to be especially appealing, so Mac and I decided I should put together a "How-To-Draw" of a similar vein.
Realizing Adventures Unrealized
While rubbing illustrative elbows with McSweeney's talented congregation of authors and artists leaves me giddy with delight, I do regret the fact that I won't be able to see any of the Thrilling Space Adventures that might result from my instructional efforts. I mean... I'm missing out on stuff like this...
Or like this...
Or even like this.
What a shame.
Unless, of course... well... you fine folks have now seen how to put together a Thrilling Space Adventure... if you were so inclined to draw one... you could send it my way... and then maybe later I could post my favorites!
Yes! Let's do that! And don't feel obligated to use every character in my space adventure, or hesitate to use a character of your own. My only request is that it's at least in some way derived from my how-to-draw.
When you're done, post your entries to your own server or blog and send me the link. Or, if you don't have your own web space, you can just attach the image (nothing over 1mb please) and send it to . Remember to include your name, and your url if you have one.
Maybe I can even wrangle up some sort of prize. I've got some Superest books lying around here. Sutter and I wrote our names in them, so the library won't take them. Maybe I'll send them to the top five or so submissions? Yeah... that sounds like a plan!
Any questions? Okay... GO!
February 2, 2010
History postcard
Josh MacPhee History $1 Once a screenprint, but long sold out (and I don't know if I'll reprint it), here's a cheap postcard version for anyone interested.... I must admit, books are one of my primary fetish objects. An ode to my bookshelf accompanied by one of my favorite Malcolm X quotes: "Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can charter a course for our future." offset printed postcard 4"x6" hand stamped/uneditioned
Pokémon Farming: Lotad
It has been rainy here on the west coast and all this rain reminds me of one of my favorite pokémon, the dancing Ludicolo. Ludicolo start out as a little Lotad and evolves from a Lombre by using a Water stone on it. They are a Grass/Water type which combined neutralize the effectiveness of the elemental attacks of Fire, Ice, Electric and Grass and provide a whopping 4x resistance to Water attacks. These Lotads are bred with a Modest (+SpAttack. -Attack) nature to provide a little more Special Attack and come with these following move-set:
Leech Seed (Grass, Acc 90)
Leech Seed saps HP from any opponent that is not a Grass type until it faints or switches out.Toxic (Poison, Acc 85)
Badly poisons opponents with an increasing degree of damage as the battle progresses
Energy Ball (Grass, STAB Power 80, Acc 100)
A powerful grass attack that has a 10% chance of lowering an opponents Special Defense.Ice Beam (Ice, Power 95, Acc 100)
A powerful counter for Grass type that resist Leech Seed and Flying type that may try to switch in. Has a 10% chance of Freezing foes.Of course any of these can be taught the HM Surf (Water, STAB Power 95, Acc 100) or level Lombre up to level 45 and have it learn Hydro Pump (Water STAB, Power 120, Acc 80) before using your Water stone.
Lotad’s abilities both take advantage of this rainy weather.
Swift Swim doubles it speed when Rain Dance is in effect and
Rain Dish recovers 1/16th of its maximum HP at the end of every turn that Rain Dance is in effect.To receive one of these Water weeds, be in the wifi room on Friday at 5:00 PM Pacific (8:00 PM Eastern) on February 5nd, 2010 Comment with your Name and Friend Code Get a pokémon to trade, I’m not looking for anything particular just something you don’t want. Make yourself available to Trade (invite->Trade) I will come to you when I’m ready. These will come from my Platinum game
Name: Dennis
FC: 0088 2490 1681If you are new to our site, your first comment will be moderated. Don’t worry if your post doesn’t show, we will get to it in time, and you will not miss out!
Lost, 'LA X': Reviewing the final season premiere
A review of the "Lost" final season premiere coming up just as soon as I bring a book into a cave...
Louis Is One Year Old!
Wow, it has been a crazy, wonderful year, and it has gone by so fast! We've made a new flickr photo set to share some memories from Louis's first year (including lots of X-mas pix we were too busy to post here), and we've got another batch of photos from the portrait studio below!
Happy Birthday, Louis! We love you so much and are so thankful for everything about you!
A function that works as a context manager and a decorator
As a followup to my last blog post on timings, I present the following function which works as both a decorator and a context manager.
# timethis.py import time from contextlib import contextmanager def timethis(what): @contextmanager def benchmark(): start = time.time() yield end = time.time() print("%s : %0.3f seconds" % (what, end-start)) if hasattr(what,"__call__"): def timed(*args,**kwargs): with benchmark(): return what(*args,**kwargs) return timed else: return benchmark()Here is a short demonstration of how it works:
# Usage as a context manager with timethis("iterate by lines (UTF-8)"): for line in open("biglog.txt",encoding='utf-8'): pass # Usage as a decorator @timethis def iterate_by_lines_latin_1(): for line in open("biglog.txt",encoding='latin-1'): pass iterate_by_lines_latin_1()If you run it, you'll get output like this:
bash % python3 timethis.py iterate by lines (UTF-8) : 3.762 seconds <function iterate_by_lines_latin_1 at 0x100537958> : 3.513 secondsNaturally, this bit of code would be a good thing to bring into your next code review just to make sure people are actually paying attention.
HipHop: Facebook runs compiled PHP on its servers
While PHP deservedly gets a terrible rep around programming language folks, this is still an interesting announcement: HipHop compiles PHP down to C++ and gets about a 2x speedup. HipHop will be released as open source, and is currently in production use, serving 90% of Facebook's traffic. It makes me wish Facebook used Python: a large-scale deployment like this would be a great boon to the PyPy project.
Found Footage: Sir Patrick Stewart adores his iPhone
Filed under: Humor, Video, iPhone
Don't even bother questioning why there is video of Jean-Luc Picard bashing Twitter and talking about his love for the iPhone, just watch and enjoy. Okay, okay, it's from a PBS interview designed to promote some of their Shakespeare programming, but that doesn't matter, really. All that matters is that Sir Patrick Stewart calls his "beautiful" iPhone "an extension of whom I am," in the way that only he can.
He also bashes gaming, but only because he says it's extremely addictive, so we'll let that one slide. Here's the really important question: Has anyone pointed out the Star Trek phaser [iTunes link] to him yet? What apps (besides the weather one, we guess) does he run on a daily basis?
[via iPhone Savior]TUAWFound Footage: Sir Patrick Stewart adores his iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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How The New York Times Lost An Entire Generation Of Readers (NYT)
This post was written by Jake Dobkin, publisher and co-founder of Gothamist. It was orignally printed on Facebook, and it is reprinted here with his permission.
See Also:
- Confirmed: Grand Central Terminal Evacuated By NYPD Earlier Today!
- The 2009 Silicon Alley 100
- New York Times Finally Decides To Add Online Paywall, Announcement In Weeks
Apple Demands Removal of USB Sharing Feature in Stanza iPhone App
Robin Wauters:
I’m sure Apple has good reasons to prevent people from being able to transfer files to iPhone and iPod Touch devices using a USB cable, and I believe this isn’t the first time they’ve asked developers of apps with this or similar features to remove them for new users. That said, I’m not 100% certain which rules were broken here, and since Apple requested Lexcycle not to discuss specifics we’re left guessing why Cupertino had an issue with the USB syncing features.
I am 100 percent which rules were broken. There are no public APIs in iPhone OS 3.1 that allow apps to sync via USB. This is a private API violation, not an e-book competition thing.
Fair Notice: Some Visual Changes Coming!
Oh, hello there. We come to announce some changes are ahead. The sort of changes regarding which the vast majority of you will not give a fruity fig. But our watchword is “always inform! Always disclose!” in these parts, and, so: there is a very good chance that this website will look a bit different tomorrow. You are welcome to read on if you are interested.
In short: we’re rebranding as a newly wholly-owned subsidiary of Cat Fancy magazine.
Okay, we are not, but wouldn’t that be awesome? I WOULD ENJOY.
For real, though, we are making some visual changes. This is what they call, in the professional industry, a “redesign,” I think! (I don’t really know what goes on in the professional industry, it turns out.)
There are at least two whole benefits here.
1. Individual entries, and the front page as well, will be much more legible, in my opinion. This is for the benefit of people who like to read things! There will be space and room for big pretty pictures also and, like, room to breathe. There should also be easier commenting interfacing and the like, for the kids that like the Internets.
2. We’re also making room for our publisher-friend David Cho to sell some ads. Yes, there will be a relaunch sponsor. You know why? Because we are getting closer to our dream of doing something called “paying writers.” I know that you guys are really into that particular endeavor, so thanks for being supportive in this regard. (Check back, um, soonish. Did you know that the average time window in which most folks pay for their advertising is like, net 240 days? I didn’t either! That is the biz, my friends. The real world? We are happy just to live in it.)
Oh, and, 3. Alex Balk finally had a slight meat-related stroke and so he won’t be blogging quite as coherently starting tomorrow, but that’s okay. Probably for the best and all.
To sum up: the same ol’ website, with a little bit of shininess, and a bit worse array of word choices from Alex.
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? COMPLAINTS? Do let me know.
Also we reserve the right to launch this redesign later in case tonight’s late-night/early-morning deployment goes into the crapper. Anyway, see you before that, during LOST. Please have completed your assigned Thorstein Veblen readings beforehand.
I’m Reading: about Ike, the NL East, Manifestos & Reyes
To hear Mets 1B prospect Ike Davis being interviewed at MLB’s Career Development Program, check out this video at MLB.com.
According to this chart from Amazin Avenue, the Mets spent more time in first place than any other team in the NL East, since 2006.
Anthony DeRosa of Hot Foot is asking fans to submit ideas for a new Mets Manifesto, such as, “Start a Fan Committee to oversee decisions and allow the people who keep the team in business to have a voice in the process.”
…i thought that was actually one of the big criticisms, in that the team pays TOO MUCH attention to public opinion, basing decisions on what is only popular, not what is necessary…
In a post to his blog for Newsday, David Lennon asks, “Who’s to Blame for J.J. Putz?”
Marty Noble of MLB.com answers questions from Mets fans about Jose Reyes, Luis Castillo, David Wright’s power, payroll, the Royals pitching staff, and how this year’s team compares to 1999.
In a post to his blog for New York Magazine, Will Leitch is hoping Reyes returns healthy.
iPad
Molly reports on Apple’s iPad. Assets: ipad, mac desktop, photoshop interface, fcp interface, vhs camcorder, rotary phone, hard drive, ipad present, leaning forward at desk, looking at iphone, reclining, reclining 2, reclining 3, layin on grass, handing it over, Adobe Flash, Missing Flash, Missing Flash 2, Missing Flash 3, Flash Icon, HTML code, HTML code 2, Jobs and Missing Flash, Flash Blog Images without Flash, YouTube HTML 5, New Safari Apple Page, Jobs with iPad, Home star runner, apple logo, dollar sign, smashing head, HTML5 Code, HTML5 Graphic, YouTube Rocketboom, Steve Thinking. Music by Podington Bear.
Facebook: “our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer”
Throw away line in the Facebook HipHop post gives us the Facebook RPE, 1mil vs Flickr’s 2.5mil.
Remove a Stripped Screw with a Rubber Band [MacGyver Tip]
The head of the screw you stripped while you were hanging that shelf may not have seemed like a big deal at the time—until you needed to unscrew it, that is. Next time you're having trouble, try a rubber band.
Home hacks and design blog Apartment Therapy offers a a few simple, smart tips for removing a stripped screw without any special equipment like an extractor—like using a rubber band:
A rubber band may aid in providing enough grip to remove, or at least loosen, the screw. Place a wide band rubber band [in between] the screw driver (we recommend bumping one size up from the screw head which caused the strip) and the screw, then apply hard, but slow force as you turn. If you're fortunate, the rubber band will fill in the gaps caused by the strip and allow extraction.
They also suggest more obvious solutions like changing the size of your screwdriver, using pliers when possible, or just pounding the screwdriver into the screw head with a hammer, hoping you can create your own traction. If you've ever tried the rubber band trick—or have your own favorite method—let's hear how it worked in the comments. If your screw's just fine but your screw hole is stripped, a golf tee may be all you need.
How To Remove a Stripped Screw Without an Extractor [Apartment Therapy]
what would he do?
I guess we'll find out tonight. Can't frickin' wait.
- Yep, I bought the t-shirt.
- Go read David's post, Real Fans Watch. "Theoretically, cultural criticism (neé OMFG SMOKE MONSTER) in the public domain should lead to casual intellectual exchanges which strengthen our democracy (and blogging!) Unfortunately, it's no longer that simple."
- His mouth isn't creepy, he's just eating an orange. But you knew that, because you're a Real Fan. And you watch.
Real Fans Watch
Sippey put to rest forever the debate about spoilers sometime in 2008 with the simple declaration "Real fans watch."
And they do! My Twitter profile bio reads simply "My twitter stream primarily features Lost spoilers," which for a time was true. Remember, Twitter used to be for unimportant brief exchanges, comparable to instant messager status & away messages. Twitter proposed a new level of discourse sandwiched between immediately disposable ideas and sneezing. For better or for worse, now it matters.
Theoretically, ideas in the public domain should be shared and expanded on. Casual intellectual exchanges are the bedrock of a democracy (and blogging!) Unfortunately, it's no longer that simple.
- Time Zones. Sippey & Ed (& Others &c) are as big lost fans as I am, and I know they follow me on Twitter, so it would not be fair to tweet anything until the show is over for them, which is two in the morning my time, so for all intents & purposes tomorrow. Therefore...
- Twitter is no longer appropriate for "real-time" conversation that may includes spoilers, only "real-time if you are inconsiderate or only have friends in time zones easterly until you hit Greenwich" conversation. The "real-time" conversation has moved to Hot Potato. This is somewhat reasonable and convenient because I have no friends there. They should have different "events" for different time zones, though, since probably different airings should be considered different events.
- I unfollowed @vespa59, because he lives in Hawaii and saw the Lost premier last Friday. He posted something that could theoretically be considered a spoiler. (I love that guy, and I will refollow him tonight).
- Poor Josh doesn't have a TV at all. We may need to make a special exception or set of ground rules for him, but I think it's reasonable to expect TV ownership (especially with Free HD signals that make cable unnecesary).
- A possible solution is for everyone to get Direct TV, so folks in San Francisco can watch the NYC affiliates and their prime time broadcasts. However....
- Friday Night Lights is airing exclusively on Direct TV, my friend Matty copies it from his DVR to a VHS and Adriana and I watch those episodes on Thursday. For citizens (and non-crazies) FNL will be airing starting in April on NBC. Since no amount of time-shifting will bridge this divide, I have a devoted twitter account (FNLDjacobs) to discuss the program.
Check Out Check You Daily
I hesitate to call myself a fashionista in the fullest sense, but this isn't to say I don't care about what I'm wearing. To be perfectly honest, as a borderline unhealthy Facebook addict I'm plagued by an irrational fear of being photographed wearing an outfit on an inappropriate number of occasions. Thus I was overjoyed when I received my ultra exclusive invite for the new personal style website Check You Daily. After filling out a brief application and getting approval from site monitors, Check You Daily users can upload, tag, and share their looks in an interactive forum, or create a personal style journal to archive their day to day garb. Looks are catalogued by both location and the items tagged, so searching for inspiration is a breeze. Also fun to note: the site is vaguely reminiscent of Cher Horowitz's mind-blowing achievement of 90's computer programming as seen in Clueless ("MISMATCH!"), and any opportunity to live out plotlines from said cinematic gem should be embraced wholeheartedly. In addition to the user-generated content, editors behind the site have included an ICON section, featuring interviews with some of style's biggest names, and a SCOPE section in which professional stylists select 3-5 of their editorial works, "[demonstrating] intricacies of their own work in their own words [and] giving insight to the development of a look." Très chic, non?
Driving through a metaphor
It's raining on Sand Hill Road, blue skies everywhere else.
some criterion titles going out of print
The Criterion Collection is having an out of print sale, so go nab Alphaville (or a slew of others) for $5 off.
Since we launched the Criterion Collection more than twenty-five years ago, we’ve endeavored to keep everything we’ve published in print. But despite our efforts to renew rights, we are losing a large group of titles from StudioCanal at the end of March, and we wanted to give you advance notice that our editions will be going out of print. ... The titles are going to Lionsgate, and we don’t know when they may be rereleased. As ever, we will continue to try to relicense the films so that they can rejoin the collection sometime in the future.
(via)
Omni Group bringing the Omni apps to the iPad
Famed OmniFocus developer The Omni Group has given a brief peak at their development roadmap. The Mac Observer reports that Omni will release OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and OmniGraphSketcher for the iPad.
The Omni Group is pretty excited about what all the iPad has to offer saying they feel that, like the original Macintosh, the iPad will be the computer for the rest of us. Omni has already begun porting OmniFocus and OmniGraffle for the iPad and will start working to bring their other products to iPad beginning in the next few months.
Omni is being very candid about their plans for the future of their products and it is refreshing to see a well-known software company keep their users informed. Omni admits that the iPad work will delay future release cycles for the Mac versions of their software but is confident that this is the right decision.
[via The Mac Observer]TUAWOmni Group bringing the Omni apps to the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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9 of 10 of us will watch SuperBowl at home
Says the Nielsen people: The great majority of U.S. households -- 9 out of 10 – say they will be watching Super Bowl XLIV at home or at a friend’s or relative’s house instead of watching it from a restaurant or bar, according to a new survey by The Nielsen Company. And for their home viewing, only five percent of households expect to spend more on food and beverages for the Super Bowl this year.While beer and football are popular American pastimes, the Super Bowl, somewhat surprisingly, is not the most popular beer holiday. Nielsen’s research shows that the Super Bowl ranks relatively low among holiday beer sales, after the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day and Halloween. Nielsen’s analysis shows that with the exception of late March, grocery retailers experienced the biggest weeks for Q1 beer sales during the two weeks surrounding Super Bowl 2009, with nearly 17 million cases sold.
Super Bowl viewers across the country stock their at-home parties with snacks, nearly 166 million pounds of snacks, especially salty snacks. Potato chips reign, with more than 44 million pounds of snacks sold while tortilla chips and pretzels also rank high for Super Bowl sales. The Super Bowl snack with the greatest growth? Popped popcorn.
Unpopped kernels are still working their way up.SG is the 1 of 10 who will be watching the SuperBowl in a restaurant or bar.
Repair service finds iPad's camera slot
Filed under: Hardware, Portables, Rumors
The folks at Mission:Repair have received iPad replacement parts from Apple. While checking them out, they noticed a slot that seems like it could accommodate an iSight. So they pulled an iSight camera from a MacBook pro and guess what happened. It fit perfectly inside the slot in the iPad's frame. In the picture at right, you see the iPad's frame (above and below) and the MacBook Pro's iSight (center).
And to add a little more fuel to the fire, some eagle-eyed event watchers claim that the iPad Jobs held on stage at last Wednesday's event actually did have what looks like a camera along the top bezel.
What does this mean? Will future iPads sport an iSight? Probably. But that doesn't explain why the 1st generation's case has the slot. It must have been pulled at the last minute for reasons of cost, function ... who knows.
If you're not going to buy one until it's got a camera, it looks like your prayers will eventually be answered.
[Via MacNN]TUAWRepair service finds iPad's camera slot originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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How to Wrap and Store Cheese
Here's how to store your cheddar collection. [Photograph: steve p2008 on Flickr]
More Cheese
10 Things That Make a Great Cheese Shop »
All About Cheese Knives »
All Serious Cheese coverage »I've had a number of SE'ers here ask for my advice on storing cheese, and luckily it's not too hard to keep your cheese happy until it's consumed. I've got a particular wrapping technique for cheese storage that I hope everyone will find useful.
When I worked as a cheesemonger, we always advised our customers never to store their cheeses in direct contact with plastic, and not to wrap them too tightly. There's some science behind this, as kitchen scientist extraordinaire Harold McGee writes in his indispensable kitchen reference, On Food and Cooking. There are, McGee says, three essential reasons to avoid tight plastic wrap. First, any kind of tight wrapping will promote the growth of bacteria, including those not native to the cheese, which can cause food-safety issues or off flavors. Second, tight wrapping prevents the dissipation of natural off odors, like ammonia, which is produced by bacteria native to the cheese. Finally, cheese, being mostly oil and fat, is able to absorb flavors and chemicals from the plastic, which you definitely don't want.
So what's a better alternative? At Cowgirl Creamery, we sold cheese wrapped in waxed paper, which I recommend, as does McGee. If you're worried about your cheese drying out, you can then wrap it loosely in plastic wrap or place it in a plastic bag that's not fully sealed, but remember to leave a way for ammonia and other unpleasant chemicals to dissipate. Here's a pictorial guide I put together on what I consider cheese-wrapping best practice.
How to Wrap and Store Cheese
Say you've bought an excellent cheese—in this case Moonglo, a lovely washed-rind goat's cheese from Prairie Fruits Farm that, for some reason, the shop has seen fit to wrap completely inappropriately. You've got to deal with that.
You're going to need a piece of waxed paper, a piece of cheese, a roll of scotch or masking tape, and, possibly, a small plastic bag. The waxed paper should be a rectangle about twice as wide as your cheese wedge is long; the length should be 3 to 4 times that measurement. This is not an exact science, so don't stress out about it too much.
Place your cheese on the paper about two-thirds of the way up. Place the cheese cut-side down on the paper, so that the sharp, narrow end faces right and the thick, blunt end faces left. Unless your cheese wedge is from an exceptionally large wheel, it should have rind on at least one of the top or bottom sides.
Pull the bottom right-hand corner of your waxed paper up over the piece of cheese so that it pulls tightly against the bottom of the cheese and lays flat across the top.
Still holding the paper tightly over the cheese, pull the right-hand side of the paper over to the left, forming a tight crease over the pointy end of the cheese (on the right side). Use a small piece of tape over the side you just folded over to secure the first two folds.
At the top of the cheese there is now a double sheet of paper kind of flopping over. Take that piece and crease it sharply over the top side of the cheese, so that it runs flat along the top of the cheese and then meets and runs flat with the paper that is underneath the cheese.
Fold the now-triple piece of paper at the top of the cheese back over the cheese, and secure it with a piece of tape. Your cheese should now be starting to look something like a culinary Christo piece.
The only loose flaps of paper should be those sticking out over the blunt end of the cheese. Just like you're wrapping a birthday present, fold two corners in, and the other two corners over them, and secure the whole mess with another piece of tape. Hey! Your cheese is wrapped. Sweet.
If you're at all worried about the cheese drying out, stick the whole thing in a plastic bag, but don't seal it or seal it only part of the way.
Your cheese, wrapped this way, should be good for 5 to 8 days. But, if you're anything like me, it won't have to last.
Just hanging out with Ollie the Twitterrific bird! (Note: I...
Just hanging out with Ollie the Twitterrific bird!
(Note: I took this with my laptop on top of my washer/dryer because I couldn’t think of another way to hold the camera and Ollie at the same time…. which is why its so fuzzy).
Lockhart Steele says: "Dobkin smash!"
Specifically in local, I don't think the Times has had an original idea in years. It's got a metro staff of what, 60 reporters, and look at all this innovation: Cityroom, which is a fairly lazy and sleep-inducing ripoff of Gothamist, and The Local, a recently closed ripoff of Brownstoner. Five years ago The Times could have bought the best local blogs in New York for a song— instead, they decided they could do it better in-house, and completely surrendered the 20-40 year old demographic to sites like ours. Each day in NYC, Gothamist produces 50+ posts, drawn from hundreds of local sources and a dash of our own reporting. We do that with five full time editors and a couple of interns here in DUMBO. How many stories does the Times Metro section produce? 25? Sure, they're all original, but I'd rather read Gothamist- it's more interesting, and it tells me more about the city. That's not to say that the Times doesn't produce credible, interesting local stories- of course they do. But in the paper's slavish devotion to originality and old-fashioned reporting, they've lost their most important civic role, which is being the master curator which tells people in the city what's important each day. They just don't do that for people my age any more. via www.facebook.com Jake Dobkin's response to an e-mail from David Carr about The New York Times is worth reading in it's entirety.
To Catch a Critic: Sietsema on the History of Restaurant Reviewing and Ethics
The Village Voice's Robert Sietsema pens an in depth piece for the Columbia Journalism Review about the history of restaurant reviewing in New York. An excellent cultural piece, it charts the waters from Craig Claiborne's seminal reviews for the Times in the 60's to the food bloggers and the free for all of today. He touches upon Gael Greene, who first brought hyperbolic language to the medium ("After Gael Greene, the restaurant review would never be the same"); Reichl, who turned the review into a "bona fide literary form;" vernacular food lovers Calvin Trillin and Jane and Michael Stern; the first well known and not anonymous food critic, Restaurant Girl; and Bruni, who Sietsema argues, bucked the growing trend to review a restaurant before it was ready. He also chronicles the rise of the friends and family, preview, and press dinners for writers and the rising issue of ethics in the food writing world.
A major takeaway: "More than ever, diners could use a reliable critical guide. But where once there were a few dependable voices who reviewed restaurants based on a common set of professional standards and strategies, there is now a digital free-for-all." Read it.
· Everyone Eats...But That Doesn't Make you a Restaurant Critic [CJR]
BPRevvin’ Up!
One thing I know, some of you love BP Radio.*
Not a day goes by that I don’t get an email asking about why the pace of new BPR’s has slowed, asking for a link to a specific episode, or making a suggestion for a future guest. Let me address all of those here.
First, the pace has slowed for a number of reasons, but let me assure you that BPR is coming back strong. The winter has always been a slower period for us, absent the companion pieces to the Top 11 that we did last year. This year, a couple things conspired against us. A near complete meltdown in my home studio was one problem, while a new addition to the Wochomurka family has given Brad some new priorities. Brad’s four years at BPR have been great and I can’t thank him enough for the time and effort.
We’ll be debuting a new and an old friend in Brad’s place. The original co-host of BPR was Scott McCauley, who left to take on the responsibilities of being one of the Indianapolis Indians‘ radio announcers. Scott will be re-joining us to help with the normal BPR interviews, but will also be doing a lot from the road as he did on his very popular blog. With prospects like Pedro Alvarez, Tim Alderson, and Jose Tabata slated for time in Indy, Scott will be getting to know some future Pirates along with their International League opponents.
Joining us on the backend and handling Fantasy February will be Joel Henard. Joel’s popular Fantasy Insiders show on BlogTalkRadio has been growing since starting a year ago, so his addition will give a new sound and viewpoint. In fact you can hear more from and about Joel on the BPR Fantasy February Preview that’s up now. We’re excited about having Joel as part of the team.
Finally, there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to bring you more of the content you want. We’ve experimented with formats, never finding one that resonated with both our listeners and our team of experts. The time, scheduling, and production work that goes into BPR (or any podcast) is more than you’d imagine, about a 3:1 ratio to what you hear on air.
So we’re looking for your ideas, as always. Would you be interested in a “roundtable”-style weekly show that brought several BP writers to the virtual studio to discuss the hot topics? Do you like the long form interviews, like we’ve done with Bob Costas, Steve Stone, and Chuck Wilson? We’re always looking for the best guests, the newest ideas, and we’ll continue to do that in 2010. Thanks to the thousands of listeners who download us on iTunes or listen in right from the front page.
* I also know some of you could care less about audio content. You’re happy reading the printed page or killing some trees. That’s cool. Just please quit asking for transcripts. Until the technology to cheaply and accurately automate that exists, it’s not going to happen. We’re more likely to do some Avatar-style 3D video content before that happens.
Another PECOTA Update
The Weighted Means Spreadsheet, PFM, and depth charts were updated Monday morning. Here are some of the fixes and improvements:
- you’ll see two new tabs in the Weighted Means Spreadsheet–it now has both playing time projected and PECOTA raw projections.
- a lot of work has gone into the translation postprocessing of the PECOTA data, and GB%, BABIP, and defensive projections appear to have been significantly improved. There are still individual players that have interesting results, which we’ll continue to look at.
- a clarification: the column in the weighted means spreadsheet GB Out %, not GB%–that is, GBO/(GBO+AO), not GB/BIP.*
- four comparable players are now available, and their names are formatted to be easier to read.
- the closer issue has been fixed.
- the holds issue has been fixed.
- the quality starts issue has been fixed.
- players have been added. Please comment on additional players we’re missing and we’ll get them in there too.
- player R and RBI now scale to the team run environment.
- a few pitchers have been assigned >30 starts, which was treated as a hard cap in previous runs.
We’ll keep you posted about additional updates… please let us know what else you are seeing in the comments.
* We would prefer GB/BIP, but for large chunks of our data, we don’t have GB info on hits, so we don’t have GB/BIP information. We can get GO data for a lot more pitchers than we can get GB data - so that’s what’s used. Once you get past pitchers with < 10 IP, the correlation between GBO% and GB% is about 0.96–pretty close to identical.
AOL's Huge Gadget Blog Engadget Turns Off Comments (AOL)
Super popular tech site Engadget has shut down commenting "for a bit," because comments on the site have "become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations."
Sounds about right.
See Also:
- Apple's Tablet Is The First Big Threat To Google's Core Business
- Gawker Offers $100,000 To Play With The Apple Tablet For An Hour
- AOL In Talks To Acquire Mashable -- Reports
John Nack: Adobe Isn’t in the Flash Business
John Nack gets it:
It isn’t in the Photoshop business, or the Acrobat business, or the [take-your-pick product name] business, either.
It’s in the helping people communicate business.
We’d all do well to remember that, because it means that the company’s fortunes are tied to building great tools for solving problems.
I hound Adobe because I care. Adobe is the greatest design software company there’s ever been. They’ve lost their way and we need them to find their way back.
Lost Mania: Professor Thom's Geared up for Lost Premiere
It seems like the whole TV-watching population is all amped up for tonight's premiere of the final season of Lost, and East Village bar Professor Thom's is no exception. For those who don't know what those numbers mean (to be fair, no one really knows) get some background info here.
Sad Update!: EV Grieve notices this on the bar's website: "Unfortunately, we will not be able to sell alcohol at the event due to Community Board relations but the party will still go on and the food and soda will be flowing."
New world record wind speed
The World Meteorological Organization recently released a report saying that Mt. Washington's world record 231 mph wind gust was exceeded by a 253 mph wind measured in 1996 during a typhoon. (thx, mouser)
Tags: weather
Reyes Says...
Be there, it’s going to be a show. via www.metsblog.com He's possibly not one of the three best players on the Mets (Wright, Santana, Beltran, Bay and K-Rod are all comparable stars). But there's nothing better for fans of the Mets, or of baseball, than a healthy Jose Reyes. Reyes' injury was the worst thing about last year.
Reyes Says...
Be there, it’s going to be a show.
via www.metsblog.com
He's arguably not even one of the three top talents on the Mets (Wright, Santana, Beltran, Bay and K-Rod are all comparable). But there's nothing finer for fans of the Mets, or of baseball, than a healthy Jose Reyes. Reyes' injury was the worst thing about last year.
Amazon Gives In to Macmillan and Apple
In an extraordinary statement published on Amazon’s site, the retailer says that it “will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.” via mediamemo.allthingsd.com Lots of lots of bits & ink spilled on the Macmillan / Amazon thing. If you read this blog, you have read all about it elsewhere. I don't see is enough people taking Amazon to task for the absurd statement (excerpted above) that "Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles." I don't think the word 'Monopoly' means what they think it means.
markpasc's Make A Face
I love make-a-face.org, built by Rock Star markpasc. I propose we rename it so that it's more obviously in competition with Facebook. Maybe Facepage or Facepaper?
Launch: AngelList, a curated list of angel investors
I’m psyched to announce
AngelList, a curated list of super high-quality angel investors. And how to reach them.
Investors like Jeff Clavier, Dave McClure, Rob Hayes, Aaron Patzer, Brad Feld, and 50 other investors have already joined. I want to thank all of the angels for taking the time to fill out these extensive profiles.
And it’s not fair for me to list just a few of the investors here — they’re all awesome. You should click and browse the entire AngelList. Together, they represent $80M that will be invested in early-stage startups this year.
Angels: How to join AngelList
If you’re an angel investor, apply to join AngelList here. At a minimum, you should have made two $25K angel investments in 2009 and plan to make two more $25K investments in 2010.
Startups: How to contact the angels
Read an angel’s profile before you try to get in touch with him. All the angels have listed how many investments they expect to make this year, their typical investment amount, the markets they invest in, how to get intros, and lots more information you can’t find anywhere else.
Some of the investors let you contact them directly. But, before you do, build a minimum viable product and learn something about your customers by putting it in front of them. If you can’t get that far on your own, go find some idea investors instead. Then send the angels an amazing 150-word elevator pitch.
Don’t send them nonsense. Angels talk to each other and they talk to me. Your reputation is all you’ve got — so please follow our suggestions in the previous paragraph.
And — stay tuned — we’re announcing a sweet new way to reach AngelList soon.
Get AngelList updates
Get notified about new angels on AngelList via RSS or Twitter. And here’s a Twitter list of the angels on AngelList:
Quiz: How Much Do You Know About Indianapolis Food Culture?
You know every Colts stat there is to know, but how much do you know about Indianapolis restaurants and culinary specialties?
Richard Feynman explains magnets, sort of
I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of anything else you're more familiar with.
This is why science is so maddening for some and so great for others.
Tags: physics Richard Feynman science video
Six More Weeks of Winter? Fry the Lil' Bastard!
From a recipe for "Contry-Style Groundhog" [sic]: "Clean and skin as soon as possible. Remove all sent glands. Cut off head, feet and tail. Cure in cool place by suspending from hook approximately 4 days."
Margin of Victory
Yesterday I wrote about winning 1-0 and some of the limits in the Play Index in searching for such games (such as the 1954 limit.) Loyal reader DavidRF pointed out the Situational Reports tool on the site, something I am embarrassed to admit I never knew about before.
What a cool toy! The first thing I did was figure out how the margin of victory has broken down since 1900. (A quick reminder that below where I talk about 1-run margins of victory, I'm not referring to only 1-0 games like yesterday but rather all games with a 1-run differential.)
Here are the percentages of games won by a particular number of runs since 1900:
As you can see,for most of baseball history, 1-run victories have been the most common. That's not too surprising--given that both teams start with zero runs and one run is the smallest margin that can decide a game, it makes sense that it is the most common outcome. I'm curious to see what type of 1-run margin is the most common but I'd assume it's probably 2-1 or 3-2. (I'll post that tomorrow, OK?) There have been just a few times when all victories of 5 runs or more were more frequent than 1-run wins: in the early 1900s, some of the 1930s, 1948, and, ho hum, the Steroids Era. I think we're beating a dead horse on that one, but suffice it to say--scoring lots of runs leads to big wins sometimes.
In some periods, run-scoring was so low that 2-run victories actually became more frequent than all wins of 5 or more runs. That happened in 1917 and 1968. The low overall scoring in 1968 caused the mound to be lowered, giving batters a little assistance against pitchers.
I find it interesting how consistent 2, 3, and 4-run victories have been. For the last 100+years, you can bank on the fact that 4-run victories would comprise 11 percent of all games, plus or minus a small fraction. Three-run games have been nailed at 15% and 2-run games have been fairly consistent around 18%. I did not show the broken-out data above, but victories of exactly 5 runs have been very consistent at 8-9% and 6-run wins have been right at 6%. I would imagine that even larger wins show more variation due to being increasingly rare events.
Pam Tebow's Awful Logic
One problem with Tim and Pam Tebow commercializing their narrative of life is that it assumes what's true for them, is true for everyone. From Will Saletan:Pam's story certainly is moving. But as a guide to making abortion decisions, it's misleading. Doctors are right to worry about continuing pregnancies like hers. Placental abruption has killed thousands of women and fetuses. No doubt some of these women trusted in God and said no to abortion, as she did. But they didn't end up with Heisman-winning sons. They ended up dead.It's amazingly stupid when you think about it. It's like a firefighter who runs into a burning house, against the orders of his superiors, saves baby and then concludes that all other firefighters should do the same. I'm not opposed to Pam Tebow concluding that God blessed her. I'm against the notion that other young women should conclude that God will bless them too.
Being dead is just the first problem with dying in pregnancy. Another problem is that the fetus you were trying to save dies with you. A third problem is that your existing kids lose their mother. A fourth problem is that if you had aborted the pregnancy, you might have gotten pregnant again and brought a new baby into the world, but now you can't. And now the Tebows have exposed a fifth problem: You can't make a TV ad.
The elements of the incendiary blog post
If you're looking to drive a lot of traffic to your blog with controversial posts, here's your template.
This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers' attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people.
The comments are worth a read too. (thx, mira)
Update: See also Charlie Brooker on How To Report the News. (thx, christian)
Tags: weblogs
TUAW giveaway: Typewar for 10 lucky winners
Filed under: Software, iPhone, iPod touch
If you read our little review of Typewar yesterday, you already know that it's an elegant and fun game for iPhone and iPod touch.
Now you have a chance to win one of ten copies of Typewar in a TUAW giveaway. All you need to do is leave us a comment telling us what your favorite typeface is.
The details of the giveaway are as follows:
Remember, if you're not a winner, you can still purchase the game from the App Store or play the online version. Good luck, and start studying the Font Book app to get higher scores.
- Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
- To enter, leave a comment telling us what your favorite typeface is.
- The comment must be left before Wednesday, February 3, 2010, 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time.
- You may enter only once.
- Ten winners will be selected in a random drawing.
- Prize: One promo code for a copy of Typewar (Value: US$1.99)
- Click Here for complete Official Rules.
TUAWTUAW giveaway: Typewar for 10 lucky winners originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Reyes: Be there, It’s going to be a Show
In a report for the New York Post, Kevin Kernan writes:
“For two hours yesterday, I watched Jose Reyes, testing his surgically repaired right leg time and again during the strenuous workout. There were 90-foot dashes; explosive 10-yard sprints, on which Reyes would grab a tennis ball on one bounce; ground balls hit to his left and right; high choppers where he had to fly across the diamond; weight-lifting; dynamic stretching; core exercises and hitting. Test after test, and each time Reyes came through with a huge smile.”
…there is no question he looks strong…
“I’ll be ready in 2010,” Reyes told Kernan. “Be there, it’s going to be a show.”
…i am really looking forward to seeing jose on field… i recently talked with people who know him well, and they say last season was very difficult for him, but it helped focus jose, and it got him realizing who he is and what he’s about… they say he wants to do more media, so people can know more about him, he wants to return to being the exciting, high-energy player from 2006, and he is very focused and serious about helping this team win a World Series… i hope they’re right… i look forward to the show…
“I’m happy because I’m able to do what I do, running without any problem, without pain,” Reyes told SNY after the workout in Garden City. “Before I got the surgery, I always had some pain there, but now I’m free to run, so that’s made me feel very happy… When spring training is finished, I’m going to be even better.”
To read more quotes from Reyes, as well as from Paul LoDuca, who is working out at the same facility this off season, read Kernan’s report, here.
To see video of Reyes during the workout, check out this video and interview on SNY.TV.
Bip Cut
Ok, I think I have finally figured out what the heck Matt was trying to do with his Bip or No Bip package. I'll scan 'er up and post it by tomorrow. In the meantime, I got Bipped again. I'm a friggin' Bip magnet. I'm surprised Bip himself isn't living in my house. This time the perpetrator is Nachos Grande, AKA FanOfReds, AKA Chris if that is your real name.
Chris tried to be slick and act like Bippings were played out on the post where he reviewed his own Bippage:I got hit once...and I have a sneaking suspicion that the Bippings are quite over with...Yeah right. Nice try, twinkletoes. Trying to put me off my guard.NEVER.I TRUST NO ONE.
I got my W2 the other day and I ran into Payroll sreaming "It's a Bipper... IT'S A BIPPER!!!" Luckily it wasn't my company's payroll. So anyway, let's see what Mr. Cheezy Tortilla Snack has in store for me.
I had a couple of Heritage Black Backs that I saw you needed... and I couldn't resist.YES YOU COULDDON'T BLAME THORZULYOU HAVE FREE WILL
Ok, Bipped again...what's it this time...
Yadda yadda Heritage... let's get to the meat of this sandwich.
Zombie-Bipped! Harangued by Harangs! Checkerboard style even! Wait a minute... what the deuce?
Congratulations? Bipping-used memorabilia? Heartbreaking cards of Staggering Genius?? (I knew he was up to somethin'!) Memorabilia and cut signature card #1/2?????
Ok, now that's clever. A cut Bip-ped and Melvin Nieves' disembodied head. It's kinda like those horrid Tri-Star and Upper Deck Franken-Cuts where they take the signed baseball card and hack it up and paste it into a cut auto card except this is weird instead of disgusting. In true case-hit design style, Chris made the Heartbreaking logo smaller than a dime while the Nachos manufacturer logo takes up half the card. Very authentic! And one out of TWO as well! Some other sucker is going to get one of these things!
Good Job Chris! Very creative Bipping here!NOW STOP BIPPING MEI'M SERIOUSYOU PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHO YOU'RE MESSING WITH
Artisan Bread in Five
As a practical guide to incorporating No-Knead Bread baking into daily life, regardless of your schedule, I highly recommend Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and the follow-up Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I've been baking from the instructions in these books for some time now, and I hardly ever buy commercial bread. My young ones love the bread, especially warm from the oven, and there's something special about bringing your own fresh baked bread to a get-together.
Why Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day? Literally five minutes of effort. Throw the ingredients together, mix, pop the dough into a bucket and then into the fridge. After a couple hours of rising, I have enough for three big loaves. The dough keeps very well in the refrigerator for a couple weeks (and tastes noticeably better the longer it’s been sitting, though mine rarely makes it that long). When I want fresh bread I pull out a bit of dough, get the oven heated up and bake away. There are plenty of no-knead recipes about, but Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois perfected a process that works for me.
The main advantage I’ve gotten out of Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day is feeding the kids a bit more whole grain and some protein as well. I find the flavor richer, too (beer helps that a bunch, but also subtracts a few healthy points). I do prefer the texture of the white loaf, and for guests or as a host gift, I’d likely choose the original recipe. Of late, our everyday breadbox loaf comes from the Healthy book. Slices, toasted a bit, make a heavenly sandwich.
-- [Thanks to readers Drew Mills and Bob Mintiero for also recommending Artisan Bread -es]Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
by Jeff Hertzberg, Zoe Francois
2007, 242 pages
$15
Available from AmazonHelathy Bread in Five Minutes a Day
Jeff Hertzberg,Zoe Francois
2009, 336 pages
$15
Available from AmazonSample Excerpts:
From Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day:
Whole grain flour is better for you than white flour. Because whole grains include the germ and the bran, in addition to the starch-rich but fiber- and vitamin-poor endosprem....whole grain flours bring a boatload of healthy substances into your diet, including phytochemicals....,vitamins, and fiber. Those are pretty much absent from white flour. Iron, niacin, folic acid, riboflavin, and thiamine are added back in enriched commercial white flour, but no other nutrients—so whole wheat delivers more complete nutrition than white flour even when it's been enriched. But there's more—because bran and germ in whole grains dilute the effect of pure starch in the endosprem, the absorption and conversion of starches into simple sugars is slowed, so blood glucose...rises more slowly after consumption of whole grains than it does after eating refined white flour products.
*
Our first book concentrated on ingredients from the traditional European baker's cupboard. We've updated our discussion to include whole grains, vital wheat gluten, and even ingredients for gluten-free breads. Perhaps the most crucial ingredient to get familiar with is vital wheat gluten. It's essential for achieving a light loaf when using lots of whole grains, never kneading, and still storing the dough in the refrigerator.
*
Yeast Love to Keep Cool
Jefferson University yeast biochemist Hannah Silver, Ph.D., loves great bread, and bakes her own with our method. We asked her where the great flavor comes from, especially with dough that has aged a few days: "Yeast extracts are sometimes used as a flavor enhancer in commercial food, and they introduce a savory, complex flavor, sometimes called umami, the so-called fifth basic taste recognized by the human tongue (in addition to sweet, salty, bitter, and sour). The flavor you get with stored dough comes from chemicals produced by yeast as they use sugars and starches to make carbon dioxide gas (which forms bubbles to leaven the bread) and alcohol (which boils off in baking).
Announcing Google's Focused Research Awards
(Cross-posted with the Google Research Blog)It is said that Google is like a university — and not just because everyone eats their lunch off trays in the cafeteria. Like a university, we devote significant energy to research across a wide array of subjects — from semantics to help improve search, to ways we can improve the efficiency of our data centers. Along with our internal efforts, we've long invested in building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with universities and the research community. We give approximately 150 research grants a year to fund projects across a variety of subjects, we host visiting faculty members here at Google on sabbatical, and last year we started the Google Fellowship Program to fund graduate students doing innovative research in several fields.
Today, we're announcing the first-ever round of Google Focused Research Awards — funding research in areas of study that are of key interest to Google as well as the research community. These awards, totaling $5.7 million, cover four areas: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy. These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas.
These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise. We've given awards to 12 projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities:
Machine Learning: William Cohen, Christos Faloutsos, Garth Gibson and Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University
Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA
Energy efficiency in computing:Privacy:
- Ricardo Bianchini, Rutgers, Fred Chong, UC Santa Barbara, Thomas F. Wenisch, University of Michigan and Sudhanva Gurumurthi, University of Virginia
- Christos Kozyrakis, Mark Horowitz, Benjamin Lee, Nick McKeown and Mendel Rosenblum, Stanford
- David G. Andersen and Mor. Harchol-Balter, Carnegie Mellon University
- Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson and Amin Vahdat, UCSD
- Thomas F. Wenisch, Trevor Mudge, David Blaauw and Dennis Sylvester, University of Michigan
- Margaret Martonosi, Jennifer Rexford, Michael Freedman and Mung Chiang, Princeton
We look forward to working with these researchers over the coming years. And, as we continue to identify key areas of research that are of mutual interest to both university researchers and Google, we will provide awards to support these collaborations. For more information about all of our research programs, check out our University Relations site.
- Ed Felten, Princeton
- Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
- Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
- Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory
Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives
Lost: Where we left off
Where we left off with the "Lost" characters in the season five finale:
'Putting Weird Things in Coffee'
[Photograph: Putting Weird Things in Cofee]
I suppose putting a slice of bacon or an egg (eggspresso, heh) in your coffee is the height of efficiency. Phronk of Putting Weird Things in Coffee explains his blog's raison d'être:
This is a blog about putting weird things in coffee. I drink coffee every day, but get bored with the same old cream and sugar. I figured I might as well document my experiments for the benefit of all humankind.
Peanut butter, Whoppers, and banana seem to make sense, but salmon and blue cheese? Yowsa.
How do you normally take your coffee? [via Reddit]
February 1, 2010
HipHop for PHP: Move Fast
One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.
Today I'm excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it's certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out.
HipHop for PHP isn't technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP's runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.
Scaling PHP as a Scripting Language
PHP's roots are those of a scripting language, like Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of which have major benefits in terms of programmer productivity and the ability to iterate quickly on products. This is compared to more traditional compiled languages like C++ and interpreted languages like Java. On the other hand, scripting languages are known to be far less efficient when it comes to CPU and memory usage. Because of this, it's been challenging to scale Facebook to over 400 billion PHP-based page views every month.
One common way to address these inefficiencies is to rewrite the more complex parts of your PHP application directly in C++ as PHP Extensions. This largely transforms PHP into a glue language between your front end HTML and application logic in C++. From a technical perspective this works well, but drastically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work on your entire application. Learning C++ is only the first step to writing PHP Extensions, the second is understanding the Zend APIs. Given that our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer — we can't afford to make parts of our codebase less accessible than others.
Scaling Facebook is particularly challenging because almost every page view is a logged-in user with a customized experience. When you view your home page we need to look up all of your friends, query their most relevant updates (from a custom service we've built called Multifeed), filter the results based on your privacy settings, then fill out the stories with comments, photos, likes, and all the rich data that people love about Facebook. All of this in just under a second. HipHop allows us to write the logic that does the final page assembly in PHP and iterate it quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C++, Erlang, Java, or Python to service the News Feed, search, Chat, and other core parts of the site.
Since 2007 we've thought about a few different ways to solve these problems and have even tried implementing a few of them. The common suggestion is to just rewrite Facebook in another language, but given the complexity and speed of development of the site this would take some time to accomplish. We've rewritten aspects of the Zend Engine — PHP's internals — and contributed those patches back into the PHP project, but ultimately haven't seen the sort of performance increases that are needed. HipHop's benefits are nearly transparent to our development speed.
Hacking Up HipHop
One night at a Hackathon a few years ago (see Prime Time Hack), I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage. Even PHP itself is written in C. We knew that it was impossible to successfully rewrite an entire codebase of this size by hand, but wondered what would happen if we built a system to do it programmatically.
Finding new ways to improve PHP performance isn't a new concept. At run time the Zend Engine turns your PHP source into opcodes which are then run through the Zend Virtual Machine. Open source projects such as APC and eAccelerator cache this output and are used by the majority of PHP powered websites. There's also Zend Server, a commercial product which makes PHP faster via opcode optimization and caching. Instead, we were thinking about transforming PHP source directly into C++ which can then be turned into native machine code. Even compiling PHP isn't a new idea, open source projects like Roadsend and phc compile PHP to C, Quercus compiles PHP to Java, and Phalanger compiles PHP to .Net.
Needless to say, it took longer than that single Hackathon. Eight months later, I had enough code to demonstrate it is indeed possible to run faster with compiled code. We quickly added Iain Proctor and Minghui Yang to the team to speed up the pace of the project. We spent the next ten months finishing up all the coding and the following six months testing on production servers. We are proud to say that at this point, we are serving over 90% of our Web traffic using HipHop, all only six months after deployment.
How HipHop Works
The main challenge of the project was bridging the gap between PHP and C++. PHP is a scripting language with dynamic, weak typing. C++ is a compiled language with static typing. While PHP allows you to write magical dynamic features, most PHP is relatively straightforward. It's more likely that you see
if (...) {...} else {..}than it is to seefunction foo($x) { include $x; }. This is where we gain in performance. Whenever possible our generated code uses static binding for functions and variables. We also use type inference to pick the most specific type possible for our variables and thus save memory.The transformation process includes three main steps:
- Static analysis where we collect information on who declares what and dependencies,
- Type inference where we choose the most specific type between C++ scalars, String, Array, classes, Object, and Variant, and
- Code generation which for the most part is a direct correspondence from PHP statements and expressions to C++ statements and expressions.
We have also developed HPHPi, which is an experimental interpreter designed for development. When using HPHPi you don't need to compile your PHP source code before running it. It's helped us catch bugs in HipHop itself and provides engineers a way to use HipHop without changing how they write PHP.
Overall HipHop allows us to keep the best aspects of PHP while taking advantage of the performance benefits of C++. In total, we have written over 300,000 lines of code and more than 5,000 unit tests. All of this will be released this evening on GitHub under the open source PHP license.
Learn More this Evening
This evening we're hosting a small group of developers to dive deeper into HipHop for PHP and will be streaming this tech talk live. Check back here around 7:30pm Pacific time if you'd like to watch.
As I'm sure there will be plenty of questions, starting this evening take a look at the HipHop wiki (we'll publish the link later) or join the HipHop developer mailing list. You'll also find us at FOSDEM, SCALE, PHP UK, ConFoo, TEK X, and OSCON over the next few months talking about HipHop for PHP. We're very excited to evolve HipHop into a thriving open source project along with all of you.
Haiping Zhao, a senior engineer, has found Facebook to be a programmer's paradise.
EVOKE: Jane McGonigal's latest game
Jane's new game is designed to help kids in Africa:
Our goal: to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start tackling the world’s toughest problems: poverty, hunger, sustainable energy, water security, conflict, disaster relief, health care, education, human rights.
EVOKE is free to play, and open to anyone, anywhere in the world. It launches on March 3, 2010 and concludes on May 12, 2010.
(It's an event game, one with a start and end date! I do like this idea in the right place, and this feels like the right place.)
Here's the trailer:
EVOKE trailer (a new online game) from Alchemy on Vimeo.
Players who successfully complete all 10 missions and all 10 quests will be able to claim their honors: World Bank Institute Certified Social Innovator – Class of 2010.
(Thanks @climatestories!)
another way to see, another way to think
Barnes and Noble Review interviews Don Delillo re. Point Omega.
I don’t write essaylike fiction. My work tends to have a strong visual quality -- the idea is to make the reader see, and it may be the case that my interest in film has helped fashion this tendency. In the case of the videowork what I experienced was not only film, it was also time; it was also mind. With motion slowed so radically, one experiences another way to see, another way to think. Things seem intensely what they are, broken down into atoms, into motes of light, as if seen for the first time.
My copy arrived today. Blogging this now to remember to return to it later after reading the book.
the hose drawer
Last week, Stamen was involved in the MTV Hope For Haiti Now telethon. It was apparently the largest such fundraising effort in history, pulling down over $60 million in what the New York Times called "a study in carefully muted star power".
So it was, you know, a pretty intense event to be a part of. With about a week or so of lead time, we put together an interactive map showing moderated Twitter messages connected to the live event and relief for Haiti generally. It was also part of the post-show on television.
It looks like this:
Sha and I traveled to Los Angeles to work out last minute kinks and watch over the project. Aaron was up here, carefully seeing to the smooth operation of the engine driving the Twitter collection process for the duration. Much of the office pulled together to crank out this project on pretty much no notice, and it was an inspiring and energetic effort.
I want to talk about that engine, though - it's occupied most of my headspace since we all got back from the holidays, headspace ordinarily full of geography and cartography. After dabbling in the consumption and development of real-time API's for a few years, we've started working with the high-volume Twitter stream this year. Back in 2007, Kellan Elliot-McCrea and Blaine Cook opened our eyes to the possibilities of streaming APIs with their series of Social Software For Robots talks. We poked at XMPP and other persistent technologies a few times, but what really whet the appetite was a project we did with MTV for the 2009 Video Music Awards, our first large-scale public project connected to the Twitter streaming API. The VMA project was a collaboration with social media monitoring company Radian6, who handled the backend bits. Given Stamen's development and design focus it was only going to be a matter of time before we started pawing at that backend technology ourselves.
The consumption and moderation system we have developed was christened "Hose Drawer" by Aaron, a name that neatly encapsulates two strands in our recent interests:
- "Hose" draws on Blaine's joking references to "drinking from a fire hose" about live streams of Twitter's real-time database, and now graces the official name of the service itself. The complete feed is called the fire hose, while a limited feed for casual users is the garden hose. I've heard that the names persist internally, with names like "hose bird cluster", referring to Twitter's avian mascot, among others.
- "Drawer" is a nod to last year's Tile Drawer, an EC2 virtual machine image for rendering OpenStreetMap cartography. We're thinking about a future where this kind of functionality is as much a piece of furniture as a PC, albeit one that can be created out of thin air and destroyed just as quickly. With a growing selection of infrastructure products, Amazon's Web Services are making it possible for us to develop services that act like products, materialized by small python scripts that bootstrap themselves into multi-machine clusters.
This is the naming convention you get from living the pun-driven life*.
The firehose offers a continuous flow of data, yet requires us to break that flow down into discrete chunks. I've been thinking a bit about this process in our work since Tiles Then, Flows Now, my 2008 Design Engaged talk about map tiles and continuity, so much so that I see the process of breaking and reforming continuity everywhere around me. I flew several times last month, and each time I passed through security I thought about the check-in process as an elaborate map/reduce implementation, atomizing a stream of passengers into packets of shoes, laptops, jackets, bags and bodies. Numerous fascinating patents cover the splitting up of a steady flow, from t-shirts cut from unending tubular knit fabrics, to continuously-cast steel to simulated egg yolks sliced from unbroken cylinders.
Scott Bilas, whose Continuous World Of Dungeon Siege paper I drew on heavily for DE 2008, describes the challenges of writing a streaming system in the world of video game design:
The core problem that we had so much trouble with is that, with our smoothly continuous world, there are no fixed places in the world to periodically destroy everything in memory and start fresh. There are no standard entry/exit points from which to hang scripted events to initialize or shut down various logical systems for plot advancement, flag checking, etc. There is no single load screen to fill memory with all the objects required for the entire map, or save off the previous map's state for reload on a later visit to that area. In short, not only is the world continuous, but the logic must be continuous as well!The pattern we see here is to keep crises small and frequent, as Ed Catmull of Pixar says in an excellent recent talk. When describing the difficulty Pixar's artists had with reviews ("it's not ready for you to look at"), he realized that the only way to break through resistance to reviews was to increase the frequency until no one could reasonably expect to be finished in time for theirs. The point was to gauge work in motion, not work at rest. "So often that you won't even notice it," said Elwood Blues.
I'm interested to see where we can take this product-that-isn't-a-product. We're going to be using it for an upcoming high-profile sports broadcasting client (you'll hear more about this in another two weeks), and the stress tests administered by the Haiti telethon have shown exactly where we need to do more work. Oddly the overall performance was great, but we found ourselves occasionally needing to go tweet diving through the database, looking for specific messages that were good for television. This ability to reach in a meddle with the guts, place yourself on a calm island in the middle of the stream, rewind the tape and alter the flow, is the next type of control we're experimenting with.
holzer tattoos
The Whitney Museum is selling Jenny Holzer temporary tattoos, "designed using select tattoo fonts by Whitney designers."
I've decided I don't like "select tattoo fonts." (via)
A First Taste Of What The Google Tablet’s Interface Will Look Like (Pics)
Last week, the world saw Apple’s long anticipated tablet device, the iPad, for the first time. In the aftermath since that announcement, a few things have become clear: it will be great for some people, but its apparent lack of flexibility (at least in its first iteration) may leave something to be desired. It’s increasingly looking like the best alternative will be Google’s Chrome OS, which is clearly on a collision course with the iPad. And tonight, we’ve come across some very impressive mockups of what Chrome OS may look like on a tablet form factor.
The photos have been posted to the official Chromium site (Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome and ChromeOS). And while Chromium is not actually part of Google, it appears that these mockups were put together by Glen Murphy, Google Chrome’s designer. In other words, there’s a good chance that the final version of Chrome OS will resemble this.
Update: Be sure to watch this video to see a mockup of the tablet in action.
It’s worth pointing out that there almost certainly will be multiple “Google Tablets”, given that Chrome OS won’t be tied to a single device. That said, Google is working with select hardware partners to ensure that it runs on devices that are up to its specifications, and there may be one tablet device that is designated as the “Google Tablet”, much like the Nexus One is the “Google Phone”.
Via TheChromeSource.
10 Movie Inventions Better Than the iPad
So the iPad is out. Big deal. Of course, we’ve already ordered 39 for Reject Headquarters, that doesn’t mean we can’t still yawn about it.
Especially considering the wide array of inventions we see in movies all the time – stuff that’s far, far better and probably fabulously more expensive than an over-sized iPod Touch.
Here are just 10 of those fantastic film gadgets:
10. Instant Pizza, Back to the Future Part II
The Pitch: Some may call you shallow, but you don’t want to wait 30 minutes for your dinner. You want it immediately. And you want it extra large with a pile of pepperonis on it. Fortunately, Back to the Future II has you covered with hydrated pizza. The iPad would break if you poured water on it, and it could never feed a family of four. Dehydrated food for thought.
9. The Tardis, “Doctor Who”
The Pitch: Stemming from our last entry, it would be easy to toss the Delorian on the list, but I wanted to aim a little higher. Time travel is great, but Delorians don’t fly off to different planets or parallel planes of existence. Neither does the iPad. The Doctor wins again. (And, yes, I realize this isn’t from a movie. Feel free to call this list bullshit in the comments section.)
8. Suspended Animation, Vanilla Sky
The Pitch: Despite being a worst case scenario of how this tech can go wrong, the suspended animation found in Vanilla Sky is breathtaking. Imagine being able to live in a dream world for the rest of eternity. I hate to keep harping on it, but the iPad will not make Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruz fight over you.
7. Skynet, The Terminator
The Pitch: What could be better than an entire, interconnected information system? I see absolutely nothing wrong with a vast amount, an army if you will, of machines that help us in our daily lives and protect us with nuclear weapons while we sleep. What an innovation in technology. Simply brilliant. Fool-proof even.
6. Dinosaurs, Jurassic Park
The Pitch: So I’m talking more about the technology that brought them back than the creatures themselves – but they go hand in hand. Dino DNA. I want you to close your eyes for a moment. Now open them again and finish reading this, then close them and imagine that you’re holding a computer in your hand while typing up some documents and listening to Coldplay or whatever while chatting with your special lady friend. Now imagine that you own a damned dinosaur. You can only choose one of these scenarios. Which do you choose?
5. The Knife That Toasts, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Pitch: Even better than all of these listed so far is the knife that toasts while it cuts bread. Sure, having a dinosaur or a time machine would be awesome, but almost nothing compares to the best invention since sliced bread – since it completely negates the need for pre-sliced bread. Have I said the word ‘bread’ enough yet?
4. Bond’s Attache Case, From Russia With Love
The Pitch: Pretty much anything from Q Division (like radioactive lint and a rocket cigarette) is cooler than an iPad, but in From Russia with Love, Bond gets an attache case that includes:
- A rifle
- 50 Gold Sovereigns
- Tear gas disguised as talcum powder
- Ammo for said rifle
- Throwing knives
I have no idea what a gold sovereign is, but I know that the iPad definitely does not come with a rifle. There’s no app for that.
3. The Continuous Orgasm Loop, Brainstorm
The Pitch: I see absolutely no need to expound on why this is better.
2. Transporter Beams, Star Trek
The Pitch: It is my personal belief that we will never have teleportation even if the technology exists. Think about it: gone would be the excuse that you’re “on your way” or that the “check’s in the mail.” People would have to be far more accountable, but if we could beam from place to place (or onto a ship moving at warp speed) it would be a far more awe-inspiring experience than, say, reading my email on a 9.7 inch screen.
1. Lightsabers, Star Wars
The Pitch: The big one. No, they won’t let you transcend time or space. They won’t let you live out a pretend fantasy world. They will toast your bread as they slice, come to think of it, but the ultimate reason they top the list is that they are so damned cool. Just try not to cut off your hand. Or your estranged son’s hand for that matter.
Editor’s Note: This list was compiled by Cole Abaius with suggestions from the devilishly handsome Kevin Carr. Yes, the Orgasm thing was his idea. You caught him.
What inventions did we forget?
Related Reading:
- Boiling Point: Twilight
- Blasphemy: R2-D2 Cameo in Star Trek Confirmed
- Will ‘Star Trek 2′ Look To Today For A Futuristic Story?
- Culture Warrior: Digital Creatures
- Exclusive: Orci and Kurtzman Talk ‘Revenge,’ Freedom, and the American Way
- Daily Diversion: My Favorite Sci-Fi Movie (Star Wars/Star Trek)
- Boiling Point: Things That Don’t Happen in Space
- Shouting Match: Star Trek v. Star Wars
iPhone-to-iPad development: How's the timing going to work out?
Either I’m missing something, the initial iPad apps are going to suck, or we haven’t yet been told that iPad-native apps won’t be available for some period of time after the iPad’s launch.
We have strong incentives to port our iPhone apps to the iPad quickly and completely so they’re ready for sale on day one. As soon as people start getting iPads, they’re going to want apps for them, and they’ll quickly realize that the experience of running an iPhone-native app on an iPad really sucks. Any iPad-native apps in the store on day one are going to receive huge advantages in publicity and ranking that could last months, and any apps that wait too long will lose favor among iPad users and may be abandoned for competing alternatives.
The problem, of course, is that before day one, we won’t have iPads ourselves for development and testing. This wasn’t a problem for iPhone development: by the time the SDK was released, we had all been using iPhones for many months. We knew how iPhone apps should look and behave, and we could test our apps on our iPhones during development for three months before anyone could sell apps to customers.
But we have very little guidance on how iPad apps should behave, and if we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one).
This leaves a few possibilities for developers:
- Develop the entire app without using a real iPad, submit the binary to Apple, and have it available on day one. But, having never run it on a real iPad, the app will probably have a lot of issues, and it will get panned in reviews for being buggy while you wait in the very long app-review queue for your updates.
- Get an iPad on day one, rush home, test the app, iron out any little bugs or inopportune design choices, and submit it to Apple. This doesn’t really give much more of a testing and design advantage over option 1, and you’ll still be stuck waiting in the app-review queue for weeks as every other developer does the same thing.
- Wait for initial app submission until after you’ve tested extensively on a real iPad. You’ll have the best release, but you will have missed the launch window, which could cost you dearly in revenue and market share. And even when you finally submit, the app-review queue will still be bogged down with people who took the first two options, delaying your presence even further.
All of these options are terrible. Not only are they bad for developers, but they’ll be bad for Apple as initial reviews ding the iPad for the first batch of sloppy native apps.
This is one reason why I suspect there’s something we haven’t been told yet: I don’t think anyone’s iPad-native apps will be available on day one. My best guess is that the iPad will be released with only the built-in apps and iPhone-native app capability. After a few weeks or months, as the SDK gets another revision or two and everyone has solid, universal (iPad and iPhone) apps submitted and (hopefully) pre-approved, the iPad App Store will officially open. This could happen sometime closer to WWDC in June.
I hope it goes something like this, because I don’t want to have to choose between those options.
How-to: Nginx as a front-end proxy cache for WordPress
From Harvard Law’s Dan Collis-Puro, a how-to on optimizing your WordPress MU install, using Nginx as a front-end proxy cache for WordPress:
We put an nginx caching proxy server in front of our wordpress mu install and sped it up dramatically – in some cases a thousandfold. I’ve packaged up a plugin, along with installation instructions here – WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator.
You can read the full details on Dan’s blog and grab the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory.
[ Visit http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/djcp ]
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize
An award and exhibition that celebrate contemporary portrait photography, whether it's editorial, reportage or fine art. Not very rock 'n' roll but consistently good continue
Blizzard launches Facebook Armory app
Earlier this evening we received a tip (thanks, Taylor) that Blizzard has launched a WoW Armory Facebook application. It promises to publish data about your WoW characters to all your Facebook buddies in real time. I figured I'd give it a spin, not so much because I want to spam my friends with it as because I'm curious what they've come up with.
You can see the results in the gallery below. Here are my brief impressions:
After choosing your characters and what you want to show, you may be worried that it's not working, but just give it a minute - it doesn't populate immediately. Mine started showing data in about ten minutes.
- It's a bit scary that it asks you to log in with your Battle.net account, but if you look at the URL of the popup window it is in fact from us.battle.net, one of the legitimate domains. Still, I'm not sure it's good training for users for Blizzard to ask us to log in within random popups.
- The login form does not ask for your authenticator.
- It doesn't tell you this in the brief description, but you choose up to five characters for the app to report to your followers. It doesn't just indiscriminately report the progress of your latest bank alt.
- By default, it publishes updates on your characters to your Facebook feed, but that box is easily unchecked (fortunately).
- It also by default posts to your feed that you've installed the app, which is something I can't forgive a Facebook (or Twitter) developer for. If I really want to tell all my friends I'm using your app, I'll tell them. Don't do it for me. At least this too is an option that can be unchecked.
Overall, assuming they manage to make it work, if you want your Facebook friends to know about your WoW characters, this is the app for you. If not, why are you still reading this post? Anyway, I'm glad to see Blizzard following through on some of the promise the Armory has always showed, even if I don't approve of all their methods. Innovation is always welcome.
Filed under: Blizzard
Blizzard launches Facebook Armory app originally appeared on WoW.com on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Quiz: How Much Do You Know About New Orleans Food Culture?
Note: Don't worry, we're not playing favorites. We'll have an Indianapolis quiz for you tomorrow!
Mmm, po-boys. [Flickr: itakebandphotos]
If the Super Bowl came down to each team's hometown foods, we'd be rooting for the Saints. The city is full of inventive foods that really only exist in New Orleans. How much do you really know about the New Orleans grub? Take the poll! »
When Context Gets Complicated (and why it's not a problem)
In Essential Skills for Perl 5 Programmers I mentioned that no one can be an adept Perl programmer without understanding context. This trips up many, many people -- and you often hear (unfair) criticisms of Perl 5 based on misunderstandings and guesses about how context works.
Context is reasonably easy to explain. (The previous sentence is grammatically correct.) Contexts is not difficult to understands. (The previous sentence is grammatically incorrect, even if you speak the Queen's English.)
If you can find the errors in the previous paragraph, you can understand quantity context in Perl 5: like subject-verb agreement in terms of number, expressions in Perl 5 can behave differently in contexts that imply zero, one, or more results.
fetch_something_awesome(); # void context my $item = fetch_something_awesome(); # scalar context my @items = fetch_something_awesome(); # list contextContext gets a little bit trickier when you need to coerce what would normally be one context into another:
my ($item) = fetch_something_awesome(); # list context my @items = scalar fetch_something_awesome(); # scalar contextIf you know the visual cues (if you don't randomly sprinkle punctuation about your program until it works), those are easy to understand as well.
The subtlety comes when dealing with complex contexts, usually with nested expressions:
say reverse $name; # list context, thanks to print my %values = ( name => get_name(), # list context, thanks to hash assignment rank => get_rank(), ); $screen->flip( $fleet->get_spaceships() ); # list context (param flattening)This is often where more fair criticisms of Perl 5 suggest that context may not be worth it, because you have to understand what a line of code means and what it implies to read it correctly.
There's a fair point there, but it's also silly in some ways. Skimming code which calls other functions may give you some idea of what those functions do, but you rely only on the names of those functions and not their documentation to tell you any other details. Do they modify global or thread-local variables? Do they have caching or performance characteristics? Do they block? Do they require special initialization or error handling? Do they return special values?
The valid point is that chaining multiple expressions into complex compound expressions can have interesting effects. (I see this in Haskell code often; invisible partial application means that I personally can't skim Haskell code without tracking down the arity of functions to figure out what happens where.)
That's no argument against language features. It's an argument against making expressions more complex than necessary. Note that the same argument applies against complex prefix-
unlessexpressions.unlesscan be amazingly useful when used properly. If you abuse it, you make amaizing problems. Don't make problems.
Math for non-experts
Mathematician Steven Strogatz is doing what sounds like a fascinating series of posts on mathematics for adults. From the initial post:
I'll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who'd like to have a second chance at the subject -- but this time from an adult perspective. It's not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it's so enthralling to those who get it.
More subject blogs like this, please. There are lots of art, politics, technology, fashion, economics, typography, photography, and physics blogs out there, but almost none of them appeal to the beginner or interested non-expert. (thx, steve)
Tags: mathematics Steven Strogatz weblogs
Refinery29: Twitter Troll: Hypoglycemic House of Holland, Philosophical McQueen, and a Victoria Beckham Showdown
Lady Gaga: "http://twitpic.com/10vukf - having "tea" during show in phillip tracy hat and armani suit" Careful, Gaga. Electric currents and liquids don't mix.
Henry Holland: "Everyone is being very mean to each other in the studio today. Don't MAKE me start making P45 paper aeroplanes people!" Maybe they all have low blood sugar? Eat some almonds, Henry Holland!
AndrewAndrew: "We want to go to this guy's parties: http://bit.ly/9G4vDR" Us too! We'll bring the Lady Gaga Doritos holder.
McQueenWorld: "why people ignore the ugly things in life but within this they are missing the beauty that lies under the rotten fruit!!!!!!!!!!!!" Words to live by.
tessbrokaw: "just ate something healthy and it tasted really gross. screw that." Dig deeper Tess, McQueen tells us there's something beautiful underneath.
Fashionista_com: "Who Wore it Better -- Blake Lively vs Jennifer Hudson. http://tinyurl.com/y8q8cwq" They both look great, but we have a feeling that Posh would blow them both out of the water.
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Modeling is Hard
It's that time of year, the months approaching Fantasy Baseball time. So I am thinking about projections and predictions: You would never look at a map and say ‘I’m traveling east on I-40. This map expects me to drive into the Atlantic Ocean.’ The map just informs you that the course you are on will eventually lead to the ocean, and if you decide not to exit, wetness awaits. (Obviously, there’s some hyperbole here, as I realize that the freeway doesn’t end with a pier). The map has no expectation of what will happen. It’s just informing you of the course you are on. The right question, paired with some simple math and data, can offer revelations about how baseball games have been won or lost for over a century. On Baseball Reference, evidence that Winning 1-0: The last team to win 2 straight 1-0 games was the 2006 Red Sox, who did it in games 92 and 93 of the year. The winning pitchers were Lester and Beckett. Prior to that, it was the 2000 Dodgers. Prior to that, it was the 1996 Cardinals. Prior to that, it was the 1991 Angels. All of these cases were against the same opponent. Within the limits of the PI I was unable to find the last time it happened against two different opponents in consecutive games. This is about the web, but it's relevant to all areas of research. David Weinberger asks what changes when filters increase the size of what’s filtered: A traditional filter in its strongest sense removes materials: It filters out the penny dreadful novels so that they don’t make it onto the shelves of your local library, or it filters out the crazy letters written in crayon so they don’t make it into your local newspaper. Filtering now does not remove materials. Everything is still a few clicks away. The new filtering reduces the number of clicks for some pages, while leaving everything else the same number of clicks away. Granted, that is an overly-optimistic way of putting it: Being the millionth result listed by a Google search makes it many millions of times harder to find that page than the ones that make it onto Google’s front page. Nevertheless, it’s still much much easier to access that millionth-listed page than it is to access a book that didn’t make it through the publishing system’s editorial filters. For good measure, a nice review of A Short Tale of Skyscrapers, by The New York Review of Books: Difficult to access and structurally unsound, the upper reaches of these structures served no real purpose other than ostentation and were wasteful in the extreme (perhaps Father Kircher was right after all about living in a violent state). They embodied the kind of destructive feuding that we see in the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, they cost inordinate amounts of money, and they came tumbling down with disconcerting frequency in a terrain riddled with the craters of ancient volcanoes and crisscrossed by fault lines. Verona’s towers crashed to earth in a medieval earthquake.
I am (not) the mayor of Coffee Shop
I am the mayor of Coffee Shop #hourlycomicday @thingaday, originally uploaded by buhny.(I was ousted)
Video: Jose Reyes is Ready for Action
To see video of Jose Reyes running, sprinting, throwing, in action, lifting weights, and looking more than ready for Spring Training, check out this video and interview on SNY.TV.
…that… is… awesome… there is no other way to put it… no single transaction, nothing, will get me more pumped up and excited for 2010 then seeing reyes running, working hard and saying, as he does at the end of the video, ‘I’m ready to play baseball,’ while pumping his fist…
…from what i can gather, the team’s trainers feel he is 100 percent… what’s more, i have heard jose is in good spirits, smiling, having fun and he’s pumped to get the season started…
Time for journalists to organize
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"Google and Yahoo and Dogg" heh. And, also, word to Andy who called this piece out for being linkless.Text by Sarah Phelan
Will journalists be forced to include a "tip jar" logo next to their online work? Or is there some other way to save an industry in crisis?Alan Mutter has a cool post on his 'Reflections of a Newsosaur' blog today: he advocates that we stop the exploitation of journalists. And he includes a handy way to calculate your own worth as a reporter, including the notion of establishing a basic hourly rate (which he calculates as four times the minimum wage in your state, so that would be $32 an hour in California, and then factor in everything else.)
Mutter's is a desperately needed message and tool-- in this age where freelancers are apparently expected to feel honored just to get their byline in an online publication, or a pittance instead of a professional salary.
Since the Chronicle drastically cut its newsroom last year and the California Media Workers alliance set up a Freelancers Unit (which, abbreviated, fittingly says "FU") I've read countless rants about the piss poor wages, or lack of them, that employers seem to think are OK to offer reporters, in the post-print, mobile-phone dominated age.
And so far, no one has figured out a way to turn around this depressing trend. Will reporters be forced to include a "tip jar" logo, alongside the "share" and "email" and "print" buttons that typically frame their online work? I don't know, but if you are prepared to give a dollar to a barista for making you a cup of joe, why not do the same for someone who just spent months of their life digging up the dirt on the rich and powerful, so that members of the public could have a clue as to what is really going on? And why don't the aggregators, like Google and Yahoo and Dogg, who profit handsomely from displaying reporters' work, pay writers a small fee (even a percentage of a cent) everytime someone clicks on this so-called 'free' content?
There may be very good reasons why none of the above approaches will work (it's easy to slip a dollar in a real jar, but less appealing when you have to log in and give someone your credit card number). But if human kind can figure out a way to get to the moon and cure cancer, then we can figure out a way to fairly compensate reporters.
Especially since these are the very folks who alert you when earthquakes hit and wars break out and seemingly wholesome politicians turn out to be cheating, daughter-denying, self-promoting sleaze bags. Yes, we can imagine a world without newsprint, but a world without news? That's called a dictatorship.
Infrastructure Bigs: To Compete, NYC Needs Congestion Pricing, Tolls
Tolls at the Holland Tunnel. Now the Port Authority is looking for the next financing model. Image: Library of Congress.
At a panel put on by the New School last week, some of New York's biggest players in transportation and planning came together to discuss the future of the city's infrastructure. They all seemed to agree: The city can't keep up with its global competitors without new sources of revenue.
Christopher Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority, framed the stakes: "We have to ask, what builds wealth?" The panel all agreed: New York's health and economic dominance can't continue without consistent investment in its infrastructure, particularly its transportation network.
Seth Pinsky, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, put it more directly. "We have spent the last 20 years trying to get our infrastructure back to pre-1970 levels," he said. Without moving further, "We will not be able to compete with other world cities."
The challenge, though, is financing. Especially if you're talking about panel members' top priorities: The ARC tunnel, the 41st Street station on the 7 line subway extension, renovation of the Delta Terminal at JFK, and the East Side Access project are exceedingly expensive. Ward stated that the Port Authority's current commitments mean that no new capital projects are on the table for the next decade, even though his agency is among the more fiscally healthy in the region.
Ward identified two different causes of the infrastructure funding crunch. The first is that "we are living in the out years," experiencing a budget crisis deferred from a generation earlier. Additionally, he said, "we're largely ignoring the role of urban centers because of this idea that you can do more with less," which he traced back to the Reagan Administration.
Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, underscored the sense of fiscal crisis. "Even what we have, we don't have," she said, referring to the recent attempt by Westchester legislators to cut the payroll tax from last summer's MTA rescue package.
The solution, they all seemed to agree, will necessarily include new funding mechanisms. Ward claimed that "the congestion pricing initiative will return time and time again until we get it right." Robert Yaro, the president of Regional Plan Association, agreed: "Congestion pricing is going to be back."
Higher tolls were repeatedly discussed approvingly, though no one got into specifics.
The panel also showed a lot of interest in raising revenue from increases in real-estate prices where new infrastructure is built, a process known as value capture. Yaro proposed that new transportation infrastructure could be paid for by recapturing some of the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" added "to each home within a half mile of those stations." Pinsky noted that "that's essentially what we've done with the 7 extension," where the process has raised billions. Ward also expressed interest in value capture.
The focus on expensive mega-projects led one panelist to question whether less costly solutions should play a larger role in addressing the region's transportation needs. Alyssa Katz, a consultant at the Pratt Center for Community Development, introduced Bus Rapid Transit into the discussion, noting that projects the other panelists seemed to favor are "incredibly expensive and difficult to do."
While the other panel members sounded bullish on BRT, they also seemed to downplay its potential significance within the region's transportation network. "If you look at connectivity," said Ward, "BRT is a good example of that at the local level. But then there's the regional connectivity and the global connectivity." Similarly, Yaro said that "BRT doesn't replace; it complements."
He concluded by noting that a new generation of transportation infrastructure will depend on breakthroughs in funding. "The Port Authority invented the cash register bridge and Robert Moses perfected it," said Yaro. "We need a new cash register."
Hello World!
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Hello, DJhello man
White House Budget Includes $530M for Local Sustainability, $1B for HSR
The White House officially unveiled its $3.8 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2011 this morning, seeking $1 billion to continue its high-speed rail investment and $530 million for the transportation leg of the Obama administration's inter-agency push to promote sustainable planning on the local level.
White House budget chief Peter Orszag challenged employees to boost their walking last fall. (Photo: CSM)
The budget also proposes a $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, a rechristened National Infrastructure Bank that would use federal money to leverage private capital for large-scale projects improving the nation's built environment.
The $530 million request for the three-agency sustainable communities partnership, which got $150 million from Congress for the current fiscal year, would go directly to the U.S. DOT for "comprehensive regional and community planning efforts that integrate transportation, housing, and other critical investments," according to the White House budget office.
The administration requested $160 million in total for the two other agencies involved in the partnership, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
As promised to Congress in December, the White House also set aside funding for the implementation of its plans for a new federal role overseeing rail transit safety. The U.S. DOT would receive $30 million in today's budget to train new inspectors and help cities such as Washington D.C. come into compliance with minimum safety standards.
On the controversial question of the cash-strapped highway trust fund -- which is expected to run out of money this spring, not long after the expiration of the latest short-term extension to the 2005 federal transportation law -- the presidential budget maintains its insistence on waiting until 2011 to fix the nation's transport funding crisis.
In the budget's U.S. DOT section, the White House writes:
The current framework for financing and allocating surface transportation investments is not financially sustainable, nor does it effectively allocate resources to meet our critical national needs. The Administration recommends extending the current [federal bill] through March 2011, during which time it will work with the Congress to reform surface transportation programs and put the system on a viable financing path...
[T]he Administration seeks to integrate economic analysis and performance measurement in transportation planning to ensure that taxpayer dollars are better targeted and spent.
In a separate section of the budget dedicated to long-term fiscal analysis, the White House describes its $43 billion estimate for highway spending in 2011 as a placeholder, not intended to reflect the funding strategy "that the Administration and Congress necessarily should or will adopt for the long-term reauthorization" legislation.
"Rather," the budget adds, "its purpose is to accurately reflect the condition of the [highway trust fund] and recognize that, under current law, maintaining baseline spending" on highways will require more transfers of cash from the general Treasury.
★ What if Flash Were an Open Standard?
Some good questions from Dave Winer regarding Apple, Adobe, and Flash:
What if Apple were trying to erase something that’s not company-owned? Either a formal or de facto standard? Further, what if their alternative were something that was locked-down and owned by a company? Further, what if the company was Apple?
I’d say that’d be a different ball of wax entirely. It would depend, for one thing, on the specific open / de facto standard technology.
But as for open web standards, the evidence — actions and shipping code, not just words — strongly indicate that Apple is a major proponent of them. Apple didn’t have to release WebKit as an open source project — they could have taken the BSD-licensed KHTML and kept their derivative rendering engine private. They’ve re-written WebKit’s JavaScript engine from scratch at least twice, and released it all as open source. (Apple has also been aggressive about releasing its advanced non-web developer technology, like blocks and LLVM, as liberally-licensed open source.) All of Apple’s top competitors in the mobile space have either already adopted WebKit or soon will: Android, WebOS, even BlackBerry. Members of Apple’s WebKit team have been helping drive HTML5 since its inception. In short, I’d say Apple likes its technology open and its products closed.
E.g., it makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.1
I do understand the fear. It’s indisputable that Apple seeks large amounts of control over its products. So it’s a reasonable question to ask whether Apple sees the web itself, which they have no control over, as a problem. I don’t think that’s the case at all, though. The web, as a whole, is arguably the single most entrenched computer technology ever created. So where Apple seeks control with regard to the web is in the technology to render it — HTML, CSS, JavaScript. No one can tell them what to do with WebKit; they wait for no one to shape and bend WebKit to suit their needs.
My feeling is not that Apple seeks total control over all content and software in iPhone OS. I’d say it’s more like they’re providing two well-defined, nice, neat, easily-understood extremes: the totally controlled native Cocoa Touch, and the totally open web.
Winer ends with a suggestion for Adobe:
Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple’s court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.
That’d be an interesting move, and it would certainly shake things up. But what if the source code to Flash Player is — as many would wager — a huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horseshit? It’s sort of like what if Microsoft open-sourced the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It’s not like anyone who is now using WebKit or Gecko would switch to that just because it was opened — or that WebKit, Mozilla, and Opera would suddenly be obligated to or even interested in adopting IE-specific web features.
The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE — the web has already moved on.
H.264 is a de facto web standard, but admittedly and unfortunately not an “open” standard, hence Mozilla’s opposition to it. My point here is simply that H.264 is not owned by Apple or any other single company. ↩
Taste Test: Delivery Pepperoni Pizza
"There were definitely two winners, and two that would require a lot more beer-drinking."
Clockwise from top left: Pizza Hut, Papa John's, Domino's, Little Caesars.
Since pizza is right up there with wings and guacamole as far as Super Bowl cuisine goes, we ordered pepperoni pizzas from the four big nationwide chains (Little Caesars, Pizza Hut, Papa John's and Domino's) to find the tastiest. Why pepperoni? Because most people order pizza with at least one topping and pepperoni is the most popular one in the U.S.
Pizza Hut
Pepperoni: Whoa, they did not hold back. There's sure enough of pepperoni but, gack, it's pretty bland. Though it does get points for having nice, crisp edges.
Sauce: Opposite from the pepperoni situation. There's very little sauce and what's there is too herby.
Cheese: "Wished this was lighter on the cheese," said one taster. (That's probably not a compliment to the cheese.)
Crust: Doughy and heavy without much flavor. Maybe a hint of garlic (maybe).Papa John's
Pepperoni: Good—spicy, meaty, crisp around the edges, and it kind of dissolves in your mouth. Plenty of it too.
Sauce: Sweet, but for some reason people seem to get behind the Papa John's sweetness. Thankfully it doesn't taste like ketchup or fake herbs, and it actually has a hint of a buttery undertone.
Cheese: A little tangy; tastes like real cheese.
Crust: A bit more done than the others (decent browning and crunch on bottom) and nice hole structure (those network of air bubbles). Not too thick, which is good—the others can be a chewing party. "Weird, weird crust...not a horrible crust but it sure had a weird aftertaste," a few testers agreed.Little Caesars
Pepperoni: Underseasoned (not quite spicy or salty enough) and undercooked (not browned at all).
Sauce: Not as candy-sweet as the others, but the problem was all the herbs. Or shall we say "herbs." It had that shaked-on dry spice taste.
Cheese: More like greasy rubber. No real flavor, except maybe chemical.
Crust: Doughy and crunchless, this barely passes as cooked. Actually, one taster felt like it was cooked in a toaster, comparing it to Ellio's frozen pizzas. "If you like toaster pizza, this is for you," said one taster.Domino's
Pepperoni: More of a dark red (like real meat) than the disappointing, fake-looking orange. Nice meaty texture with a good amount layered per slice.
Sauce: Still has that delivery pizza sweetness, but with a slight kick.
Cheese: The best cheese of the four: tangy, well-seasoned, and actually tastes like mozzarella.
Crust: Breadier than the Papa John's crust but still had the same nice browning underneath. Intensely garlicky. There were food scientists hard at work here, but whatever you guys did, nice job. We'd eat another slice of this.Final Thoughts
There were definitely two winners, and two that would require a lot more beer-drinking. We'd recommend ordering Papa John's and Domino's. While Papa John's would be easy to graze on all game long, Domino's was the most aggressively flavored, so you might actually be good after a couple slices. Pizza Hut and Little Caesars, on the other hand, oh boy.
Special Thanks
A big hug and spoonful of Pepto-Bismol goes out to The Food Lab's J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, Brownie of Blondie & Brownie, and Doug Quint of the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck for putting their stomachs on the line to help the Serious Eats team get through a pile of pizza boxes. Naturally, there was pie (as in pie-pie, as in "Elvis" pie baked by Brownie involving bananas, peanut butter, and bacon—basically the pie version of this) for dessert.
iPad as revolution
Macworld: “For Apple, it’s not about killing off tinkerers, but ensuring that not everybody who wants to use a computer has to be a tinkerer.”
NYPD Denies Role in Another Pedestrian Death. Kelly, Bloomberg Silent
In what has become an all-too-familiar scene, NYPD is denying reports that a police chase led to the death of a pedestrian after an incident of petty theft on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
Karen Schmeer, 39, was an acclaimed film editor known for her work with documentarian Errol Morris. At approximately 8 p.m. Friday, Schmeer was crossing Broadway at 90th Street when she was struck by the driver of a rented Dodge. She was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Luke's-Roosevelt.Karen Schmeer. Photo via NYT
One of the men in the car, 25-year-old David McKie, was arrested after fleeing the vehicle. He was charged with second-degree murder. Two other suspects are still at large. The three were reported to have stolen some over-the-counter allergy medication from a nearby CVS pharmacy. The Daily News reports:
A police source said cops tried to pull over the suspects minutes before the crash, but they lost the car momentarily.
When they caught up with the vehicle, it had already struck Schmeer, as well as several other vehicles.
Witnesses at the scene painted a slightly different picture, saying they saw the car weaving in and out of traffic going north on Broadway with a squad car with lights and sirens blaring in hot pursuit.
According to the NYPD Patrol Guide, "Department policy requires that a vehicle pursuit be terminated whenever the risks to uniformed members of the service and the public outweigh the danger to the community if [the] suspect is not immediately apprehended." The Times' coverage of Schmeer's death takes the chase scenario as a point of fact, but does not indicate that the paper attempted to get an explanation as to why officers would be engaged in a high-speed pursuit on the Upper West Side at dinner time on a Friday.
Of the Times story, an NYPD spokesperson told Streetsblog: "That report is wrong." The spokesperson declined to elaborate and directed us to submit further questions via email. NYPD has not replied to email queries about the circumstances of the crash and whether police violated protocol. Neither Commissioner Ray Kelly nor Mayor Bloomberg have apparently seen it necessary to address the witness accounts of a high-speed pursuit.
Schmeer's death marks the latest in a string of deadly crashes in which pursuing officers are suspected or known to be involved. Last spring, Streetsblog talked to several witnesses who said a car thief was fleeing police when he hit and killed 38-year-old Greenpoint mother Violetta Kryzak. The commanding officer of Brooklyn's 94th Precinct said the department had "no indication" that a pursuit occurred.
One year ago, a video camera captured an apparent Staten Island chase that led to the death of a couple with young sons. "At no time was this vehicle pursued," said an NYPD spokesperson.
Last August, 27-year-old restaurant worker and father of three Pablo Pasares was run down in Long Island City by a man after an alleged drug buy. Detectives "were chasing the guy," said one witness. "He lost control." In this case, police apparently did not deny a chase had taken place.
And just last week, cops embarked on a "high-speed, multi-collision chase" through Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights that, miraculously, ended up damaging only a few parked cars and the police cruiser.
The list goes on, and the question remains: How can NYPD support its claim that it did nothing wrong when witnesses say otherwise?
Mark Pilgrim on the Setup
Mark Pilgrim:
I’ve had my current desktop for a little over two years. I want to continue using it for another 20. I mean that literally: this computer, this keyboard, this mouse, these three monitors. 20 years. There’s no technical reason the hardware can’t last that long, so it’s a matter of whether there will be useful software to run on it.
Fascinating.
Jane McGonigal on Gaming for Good
A Worldchanging Interview
Solving the world’s biggest problems will require a superhuman outpouring of energy, passion, creativity, and collaboration. Fortunately, Jane McGonigal has a strategy for unleashing people’s capacity to take on hard challenges: playing games. A celebrated designer, researcher, and future forecaster, McGonigal specializes in alternate reality games that engage massive online audiences in real-world issues ranging from energy shortages to health pandemics.
McGonigal brings to the task both academic credentials (Ph.D. in performance studies from U.C. Berkeley) and veteran gamer instincts (as a kid, she hacked games on the Commodore 64). As director of game research and development for the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., she frequently collaborates with global partners on game development. Her new book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Happy and How They Can Change the World, will be published later this year by Penguin.
I caught up with McGonigal by phone as she was putting the finishing touches on her latest project. EVOKE, which she is developing for the World Bank Institute, promises to deliver “a crash course in changing the world” when it launches in March.
Suzie Boss: For the uninitiated, what are alternate reality games?
Jane McGonigal: When people think of computer or video games, they often think of playing in a virtual world that doesn’t exist in reality. But alternate reality game designers are trying to get people to play in the real world. We want people to bring the same curiosity, wonder, and optimism that you feel when in your favorite video games into your real lives and real problems.
SB: Your games sound pretty different from commercial products like World of Warcraft.
JM: There are two big distinctions. First, alternate reality games are not in a virtual environment. They’re built on top of social networks, so we use ordinary online tools like online video, blogs, wikis, and being part of a network. It’s not about graphics and avatars. Second, it’s real play and not role play. You don’t adopt a fictional personality. You play as yourself.
SB: Do your games actually change how people act in real life?
JM: CryptoZoo is a good example of a game oriented to changing your everyday behavior. I developed it for the American Heart Association with the mission of changing the way people think about physical activity. Right now, many of us think of physical activity as requiring you to carve out an hour and changing into your gym clothes. You think you have to go to a special place to sweat. It feels separate from our everyday lives and not integrated into what we do when we’re hanging out with our friends. CryptoZoo inspires people to say, let’s be active for the next five minutes. We teach people to see real streets, real parks, real physical environments as opportunities for playing the game.
SB: How does it work?
JM: CryptoZoo is about chasing these imaginary, bigfoot-like creatures called cryptids. Each cryptid runs in a distinct way. It has specific style of interacting with the environment. Summit monkeys, for instance, swing around any poles they see and run up and down steps. Slaminas run backwards, without stepping on any cracks. (The website includes field reports that describe creatures’ behaviors, along with videos created by players.) So if you’re walking down the street and notice telephone poles and a staircase at city hall, you might say, “Let’s chase the summit monkeys through this block.”
SB: Has CryptoZoo gotten people moving?
JM: That’s the cool thing. Gamer-type people do not necessarily see themselves as athletic. So when we’ve organized CryptoZoo events—such as a late-night cryptid chase through Manhattan at the Come Out and Play Festival—we gather data. At the start, only one in eight people considered themselves athletic. But just from playing the game, they ran more than a mile. They were sweating. Their heart rates were up. These were the same people who had said earlier, “I hate running. That’s not what I do.” But then they did it. It was transformative. The experience changes the way people see themselves. Games are really good at showing us that we’re capable of more than we thought.
SB: Is there more going on here than old-fashioned play?
JM: A lot of people are interested in play. I’m more interested in game play. And here’s the difference: Play is exploratory, open-ended, improvisational. It’s very free. All animals play. Game play is different. It’s outcome-oriented, goal-oriented, and structured. Humans are the only species we know of that comes together to structure an experience where we all understand the rules and work toward the same goal. In fact, cognitive scientists now define the ability to play a game as the distinguishing cognitive trait of the human brain.
People have been playing games as long as we’ve had civilization. As I explain in my book, the earliest dice games were played during times of famine. Whole societies would come together and play these games as a way to diminish their suffering and create social resilience. I interpret that history to mean that games are a way to get massively many people to rally around a common goal.
SB: And that brings us to EVOKE, your new massively multiplayer change-the-world game. Give us a preview.
JM: EVOKE is about rallying as many people as possible around social innovation goals. The goal is to build up our global capacity to change the world in as short a time as possible, for as many people as possible. I call it a crash course in changing the world.
Every week for 10 weeks (starting March 3), there’s going to be a new episode about social innovators working out of Africa. They travel around the world solving epic crises, like food shortages or power outages in major cities. (Game narrative is a graphic novel written by Kiyash Monsef, McGonigal’s husband, with illustrations by Jacob Glaser.
Players take on three missions each week. They learn—basically, filling their brain with information about the topic. They act—doing something in real life to implement what they’ve learned. And they imagine. What could they do about this problem today if they had a team, money, and resources? That’s what social innovation is all about—scaling up local solutions to make big, sustainable solutions that can spread.
The first week, the episode is about a scenario 10 years from today when there’s a major famine in Tokyo. Players learn about the issue of food security. They do something in real life to increase the food security of at least one person they know. And then they imagine a bigger solution.
Meanwhile, real experts (from the field of social innovation, World Bank Institute, and other domains) are watching, mentoring, and giving feedback. At the end of the game, we’ll set up year-long mentorship for people who have ideas. They’ll get support to develop their ventures. We want the game to be a springboard to real action.
SB: Who do you hope will play?
JM: Young people in Africa are our ideal audience. We’re working with universities throughout Africa to get the game into classrooms. Then there’s a wider audience of people anywhere in the world, but especially in areas of high poverty where there’s an urgent need for social innovation. I’m imagining mostly young adults—under 35 (although there’s no age limit).
Finally, there’s a third level. And that’s anybody who knows anything and is willing to funnel that knowledge toward people who can do a lot of good with it. They can participate as a mentor or ally. By coming once a week and spending 15 minutes, they can offer players attention, positive feedback, and ideas. The idea is to create a critical mass of engagement and attention so we have a big swarm of people who come and do something together.
SB: What sort of numbers are you hoping for?
JM: If we could get 50 students in Africa to work their way through the entire game, and get to the point where they have a social enterprise ready to pitch, that’s a huge win. That would be fantastic. Then, I always set a lucky number for people who feel that their life is transformed by the game. They’ll spend enough time participating so that the rest of the work they do afterwards is influenced by their new powers, new capabilities, and new allies. My magic number is 1,100. Beyond that, I’d love to see 10,000 people signed up and participating.
SB: I notice you sometimes use superhero lingo when you talk about games (i.e., developing “new powers”). Is that deliberate?
JM: Anytime you work really hard at something you care about, you do develop strengths and abilities. That’s how we humans learn. With games, the level of emotional engagement is so intense. With the bigger games I’ve designed, people play them like a full-time job, sometimes for 40 hours a week. When you put that much time in—and you do it because you love it—you’re going beyond normal learning or normal skill acquisition into the world of superpowers. It’s heroic effort, and you wind up with all these great attributes and assets.
SB: Where did your own passion for gaming come from?
JM: I was a computer geek growing up, hacking my own games on the Commodore 64. But I never thought of gaming as a viable career path. Then when the first-person-shooter genre came out, I fell out of gaming for a while. My brain doesn’t enjoy that. Meanwhile, toward the end of college, I worked in parks and recreation in New York. We put on big game festivals at parks and schools, and I saw the power of games to bring people together and create community. Those were athletic, playground-type games. Once that became possible to do with technology—with all the narrative and interaction of computer games—that was an exciting moment.
SB: Recently, you blogged about how you created a game to help you recover from a concussion. What happened?
JM: I had a fluke accident last summer and slammed my head into a cabinet door. I was in the middle of working on my book and suddenly, I was in this fog. If I tried to read or write, my brain would basically shut down. This dragged on for weeks. There was no purpose in my days. Everything just stopped. It was bleak. So I started making up a game. The idea was, I’d become this Buffy-the-vampire-slayer-type hero and slay my concussion. I came up with missions and allies so I could get my friends and family to help me. It was a cry for help, and it started to work.
I might eventually take it further.
SB: Finally, you’ve said you’d like to see the Nobel Peace Prize go to a game designer someday. Why?
JM: Games wield enormous power in our culture. They’re controlling the attention and getting the most energy and passion out of many, many people.
The commercial gaming industry is our innovation lab. By making games purely for entertainment, we learn more about how to make people happy and how to develop these superpowers.
But if you don’t do something real with these powers, it’s a waste. If we’re not developing games that use all that insight and all that powerful technology for good, it’s a big, tragic waste. So, my benchmark for the games I want to help create is that they should only be games that serve a humanitarian purpose, that give people a chance to tackle urgent problems like poverty, that lead to world peace. These are big human goals that I think games are capable of tackling.
Images courtesy of Avant GameHelp us change the world - DONATE NOW!
(Posted by Suzie Boss in Features at 10:04 AM)
we have a monopoly on michael sippey
Two great things about John Scalzi's wrap up of the Amazon / Macmillan cluster this weekend. First, this bit:
The letter took time to praise Amazon but also did some interesting rhetorical heavy lifting — for example, labeling Amazon a “customer” of Macmillan rather than a “partner,” which is a fun corporate way of jamming Amazon into an ecological niche it probably would prefer not to be in.
Second, Scalzi's changed the descriptive slug on his blog to read "We have a monopoly on John Scalzi." Nice.
But since his post is trending on Techmeme, I wish that Scalzi had a bit more to say about how the only real winner here is Apple. Not only because this weekend's drama has the potential to drive passionate readers away from Amazon and to Apple, but also because the only way Macmillan's tough guy bargaining position re. the "agency model" would have been possible is because of iBookstore.
Foodprint NYC event
Foodprint is not your typical NYC food gathering. From Edible Geography:
The free afternoon program will consist of four panel discussions: "Zoning Diet," about the hidden corsetry of policy, access, and economics that gives shape to urban food distribution; "Culinary Cartography," a look at the kinds of things we can learn about New York City when we map its food types and behaviours; "Edible Archaeology," about the socio-economic forces, technical innovations, and events that have shaped New York food history, in the context of the present; and "Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios," an opportunity to collaboratively speculate on changes to the edible landscape of New York in both the near and distant future.
The event takes place in NYC on Feb 27th; it's free and the entire thing will be available online as well.
Tags: food NYC
Upright Hubris: A Short Tale of Skyscrapers
Ingrid D. Rowland
The shadow of the Burj Khalifa over downtown Dubai (Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images)If the Earth has never been shy about proclaiming the instability of its surface, the creature misnamed Homo sapiens has never been shy about ignoring the message. Dubai’s 828 meter-tall Burj Khalifa skyscraper, which opened in early January, is only the latest in a millennial series of contenders for the title of world’s tallest building. It looms, at least for now, above Malaysia’s Petronas Towers, Toronto’s CNN Tower, Chicago’s Sears Tower, and the quaintly venerable Empire State Building in that proverbial city of towers, New York. Yet the profile of Burj Khalifa suggests nothing so much as a seventeenth-century engraving intended to ridicule the human habit of tower-building, part of the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s exquisitely illustrated essay on the Tower of Babel, Turris Babel of 1679.
Kircher was interested in nearly everything, including the length of the Biblical cubit, and the Tower of Babel was one of his points of reference for establishing precisely what that length might have been. But Kircher’s image calls into question more than the measure of the cubit. Officially, for a Jesuit father in Rome in 1679, Earth’s proper place was the center of the universe—a locus from which it could not be easily dislodged. But his picture illustrates how an overly massive tower would have done just that. In the foreground we see a Tower of Babel reaching from the sphere of the Earth up to scrape the sphere of the Moon (COELUM LUNAE); fluttering around its upper reaches are versions of Genesis 11:4 —“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven”—in six languages (Latin, Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic, all of which Kircher knew). The two long boxed captions on either side of the tower, meanwhile, explain the background image: it shows (as per the “Note to the Reader” in the left-hand panel) that a tower of that height “when balanced against the earthly globe … greatly exceeds the weight of the earthly globe itself.” Hence Planet Earth hangs dramatically on a chain from the center of gravity that would obtain for a combination of Earth plus moon-scraping tower.
But how can the center of the universe be knocked off center? As the right-hand panel helpfully remarks, “These results are absurd,” enumerating reasons that include “the movement of the earthly globe out of its center would bring on the ruin of all nature below”, “the Sun and the Moon could no longer illuminate the earthly globe”, and “No one could exist on the Earth except in a violent state.” In truth, the more we examine it, the more Kircher’s whole page looks like a colossal phallic joke—especially from a man who also wrote obsessively about obelisks. If we listen carefully we can probably still hear the old trickster, nearly eighty when this book was published, cackling with delight.
The phallic nature of towers has never been subject to much doubt. Medieval Italian cities bristled with them, each one symbolizing, with what the Greek poet Pindar called (in another phallic context) “upright hubris,”* a powerful family or clan. Bologna at the time of Dante in the early fourteenth century was as full of skyscrapers as New York.
Difficult to access and structurally unsound, the upper reaches of these structures served no real purpose other than ostentation and were wasteful in the extreme (perhaps Father Kircher was right after all about living in a violent state). They embodied the kind of destructive feuding that we see in the Verona of Romeo and Juliet, they cost inordinate amounts of money, and they came tumbling down with disconcerting frequency in a terrain riddled with the craters of ancient volcanoes and crisscrossed by fault lines. Verona’s towers crashed to earth in a medieval earthquake. The sudden change in color at a certain level of Siena’s Mangia tower marks an eighteenth-century collapse. The Campanile that dominates Piazza San Marco in Venice is a modern reconstruction; the original crumbled to a heap in 1902.
Why, then, do we keep building to such heights? To be sure, it is in the nature of phallic things (symbols included) to try, try, and try again, just as it is in the nature of primates, among other artists, to imitate all that they admire, including marvelous tall majesties like mountains and trees. But ultimately, as Father Kircher suggested, there are physical limits to the most ingenious human striving. As more and more women join the ranks of practicing architects, as well as the ranks of those who commission architecture, perhaps we will see a change in the ideal form of buildings and cities. (For one example, see Jeanne Gang’s new wind-baffling, undulating skyscraper in Chicago.) Certainly the great architectural matrons of the Italian Baroque era, like the Neapolitan princess Isabella Feltria della Rovere, wasted no time erecting towers—instead, while her feckless husband languished in debtor’s prison, she poured her fortune into the great marble-encrusted Jesuit Church of Gesù Nuovo, reserving a place for her own tomb at the high altar. That, at least, was an architectural scheme that the Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher would have endorsed with wholehearted enthusiasm.
∗ Pindar, Pythian Ode 10.36, referring to the donkeys of the legendary Hyperboreans: γελᾷ θ᾽ ὁρῶν ὕβριν ὀρθίαν κνωδάλων Apollo “laughs, seeing the upright hubris of the beasts.”
The New York Times Without Flash | Doug McCune
"The simple truth is, creating amazing visualizations like you see on the NYT website is possible and easy with Flash. They use the tools that get the job done most efficiently and produce the best end result. This isn’t an argument about whether it’s theoretically possible to create these types of visualizations without Flash, it’s about whether it’s being done."
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And the GRAMMY goes to…
Kudos to David Byrne (and Brian Eno) and Eminem for walking away with a few of those coveted gold Gramophones at the 52nd GRAMMY Awards last night. It’s been a privilege to have both of these extremely talented artists release records on the Topspin platform, and we’re proud to see them awarded for their amazing work.
If you haven’t been following along at home, Eminem picked up two GRAMMY Awards for ‘Relapse’, one for Best Rap Album, and the other for Best Rap Performance By A Duo Or Group (with Dr. Dre and 50 Cent) for the single, ‘Crack A Bottle’. Eminem released ‘Relapse’ directly to his fans on eminem.com in a variety of exclusive digital and physical packages via Topspin in May 2009. (’Relapse: Refill’ was also introduced via Topspin in December 2009 with the addition of a variety of exclusive shirt designs bundled with the record.)
David Byrne & Brian Eno’s ‘Everything That Happens Will Happen Today’ won the GRAMMY Award for Best Recording Package, with art direction by Stefan Sagmeister. Sagmeister’s design for ‘Everything That Happens…’ included a fabricated tin for the deluxe version of the record, and was released exclusively via the Topspin platform at everythingthathappens.com. If you missed Ian’s unboxing of the ‘Everything That Happens…’ deluxe package, check it out below.
As many of you know, we’re big proponents of deluxe offerings here at Topspin. Artists who’ve released albums directly to their fans in a variety of digital and physical packages using Topspin typically see deluxe offerings account for as much as 40% of total unit sales and north of 50% of gross revenue in some cases. Don’t force your fans to settle for the one-size-fits-all version of your record at retail – create something special they can only get from you.
Congratulations again to David Byrne & Brian Eno, Eminem, and all the GRAMMY Award winners and nominees for putting out some great music this past year.
Duplicates existing functionality
Shared by Harold
This is a definite problem. iPhone ecosystem is fine (from my consumer perspective) for things that Apple doesn't compete with. It's shit for the stuff Apple does. And it's really, really shit for the stuff Apple does badly.This addendum at the end of The iPad is the iPrius got to me:
Imagine when Adobe invests $X millions building Lightroom for a year only to have it rejected because Apple launches Aperture the same week.
With all of the discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of applying the iPhone OS to more general-purpose computing tasks, this is one aspect that’s easy to overlook at the beginning: software competition evaporates for anything already done by an Apple app.
It’s an acceptable trade-off for a smartphone, but is it healthy for anyone if all possibilities vanish for alternative native web browsers, email clients, media players, media storefronts, calendars, and contact managers?
And Apple’s apps span a wider range than just the iPhone’s “big four” bottom-row apps that have been forbidden to duplicate so far. How far will Apple’s “duplicates existing functionality” policy go as their App-Store-locked platforms are used for more general computing tasks?
If it were my time and money on the line, I’d certainly not want to be in the business of making an iPad photo manager, mapping app, ebook reader (narrowly missed that axe), slide-presentation builder, word processor, or spreadsheet. And that list will keep growing as Apple expands their software lineup to encompass nearly anything that’s mass-market enough to be worth their attention.
Another failure pattern that this situation creates is when an Apple app falls out of Apple’s favor and stops receiving significant improvements (e.g. iCal, Aperture), but is still covered by the competition ban. Users of those apps must simply live with the limitations or undertake the significant expense of dumping the entire platform.
I can’t think of any justifiable reason why it’s good for anyone in the long run — including Apple — to prohibit competition by apps that would otherwise be acceptable simply because Apple already made a similar one. And while most of the App Store’s policy issues are a mild nuisance at worst, we’re going to keep finding edge-case failures like this until the hopelessly broken policy of app review is significantly rethought.
Of Projections and Predictions
It’s February, finally, so spring training is just around the corner. Teams are putting the finishing touches on their rosters, filling out benches and bullpens, giving jobs to role players and evaluating the walking wounded. And now that the off-season is mostly finished, you should expect to be inundated with the buzzword of the month – projections.
CHONE. ZiPS. MARCEL. PECOTA. CAIRO. And yes, FANS. (Side note: are we capitalizing it, even though it’s not an acronym? I think we should. It’s not like anyone has any idea what CHONE stands for.) There will be no shortage of projection systems tossing out expected performances over the next month or two.
It won’t stop with just individual players, either. The guys over at Replacement Level Yankee Weblog have already run the CAIRO projections through the Diamond Mind simulator 100 times and posted the aggregate results as projected standings. Spoiler alert – the Yankees are good, the Blue Jays are not.
However, we need to make a distinction: projections are not predictions. Projections are information about what we think we currently know, while predictions are speculation about things that we probably cannot know.
This may sound like semantics, but there is an important difference here, and it’s often lost in the way projections are discussed. Too often, projections are treated as predictions of the future. You’ll see people say things like “CAIRO thinks the Blue Jays are going to only win 67 games this year,” for instance.
But that’s not really true. CAIRO thinks that the Blue Jays are on course to win 67 games, and if they don’t do something about it between now and the end of the season, that is their likely destination. But, like a map, the entire point of a projection is to inform the the user so that he can then alter the course if he so desires.
You would never look at a map and say “I’m traveling east on I-40. This map expects me to drive into the Atlantic Ocean.” The map just informs you that the course you are on will eventually lead to the ocean, and if you decide not to exit, wetness awaits. (Obviously, there’s some hyperbole here, as I realize that the freeway doesn’t end with a pier). The map has no expectation of what will happen. It’s just informing you of the course you are on.
Just like you control where you car goes, so do front offices control where their team goes, to a point. It is quite possible that Alex Anthopolous will look at his team’s internal projections and say, “Hey, we kinda suck; someone go find me a third baseman.” And then, after his assistants find him a third baseman, the team will be better. And people will say that the projection was wrong.
But it wasn’t wrong, because it wasn’t predicting anything. It was giving an evaluation of what was true at the time, to the best of its abilities. Its abilities may be flawed (and how you evaluate projection systems is another post for another day), but the intent was never to suggest what will happen, but rather, what could happen if nothing changes, knowing full well that things will change.
So, if you see a projection that you don’t particularly like, don’t get too bent out of shape about it. It’s just information about a path that a team may currently be on in February. By July, there’s a really good chance that the team will be on a different path, and a new projection accounting for that change in course will be available. Most of all, don’t assume that the people behind the projections hate your team. In fact, if your team gets a terrible projection, you may want to thank the system’s creator – that may just be the information that prods the front office to go out and improve the team, thus proving that the stupid system was wrong all along.
Cornish Journal: A Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors
To the residents of Cornish, N.H., J. D. Salinger was not a recluse. He was a townsperson — just a guy called Jerry.
Bill Simmons on LeBron to the Wizards
(2008 photo by Jonathan Newton - TWP) Like I always say, I'm a 100 percent objective sports journalist, but there are certain local personnel moves that would be tough for me to view with a neutral eye. Tony Romo in a Redskins jersey? Can't picture it. Matt Bradley or Brooks Laich suiting up for the Flyers? Don't want to see it. Sidney Crosby rocking the red? Impossible. And LeBron James wearing the Wizards colors whilst flinging white powder to the gods? I might retch a little bit at that one. Wizards fans constructed this worldview where their star (Gilbert) was genuine and refreshing and as down-to-earth as an NBA franchise player could be, while Cleveland's star was a phony, preening, posturing, self-obsessed diva. Now, clearly this worldview has fallen apart in recent weeks, but I still don't see how fans could go from loathing LeBron to loving him. Still,
Winning 1-0
Some facts about winning by a score of 1-0, all post-1954:
- No team, since 1954, has ever won 3 straight games by a score of 1-0. I found this out by looking at the team batting streak finder.
- The last team to win 2 straight 1-0 games was the 2006 Red Sox, who did it in games 92 and 93 of the year. The winning pitchers were Lester and Beckett. Prior to that, it was the 2000 Dodgers. Prior to that, it was the 1996 Cardinals. Prior to that, it was the 1991 Angels. All of these cases were against the same opponent. Within the limits of the PI I was unable to find the last time it happened against two different opponents in consecutive games.
- Each year there are roughly 20 to 50 games that end 1-0. Since 1993, the number has been between 26 and 42 each season. Here is a plot showing the percentage of games each year that end up as a 1-0 victory for one of the teams:
Fascinating. Here is yet another plot that clearly shows the Steroids Era, right there starting in 1993. Over the entire period, the fraction of such games has gone up and down quite a bit, often as much as a full percentage point from one year to the next. Suddenly, starting in 1993, the number has stayed almost perfectly constant despite it being a fairly rare event. It's no surprise that the overall percentage of such games has dropped--with offense coming more easily it's unusual for two teams to be limited to one total run in a game. However I'm not exactly sure why the amount of fluctuation has dropped off so much, again given how rare the event has become. Perhaps the fluctuation hasn't dropped off so much when considered as a percentage of the overall frequency. (What I mean is when the percentage was 3-4%, a variation of 1% was about 30% of the nominal value. Now that the percentage is hovering near 1.5%, a 30% variation is only about half a percentage point--however it seems that the actual fluctuation is even less than that.)
Let's here your theories on why 1-0 games vary so little nowadays.
News: Reyes is Ready for Baseball
Jose Reyes worked out on Long Island today and, according to SNY’s Kevin Burkhardt, he did five sprints, 90 feet each, and looked ‘great.’
From what I can gather, Reyes ran at full speed without a limp.
“That’s how I do it,” Reyes
said, upon finishing his sprints. “I’m ready to play baseball.”To see footage of Reyes, who SNY mic’d during the workout, check out SNY’s Daily News Live at 5 pm, as well as SportsNite at 10 pm.
Updated at 11:08 am:
I hope to get video from SNY.TV to post on MetsBlog later today.
Aerial map of NYC from 1924
The interactive map on the NYC govt site has hi-resolution aerial photos from 1924 (click the camera and move the slider to 1924). Check out all the piers, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the old baseball stadiums, the LES (and everywhere else they built housing projects), Penn Station, and the skyscraperless Midtown. This is hours of fun.
Tags: maps NYC
"Just before Apple announced the iPad and the agency deal for ebooks, Amazon pre-empted by announcing..."
“Just before Apple announced the iPad and the agency deal for ebooks, Amazon pre-empted by announcing an option for publishing ebooks in which they would graciously reduce their cut from 70% to 30%, ‘same as Apple’. From a distance this looks competitive, but the devil is in the small print; to get the 30% rate, you have to agree that Amazon is a publisher, license your rights to Amazon to publish through the Kindle platform, guarantee that you will not allow other ebook editions to sell for less than the Kindle price, and let Amazon set that price, with a ceiling of $9.99. In other words, Amazon choose how much to pay you, while using your books to undercut any possible rivals (including the paper editions you still sell). It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the major publishers don’t think very highly of this offer.”
- Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight
Video: Jon Hamm and Michael Bublé's 'Hamm & Buble Restaurant' on SNL
On Saturday night's episode of SNL, Jon Hamm hosted and Michael Bublé was the musical guest, maybe for the sole purpose of this sketch. If you combine their last names you get "Hamm & Bublé," a restaurant concept where only pork products and fine sparkling wine would be served. Granted, the proper pronunciation of Bublé is "boo-blay" not "bubbly" and drinking a glass of champagne with pig chunks floating inside isn't the most delicious idea in the world, but when Jon Hamm decides you will go into business together, you listen. Watch the video, after the jump.
Jon Hamm and Michael Buble's 'Hamm & Buble' Sketch on SNL
Related
SNL Digital Short, 'Cookies'
Jon Hamm's 'John Ham' Toilet Paper on SNL
Bernie Mac Flaunts Hot Sauce Carry Purse on SNL
Fernando Vicente
Fernando Vicente’s caricature blog is made up mostly of portraits of artists and writers. This Churchill is a rare exception, but I couldn’t resist the interesting sharp angle of his right arm atop Big Ben.
Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Caricature, Fernando Vicente
finn stone at woolff gallery
finn stone
woolff gallery, london
on now until february 18th, 2010
'leg-go'
a larger than life high-heel shoe adorned with pieces of lego
an exhibition of UK based designer finn stone's work has just opened at the woolff gallery in london.
the pieces on show are part of a new unseen collection, including his controversial 'pigs',
and 'broom broom' and leg-go' in which he has transformed mundane objects into sculptural works
through the use of toy cars and lego.
detail of 'leg-go'
'broom broom'
a broom made up of toy cars - vroom vroom!
detail of 'broom broom'
'pigs'
Wil Shipley: Apple "copied me"
Filed under: Apple Corporate, Software, Bad Apple
When Steve Jobs was introducing the iPad last week, a number of us familiar with Delicious Monster had the same reaction during the iBooks demo: "That looks like Delicious Library."
Developer Wil Shipley noticed, too.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Shipley complained about the striking similarity.
"But the thing about iBooks is, it's a book-reader. So, of course they looked around, found the best interface for displaying books (Delicious Library's shelves), and said: yup, this is what we're doing."
He notes that he didn't copyright the idea of showing photo-realistic books on wooden shelves, and that if Apple had called ahead of time they would have revealed a secret on one hand, and admitted that the two apps were similar on the other.
"...they can't write someone a check unless they got some value in return. And if they got value, the lawyers would ask, how much was it? How was it determined?"
Before you call "coincidence," note that many former Delicious Monsters employees are now at Apple. Of course, you can't say that this was malicious. In fact, Shipley's assertion is probably correct: They felt that Delicious Library's implementation was the best and ran with it.
In a way, it's flattering. Something he made has been acknowledged by a huge corporation known for design. Still, it's gotta sting. Shipley again:
"But your [designs] aren't really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, 'Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.'"TUAWWil Shipley: Apple "copied me" originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Pre-TED2010 reading list: 8 picks from TED's June Cohen
In the weeks before TED -- amid frenetic preparations for the conference -- I always steal a few calm moments, surrounded by stacks of books by this year's speakers. It's one of my favorite pre-TED rituals. Of course, there's no hope of finishing them all. But I like to immerse myself in at least a few chapters of each, so I can meet the speaker where they are, and understand the conversation they're having with the world.
This year, I tweeted about it, and got many requests to share the list. And so, here they are ...
Pre-TED reads 1/9: Denialism, by Michael Specter @specterm. How fear of science is preventing progress. Powerful. Loved.
Pre-TED reads 2/9: The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton (of @aldaily) Beautiful prose arguing that art is a human universal.
Pre-TED reads 3/9: Connected, by Nicholas Christakis @connected_book The shocking proof of how deeply we're affected by our friends' friends.
Pre-TED reads 4/9: The Wisdom of Whores, by @ElizabethPisani How POORLY we spend billions of $ trying to prevent AIDS
Pre-TED reads 5/9: I Am an Emotional Creature, by Eve Ensler. Embrace your inner girl!
Pre-TED reads 6/9: Whole Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand. Environmentalism reconsidered, for the realities of a new era. Or: Why nuclear power, GM foods & squatter cities are green.
Pre-TED reads 7/9: No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale, by George Whitesides. Tiny, lovely things in image & prose
Pre-TED reads 8/9: This Will Change Everything, edited by John Brockman @edge. Short, sharp essays by who's who of TED world. I think one could safely call this "brain candy."
Pre-TED reads 9/9: Fair Game, by Valerie Plame Wilson, the 'outed' CIA agent, who'll talk at TED about the need for nuclear disarmament. I'm fascinated by this woman!
And, finally, pre-TED listening: Natalie Merchant's 1st studio album in 7 yrs. Soon-to-be released: Leave Your Sleep Love, love, love.
Everything sucks and we're all bitter
Mark Morford on our unfortunate modern condition of being publicly disappointed all the time.
What happened to my bonus? What happened to my job? What happened to my country? Why can't it all go the way it's supposed to go? You mean having a kid won't solve my marriage problems? Why don't these drugs make me feel better? Where's that goddamn waiter with my salad? Have you seen the stupid weather today? Is this really all there is?
See also preemptive irritation and Louis CK on Conan talking about how everything is amazing and nobody's happy. (via @dooce)
Tags: Mark Morford
Refinery29: 7 Couture Looks Lady Gaga Will (Hopefully!) Rock This Year
Lately we're not sure if couture imitates Lady Gaga, or does Lady Gaga imitate couture? From the pastel heart-shaped hairdos at Chanel to the lampshade lace ensembles at Givenchy, the 2010 spring/summer couture shows seemed to be heavily inspired by the pop star and her daring sense of style. Couture historically has been an adventurous romp into sensational, often experimental territory (thanks Galliano!). And perhaps it's the limping economy, but couture seems to have lost its luster in previous seasons. So, maybe we have Gaga to thank for the recent revelations on couture's runways. Everyone from Jean Paul Gaultier to Valentino seemed to be channeling their inner Gaga, creating pieces that not only mirrored her outrageous, expressive style, but literally looked like they came straight from her wardrobe. In honor of her highness's fearless take on fashion, here are our top seven couture outfits we can totally see her rockin' in the near future.
Above, from left:
Jean Paul Gaultier Couture Dress—Lady Gaga always seems to look naked and clothed at the same time. This contoured, caged, crazy thing of a dress fits the bill.
Jan Taminiau Couture Hood—What's a Gaga wardrobe without a pantless look? This one's even got built-in pelvic pads!
Armani Privé Couture Dress—A step forward from the Hussein Chalayan bubble dress. This one is sealed to ensure freshness!
Amazon surrenders
Shared by Bud
Charlie Stross is providing a Macmillan author's view of the affaire Amazon.The New York Times reports that Amazon has conceded to Macmillan:
"We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles," Amazon said. "We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books".Which is highly interesting: as Bruce Schneier puts it, "in a supply chain, profit — and power — tends to flow to the most constrained member of that chain." In an airport food court, most of Starbucks' or MacDonald's profits flow towards the airport, for real estate in that situation is constrained; in ebook publishing on the Kindle platform, profits flow towards the platform owner (i.e. Amazon).I'd rate this as a temporary setback for Amazon; in the war to define the internet book distribution chain, Macmillan have merely clawed back some of the territory they've lost over the past five years and bought themselves some time in which to try and get their ebook sales up and running on a profitable basis. In the long run, though, if they don't make it work within a couple of years, expect to see more battles (and possibly a new CEO: there are many firing crimes in publishing, but pissing off a major distribution channel in order to win a concession and failing to exploit it successfully has got to be one of them).
Longer term the publishers badly need to reconsider the entire idea of selling ebooks wholesale or on an agency basis via internediaries. This goes against everything they've ever done before — but the correct model for selling ebooks (profitably and at a fair price) is to establish a direct-to-public retail channel, like Baen's Webscription subsidiary. Oh, and once you're there, you can ditch the annoying DRM.
Link: about Fernando Martinez, from ESPN.com
In a report for ESPN.com, Jorge Arangure Jr. profiles Mets OF Fernando Martinez, and wonders if, at just 21 years old, can a prospect already be considered a ‘bust.’
“In an ideal world we wanted him to spend all of last year in Triple-A and get at-bats, we put him in a situation where as a young man he was hitting in the fifth hole,” Mets GM Omar Minaya told Arangure, about Martinez. “I think he gained something from that experience… We just want him to stay healthy. We expect him to be a contributor in the majors in a year or so.”
…martinez looked under-prepared at the plate last summer, but he did play quite well in the field, especially in center field, despite that awkward dropped pop up with Johan Santana on the hill… as i have said before, in talking with people around baseball this winter, and with people in the Mets organization, it seems nobody is yet questioning martinez’s talent… but, nobody is going to trade for him, or start him, or put any more stock in to his abilities, until they see him play a full season without getting injured… he needs to just stay in Triple-A this season, work, stay healthy and produce… this is a huge year for him, to say the least, though he still has three full seasons before being eligible to be a minor-league free agent…
The NYC tech scene is exploding
The pace of innovation in the New York area is very impressive right now. Some of the top entrepenuers in the country are building and scaling companies in the NY ecosystem - Ron Conway, yesterday in an email to me (published with his permission)
With the announcement of Roger Ehrenberg’s new fund – IA Venture Strategies – NYC now has another top-tier seed fund. I’ve had the pleasure of investing with Roger a number of times. He’s not only a great investor but also a huge help to the companies he invests in. It’s great that he’s going to be even more active and I hope to work with him a lot more in the future.
The NYC tech scene is exploding. There are tons of interesting startups. I’m an investor in a bunch and started one (Hunch) so won’t even try to enumerate them as any list will be extremely biased (other people have tried). I will say that one interesting thing happening is the types of startups are diversifying beyond media (HuffPo, Gawker) to more “California-style” startups (Foursquare, Boxee, Hunch).
In terms of investors, NYC now has a number of seed investors / micro-VCs: IA Capital Partners, Betaworks, and Founder Collective (FC – which I am part of – has made 7 seed investments in NYC since we started last year). The god of seed investing, Ron Conway, who I quote up top, has recently decided to become extremely active in NYC. One of the nice things about having small funds is we don’t need to invest millions of dollar per round so we all frequently invest together.
NYC also has mid sized funds like Union Square (in my opinion and a lot of people in the industry they have surpassed Sequoia as the best VC in the country). We also have First Round, who very smartly hired the excellent Charlie (“Chris”) O’Donnell as their NYC guy.
Then we have the big VCs who have also been increasing their activity in NYC. Locally, we have Bessemer (Skype, LinkedIn, Yelp), Venrock, and RRE. Boston firms that are very active and positive influences here include: Polaris (Dog Patch Labs), Spark, Matrix, General Catalyst, Bain, and Flybridge (sorry if I’m forgetting anyone…). Finally, some excellent California firms like True Ventures have made NYC their second home.
The one thing we really need to complete the ecosystem is a couple of runaway succesesses. As California has seen with Paypal, Google, Facebook etc, the big successes spawn all sorts of interesting new startups when employees leave and start new companies. They also set an example for younger entrepreneurs who, say, start a social networking site at Harvard and then decide to move.
Ichiro And Making The Impossible Possible
I was talking with some folks about Ichiro the other day. Yes, I have friends. Weird, right? Anyway, since we are all rational folks, we all agreed that Ichiro is undeniably awesome and one of the best current players in the game. As I am often wont to do, I headed over to Ichiro's Fangraphs page to look at some of his peripheral metrics out of sheer curiosity. Hoo boy, take a look at this:
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 BABIP .371 .347 .333 .401 .319 .350 .390 .337 .384
Holy. Crap. One of the big knocks on certain players with high batting averages is that they were inflated by an unusually high Batting Average On Balls In Play. Too high a BABIP and your performance at the dish is deemed unsustainable. Nine times out of ten, this condemnation turns out to be correct, and you'll undoubtedly see changes in performance based on this metric. Not so with Ichiro. Not even close. It should also come as no surprise that Ichiro is also the leader for the last three years in BABIP, posting a meager .370 in that department.
Now, there is a perfectly rational explanation for this. Quite simply, Ichiro's remarkable ability to generate infield hits helps boost his average by allowing him to beat out balls that would be turned into outs for any normal hitter. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Ichiro is also the leader in infield hits for the past three years, posting a ridiculous 134 total squibblers. The next closest person? Derek Jeter. With 76.
So why did I bother to post about this? Quite simply because of how remarkable it is and nothing else. There may be a rational explanation for Ichiro's performance, but at some point you just have to acknowledge that the guy is a machine.
Maureen Cummins
Book artist and print maker Maureen Cummins, who is in the Paper Politics exhibition and book, recently put up a new site of her work HERE. There's a lot of great material up there, and well worth checking out. The image to the left is from her 2000 artist book "Stocks and Bonds."
Finding the cause of performance issues in your programs
This post is a response to reader questions asking how, in my previous post on Replacing Core Data Key Paths, I knew that the biggest performance problem in my initial approach was the incremental reallocation of
NSMutableSet. In this post, I'll look at basic time and memory profiling on the Mac and talk about the most common types of scenario to look for when you're trying to solve performance problems.Introduction
In my previous post, Performance Tests: Replacing Core Data Key Paths, I presented a simple category to improve Core Data key path fetching by 25%-35% (actually the improvement was much greater at small set sizes but they rarely matter). The improvement worked by using property accessors to access the Core Data values instead of looking up the properties by string name.
However, the original "naïve" approach that I used to do this actually took more than twice as long as the original Core Data string key paths.
This week, I'll look at how I analyzed this code and how I worked out where the performance bottleneck was.
The code to analyze
The purpose of the code was to replace this:
NSSet *projectNames = [company valueForKeyPath:@"projects.name"];with this:
NSSet *projectNames = [company.projects slowObjectValuesForProperty:@selector(name)];But, as the "slow" in the method name reveals. The initial approach was slower — by approximately a factor of 2.
The implementation of the
slowObjectValuesForProperty:method is really simple. Let's look at it:- (NSSet *)slowObjectValuesForProperty:(SEL)propertySelector { NSMutableSet *result = [NSMutableSet set]; for (id object in self) { id value = [object performSelector:propertySelector]; if (value) { [result addObject:value]; } } return result; }The test harness that I'll be using will be the PropertyAccessors project from the Performance Tests: Replacing Core Data Key Paths post, with all tests except the "Key Path Accessor" and "slowObjectValuesForProperty: accessor"
ifdef'd out.Time profiler
The first approach you should use when your code isn't running as fast as desired is a basic time profile.
As preparation for this, you should make sure that the test will run for long enough to give useful test results. Time profiling works by suspending the program at regular intervals and reading the program's current position. This amounts to a random sampling over time. But these random samples won't be helpful unless there are enough in your time critical code. Increase your data size or put the code you're looking at in a loop and try to make it run for at least 2 seconds.
For this test, I set the NumCompanies and NumProjectsPerCompany to 100 (giving a total data size of 10,000 project names) and further set the NumTestIterations to 1000 (so this test will fetch 10 million names in total).
This gives the following test durations:
Key Path set iteration test took 4.13078 seconds. Slow objectValuesForProperty: test took 8.83262 seconds.By default, the Time Profiler will sample once every millisecond. If your tests cover a large amount of code, you'll need more samples — so either make your tests run longer or increase the sample frequency (Time Profiler can go as fast as 20 μs).
Build the project (but don't run it directly from Xcode). Then select the "Run→Run with Performance Tool→Time Profiler" menu. You can also use "Shark" for this but they both work in a similar way and the Time Profiler runs in Instruments which has a nicer, newer interface (although Shark can track a few lower level metrics that Instruments still lacks).
The PropertyAccessors test will self-run, so you can just watch it go. For other projects where some interactivity may be required, you'll need to interact with the program until it runs the code you want to examine. If your test has a short duration or a large amount of code, you may need to click the "i" next to the "Time Profiler" Instruments icon at the top to change the sample rate to get good coverage for your program (you'll need to rerun the test if you make this change).
Your window should look like this. If it doesn't, make sure the "Detail" view is visible (you won't need the "Extended Detail" view). Also make sure the "Call Tree" view is selected in the "Detail" view (it's the icon at the bottom of the window that looks like three horizontal lines stacked slightly askew).
Once the program finishes, uncheck the "Invert call tree" checkbox in the left column then expand the "Main Thread → start →
main" elements and we'll see the most expensive steps in themain()function (which is where all the tests are run in this project).
The top item in the
main()function is thefetchObjectSetForRequest:method but we're not looking at that here (it's just Core Data loading and prefaulting the entire database).Instead, we want to know why the second item,
slowObjectValuesForProperty:, takes 2.23 times longer than the third item,valueForKeyPath:.Expanding the tree from the
slowObjectValuesForProperty:method twice, we seeCFBasicHashAddValue()occupies almost all of this method's time.If we expand the
valueForKeyPath:call tree 7 times, we can see the sameCFBasicHashAddValue()is used to create the set here but for some reason, this function only takes 1402 milliseconds here, compared to 5996 milliseconds for theslowObjectValuesForProperty:method.The same function, acting on the same data. But one takes 4 times longer than the other. What is the explanation?
There are two possible answers: either the slow case is suffering from poor memory caching performance, or it is acting repeatedly and is slow due to repetition.
Object allocations
Shark can measure event counts (like cache misses and memory bandwidth) if you actually think that's the cause of a problem but it's unlikely to be the problem here. In most situations where the Time Profile isn't clear cut, the best thing to try here is a object allocation analysis.
As with the Time Profile, we run the Object Allocations performance tool from "Run→Run with Performance Tool→Object Allocations" menu in Xcode.
Again, switch to the "Call Tree" view and make sure "Invert Call Tree" and "Separate by Category" are off.
Additionally, right-click (or control click) in the table header of the "Detail" view and make certain that "Count" and "Bytes" columns are both enabled.
If you navigate into "Main Thread → start →
main→slowObjectValuesForProperty:", then follow the biggest allocation 4 times and you'll see that__CFBasicHashRehashis responsible for allocating almost all of this method's memory.Similarly navigating into the
valueForKeyPath:of the other test, reveals the same method 7 levels in allocates a majority of this method's memory.However, there are three big differences here:
- The
slowObjectValuesForProperty:version performs 800,000 allocations whereas thevalueForKeyPath:version performs exactly 100,000 (equal to the number of tests).- The
slowObjectValuesForProperty:version allocates 210.57MB whereas thevalueForKeyPath:version allocates just 97.66MB.- The
slowObjectValuesForProperty:version is found insideCFSetAddValuewhere thevalueForKeyPath:version is found insideCFSetCreate.From the first point, it would appear that the presumption that the slow version is slow because it unnecessarily repeats itself is looking accurate — it is repeatedly reallocating.
The second point also suggests that the slow method is wasting extra memory (which is probably causing mild performance penalities). On low memory systems, this would be even worse.
The third point suggests why the first two might be the case: the slow method needs to reallocate as it adds more data.
Understand what the code you're invoking does
All this helps to identify where your program is spending its time. From here, you could probably work out that allocating the
NSMutableSetonce, instead of repeatedly as you go, is a good idea.Of course, you need to confirm this by applying your changes and testing. Changing this code to allocate once instead of repeatedly as it goes is easy — it takes a matter of seconds. You do need to be wary though about spending too long optimizing code on a whim. The more involved the code change, the more confident you should be that you're actually fixing a problem and not inspecting irrelevant code or making unhelpful changes.
This is where it helps to really understand the code you're playing with.
For example: the reason why moving to a single allocation with the
NSMutableSetabove is helpful, is not actually directly because of the allocation itself — since the biggest block of time insideslowObjectValuesForProperty:that we're trying to optimize is spent in__CFStringEqualandmemcmpwhen you drill all the way down; it is not spent inmallocitself.Instead, I know that whenever
NSMutableSetresizes, it needs to rehash every single object back into the newly resized hash table. It is this rehashing that is hammering the__CFStringEqualandmemcmpfunctions (since they are the functions used to hash and detect collisions in the hash table). Yes, reducing reallocations makes it faster but the biggest reason for this improvement is the nature of hashed storage: because reducing reallocations reduces the need to rehash.As I reported in the original post, fixing this allocation so that it happens just once will speed this code up by 2.6 times but it is important to understand that the need to rehash is why this change helped — other reallocation situations may not gain as much as we have here.
Finding the best candidates for speed improvements
Generally though, allocations and reallocations are always a prime place to look. Large allocations are expensive to move around in RAM, millions of small, irregular allocations can fragment memory and every allocation normally needs to be initialized, incurring some kind of expense. Even with
NSArray, which doesn't need to rehash when it reallocates, there is still a copy of the elements from the old array to the new one. The performance gain will not be as great but it is still a place to squeeze extra performance.When optimizing, the first things to look for are:
- Memory allocations. They're easy to find and easy to tweak. They don't always give the best performance improvements but they're a good first point to examine.
- Iteration over large arrays to find elements. If you need to search large arrays often, you should be storing in a dictionary or other constant time access structure. Depending on the size of the array, this can be a near 100% speed improvement. i.e. never, ever search an array bigger than about 100 elements.
- Nested loops over medium to large data sets. Easy to find. Eliminate the nesting if you can. Although they can be hard to eliminate since you need to rethink how you access your data but you can often do something to reduce their impact. If you have 1 loop inside another, always put the smallest loop (in terms of number of elements) inside the bigger one if you can, since memory scales better to doing small packets of work huge numbers of times. Performance increase is a factor of the loop size that you remove.
- Anything non-polynomial on more than trivial data sets. Non-polynomial actions are the slowest, worst things you can do. They are occasionally required but if at all possible, think up another design. What's non-polynomial? Anything where the number of packets of work involved in processing a collection grows greater than polynomially with respect to the size of the collection (i.e. if the packets of work are "y" and the number of objects in the collection is "x", then non-polynomial means you can't express the growth as y=x^a where a is a constant). Exponential growth (i.e. y=a^x) or factorial (i.e. y=x!) are the most common kinds of non-polynomial growth. If all this is confusing, then at least know the common case: when you have objects in a collection and you need to reprocess the connections from every object to every other object in the collection — try to avoid this by any means possible.
You may be tempted to think that pervasive multi-threading, OpenCL, SSE vectorization or assembly optimizations are the best way to solve performance issues, since they are all "high performance" technologies and the fastest programs all use them in some combination. However, these technologies are much harder to implement than simple design improvements so they should always be something you consider once you're sure that the design can't be further improved.
Conclusion
The first rule with optimization is that you should always optimize based on evidence.
Don't begin to optimize if you can't find a bottleneck or create one with data. Optimizing without actual evidence of a bottleneck (just suspicion that there might be one in future) is called "Premature Optimization" and is normally considered a waste of time.
However, even once you know where the bottleneck is, you need to know what is causing it. If the code is small, you can just play with it to see what happens but generally you need to inspect closely. It is surprisingly easy to make the wrong guesses about what is causing performance issues and waste time changing code for no gain.
I hope I've shown you how to gather the information you need to understand simple performance problems and the types of clues you'll need to narrow down the locations in your code that can be improved.
January 31, 2010
Veselka's cabbage soup is the best soup.
I found this recipe via Adam's great soup battle (though the recipe is from smitten kitchen), and I'm so glad I did: this soup was a meal and a half, and so tasty.
One note: don't use red cabbage, even if you already have it on hand, unless you want purple soup (albeit purple soup that still tastes wonderful).
Stephen Colbert and his iPad at the Grammys
Filed under: Odds and ends, Apple
It must be nice to be the host of your own popular Comedy Central show and a host on the Grammy Awards. Why? You get to play with an iPad.
No, it's not one of Tim Meehan's faux iPads - this was a working unit that flipped from portrait to landscape mode when Stephen Colbert pulled it out of his jacket... or pants. Enjoy this short piece of video from tonight's Grammy Award ceremonies.TUAWStephen Colbert and his iPad at the Grammys originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Pokémon Farming: Horsea
Horseas are Water type pokémon that came be found by fishing with a Super Rod on Route 226. They gained a valuable evolution in the second generation as Seadras can evolve in Kingdras, a Dragon/Water type, by trading them with a Dragon Scale attached. These little Horseas are Special Attack oriented and bred with a Modest (+SpAttack, -Attack) nature and come with the following move-set:
Brine (Water STAB, Power 65, Acc 100):
Brine has the unique quality of doubling its power when the opponent’s HP is half or less. With the STAB boost, that is a power of 185.Dragon Pulse (Dragon, Power 90, Acc 100):
If you evolve it into a Kingdra this will become a STAB move also.Ice Beam (Ice, Power 95, Acc 100)
Unlike other Dragons, Kingdra only takes neutral damage from Ice moves. This move will hit other Dragons hard as well as Grass pokémon that might want to switch in against it.Signal Beam (Bug, Power 75, Acc 100)
Another counter against those Grass types with a 10% chance of confusing the opponent.Horsea has two very useful abilities:
Swift Swim doubles its speed when Rain Dance is in effect and
Sniper makes critical hits delivered by it do three times the damage instead of the usual two times.
Swift Swimmers will evolve into Poison Point Seadras, but back into Swift Swimming Kingdras
- To receive one of these Sea Dragons to be, be in the wifi room on Tuesday at 5:00 PM Pacific (8:00 PM Eastern) on February 2nd, 2010
- Comment with your Name and Friend Code
- Get a pokémon to trade, I’m not looking for anything particular just something you don’t want.
- Make yourself available to Trade (invite->Trade) I will come to you when I’m ready.
These will come from my Platinum game
Name: Dennis
FC: 0088 2490 1681If you are new to our site, your first comment will be moderated. Don’t worry if your post doesn’t show, we will get to it in time, and you will not miss out!
Bloomberg Sports: Professional Tool
For those of you wondering what the twitter topic #BBGSports is all about, Bloomberg is hosting an event at their headquarters in NYC where they’re demoing their latest fantasy and professional baseball data products. Their professional product more or less slices Pitch f/x data in every which way possible. Here are some pictures of the demo:
Data sliced and diced in the strike zone and on the field:
Strike zone data and spray charts for specific players:
Their pitch predictor tool:
Regular stats section, including a section where you can create your own stats:
the Your Movie Sucks™ files, by Roger Ebert
"The Lovely Bones" (PG-13). A deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they realize what a wonderful person you were. Peter Jackson ("Lord of the Rings") believes special effects can replace genuine emotion, and tricks up Alive Sebold's well-regarded novel with gimcrack New Age fantasies. With, however, affective performances by Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci and Saoirse Ronan as the victim. One star via blogs.suntimes.com All of Ebert's pans for the year collected in one place.
Pricing Drama
It’s been a hairy few days, starting with Amazon firing a broadside at Macmillan (I like Charlie Stross’ summary the best) then, within 72 hours, backing down. The ensuing conversation (mostly on Twitter) has been very interesting.
Early on I remarked “The 21st-century marketplace is being reinvented in real time right now” which I think is obviously true. A lot of the crowd was expressing fury that anyone would charge $14.99 for a bag of bits and yes, that does seem a little steep. Later on I followed up with “The actual price isn't important. What matters is how it's set. $14.99 seems high, but pricing being an Amazon fiat is WRONG” and that got surprising push-back.
So here’s what I think. In a sanely-functioning market for books, the following should all be true:
Any publisher should be able to charge whatever they want for any individual work. For example, at some point J.K. Rowling is going to write another book, and there’ll be a certain number of people who are prepared to pay silly amounts of money to read it on Day 1. So why shouldn’t the publisher and J.K. launch it at an insanely high price, which then drifts down? Maybe toss in a few bonus features for early buyers?
And then at some later point, let’s suppose a few years go by and J.K. does something newsworthy like marry Arnold Schwarzenegger or die; why not put on a quick $2.50-off-the-whole-Rowling-list sale to capitalize on the news while it’s fresh?
The retailer (for example, Amazon or Apple) should be able to sell the work for whatever price they please, including at a loss. Smart retailers use counter-intuitive pricing all the time to maximize their bottom line across their product mix.
Publishers and retailers should be able to explore a bunch of different pricing mechanisms, including the kind of agency structure Macmillan wants, a variety of volume discounts, promotional gimmicks, and exclusivity.
Hypothetical example: Suppose, next year, you want to read Lady Gaga’s unexpectedly-bestselling Practical Semiotics, you gotta buy a B&N Nook; it might make sense for B&N to pay Lady G a cool ten million or more for that kind of deal.
Competition over data formats should be discouraged. EPUB is plenty good enough for an overwhelmingly high proportion of the books that anyone wants to buy, and if there’s a piece of work for which EPUB falls short, it’d probably be better on paper, anyhow.
Some may not know that I spent quite a few years toiling in the publishing-technology mines, and I’m pretty sure that I’m right about this. The way I see it, anyone who is peddling a proprietary book format is under suspicion of trying to establish monopoly lock-in.
This is important, because of the next important possibility:
The market should allow authors to bypass intermediaries, host their own EPUB files, and sell ’em straight to their readers. I’m not going to insult the intelligence of my readers with an explanation of why this is a good idea.
Anyhow, based on these principles, Amazon’s attempt to assert that they decree both the retail price and publisher’s cut was clearly out of bounds, and I’m glad that’s over with.
Macmillan’s attempt to assert that they will sell only for $14.99 and only allow 30% markup seems silly to me, but not damaging to the market, because other publishers can compete creatively. To be specific, 70% of $14.99 is $10.49 — if I were Macmillan, I’d wholesale at $10.49, let the retailers charge what they please, offer them volume discounts, and see if anyone were prepared to offer big bucks for an exclusive or some other promotional win.
And if $14.99 really is too much for a well-reviewed brand-new work by a hot author, well, the marketplace will expose that quickly and brutally. But I think we ought to be able to try out lots of silly ideas to find which ones work.
'Citizen cartographers' map the microcosms of the world
"Maps are expensive and proprietary," said Coast, sipping on his coffee and explaining the core tenets of the project, called OpenStreetMap. "They should be free." Coast had the idea for OpenStreetMap in 2004, when he was a student living in London. Coast had a GPS and a laptop, you see, and he figured that with a little programming magic he could build a map of his local haunts that contained more useful information than any service he could find online. What's more, he said, "I figured that if I did that, and he did that, and you did that, then, together, we could put together a jigsaw map of the world." via www.washingtonpost.com I've been trying but OpenMaps and OffMaps on my phone. I prefer OffMaps, but they're both great, and they both rival Google & Apple's "Maps" in terms of user experience. OffMaps lets you download maps onto your phone for local storage, which is especially useful when you are roaming or travelling.
Second-Hand Report From Steve Jobs’s All-Hands Town Hall Meeting at Apple Last Week
Take it with a big grain of salt, because it’s second-hand and illustrated with a goofily menacing photo of Jobs, but Wired has a report on Jobs’s post-iPad all-hands company meeting:
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
Sounds about right to me. If anyone who was there disputes Wired’s synopsis, I’m all ears.
Update: Arnold Kim has a few more tidbits. And one DF-reading little birdie emailed to say that while the gist is right, the Wired transcript is clearly paraphrased: “He actually said ‘teams at Google want to kill us.’ He never said it in a way that made it sound like the whole company did. Mostly just the Android team.”
All about EPUB, the ebook standard for Apple's iBookstore
Filed under: Odds and ends, Books
Overlooked in much of the hype about the iPad announcement earlier in the week was a comment by Steve Jobs in the Keynote presentation where he mentioned that the iBooks app for iPad would take advantage of the popular EPUB format for electronic books. Since we're all going to get a lot more familiar with this format in the near future, we felt it would be a good time to provide our readers with more information about EPUB.
EPUB is the same format used by the popular Stanza [free, iTunes link] app for iPhone and iPod touch. It's a free and open standard format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and it's designed for reflowable content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. The IDPF has championed EPUB as a single format that can be used by publishers and conversion houses, as well as for distribution and sale of electronic books.
The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. It supports digital rights management, something that's sure to warm the cockles of the hearts of publishers, but there's no DRM scheme that is currently specified as part of the format.
Other ebook readers that currently use the format include the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, and the iRiver Story.
If you're a budding publisher and want to get your ebook into the iBookstore, you'll need a tool to help you create your document in the EPUB format. Of course, we don't know if just anyone will be able to self-publish for the iBookstore, but Apple does note that they will have books from both "major and independent" publishers available.
For Mac users, the choice of tools is small, but good. First, there's the free Calibre ebook management tool. Calibre converts a number of different file formats to EPUB, so it's a good tool for doing an initial conversion. However, to do a lot of formatting, you'll need a full-powered EPUB editor like Sigil. Sigil is a free open-source editor that runs on a number of platforms including Mac OS X.
Next, there's the inexpensive (US$49.99 for a single license) iStudio Publisher. iStudio Publisher is a full-fledged desktop publishing application that can export text flows in EPUB format -- while that's good to hear, it's unclear if iStudio Publisher EPUB files can include photographs or diagrams.
If you happen to be an Adobe InDesign CS4 (US$699) user, you're in luck. The top-of-the-line tool for design and publishing supports EPUB, and it is possible to create files that will work on Amazon's Kindle as well. Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, has a complete list of the tools for production and conversion of files here. It wouldn't be surprising to see a future version of Pages develop into a way to create EPUB documents.
While EPUB is a popular format, it's not without criticism. The format is great for text-centric books, but is considered unsuitable for publications that require advanced formatting or detailed layout, such as comic books and technical tomes. That could result in some issues for textbook publishers. The lack of a standard DRM scheme could cause the format to splinter into different factions unless Apple forces the issue by adopting an open scheme.
There are also issues with the lack of detail on links within EPUB books. This makes it impossible or difficult to link ebooks, or even provide links within an EPUB book. It appears from the keynote demonstration that Apple has come up with their own "standard" for linking, as there were very active examples of linking from a table of contents to individual pages within an ebook. The standards for annotating EPUB are also lacking, which means that each company using EPUB is coming up with their own way of handling this.
There's a very good possibility that Apple has created their own in-house standards for DRM, linking, and annotation. If the iPad and iBookstore are the successful products that they can be, Apple could finally force the industry to adopt a more robust EPUB standard.
So, that's it for our roundup of all things EPUB. As TUAW receives more information about how iBook and the iBookstore are going to work, we'll be sure to pass it along.TUAWAll about EPUB, the ebook standard for Apple's iBookstore originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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- October 8, 2006 - October 14, 2006
- October 1, 2006 - October 7, 2006
- September 24, 2006 - September 30, 2006
- September 17, 2006 - September 23, 2006
- September 10, 2006 - September 16, 2006
- September 3, 2006 - September 9, 2006
- August 27, 2006 - September 2, 2006
- August 20, 2006 - August 26, 2006
- August 13, 2006 - August 19, 2006
- August 6, 2006 - August 12, 2006
- July 30, 2006 - August 5, 2006
- July 23, 2006 - July 29, 2006
- July 16, 2006 - July 22, 2006
- July 9, 2006 - July 15, 2006
- July 2, 2006 - July 8, 2006
- June 25, 2006 - July 1, 2006
- June 18, 2006 - June 24, 2006
- June 11, 2006 - June 17, 2006
- June 4, 2006 - June 10, 2006
- May 28, 2006 - June 3, 2006
- May 21, 2006 - May 27, 2006
- May 14, 2006 - May 20, 2006
- May 7, 2006 - May 13, 2006
- April 30, 2006 - May 6, 2006
- April 23, 2006 - April 29, 2006
- April 16, 2006 - April 22, 2006
- April 9, 2006 - April 15, 2006
- April 2, 2006 - April 8, 2006
- March 26, 2006 - April 1, 2006
- March 19, 2006 - March 25, 2006
- March 12, 2006 - March 18, 2006
- March 5, 2006 - March 11, 2006
- February 26, 2006 - March 4, 2006
- February 19, 2006 - February 25, 2006
- February 12, 2006 - February 18, 2006
- February 5, 2006 - February 11, 2006
- January 29, 2006 - February 4, 2006
- January 22, 2006 - January 28, 2006
- January 8, 2006 - January 14, 2006