Paws up!
National Geographic is at it again.
COMPETING WITH US!
Don’t click on their site. Please.
I blame Marilyn T. as usual. Submitted by the fabulous F1v3r.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Primates
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January 22, 2011
Baltimore Crime Beat: "Wire" creator responds to top cop's criticism
But publicly, let me state that The Wire owes no apologies -- at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern. As citizens using a fictional narrative as a means of arguing different priorities or policies, those who created and worked on The Wire have dissented. Commissioner Bealefeld may not be comfortable with public dissent, or even a public critique of his agency. He may even believe that the recent decline in crime entitles him to denigrate as "stupid" or "slander" all prior dissent, as if the previous two decades of mismanagement in the Baltimore department had not happened and should not have been addressed by any act of storytelling, given that Baltimore is no longer among the most violent American cities, but merely a very violent one.Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility. That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O'Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work. Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire. via weblogs.baltimoresun.com Why would Baltimore's police commissioner pick a fight with David Simon? How weird. But I'm in favor of whatever it takes to get some good Simon trash-talk in circulation.
Why Doesn't My Boyfriend Get Boners When I Want Him To? Plus Anal Sex and Whining
by A Dude
Is anything to be gleaned from the fact that my boyfriend never tries to have sex with me in the morning? Never a morning boner that he wants to do anything with. I like it when guys initiate sex (whatever, I know, I just find it hotter) so the idea of being like, “Um, aren’t you supposed to have morning wood? Would you like to have sex with me?” sort of sucks. But my favorite sex is hangover sex, and we’ve literally never had it the way I want in all four years that we’ve been dating/living together. He’s also not very sexually aggressive and always wants to do it in the same way, which is boring, and at this point I just agree to sex on a mental timetable (“oh, we haven’t done it in a week, I don’t want us to be one of those couples who doesn’t have sex for longer than a week, so I guess we’ll have sex tonight” wow OK this is depressing!). And yes, yes, I know, I should just ask for what I want, but what if asking for what I want strips the very act of its sexiness?
Yes, you did pretty much answer your own question — especially after being in a relationship for four years, you should by now feel comfortable having discussions about sex with your boyfriend, especially the kind in which you want to complain about not getting fucked enough. It’s such a cliche, but there really is nothing more important in regards to love and sex than communication, yet comfort in this realm is so elusive for so many. Still, there should be no reason for you to even hesitate to have a discussion with your man in which you politely request that the two of you make each other squirt with greater frequency. NO. REASON.
With that said, I think you need to keep in mind that, despite popular myth, not all men are wired the same, especially as we begin to, ugh, mature. Sure, when we’re 20ish, our single focus in life collectively is to pretty much just find other living humans willing to extract semen from our eager, aching wee-wees. But a funny thing happens as we get older — intangibles like intelligence, personality, wit, a soul, etc., begin to factor into the attraction equation, sometimes even outweighing the whole tits and ass thing that was once the only erection-producing ingredient our bodies ever needed. I am not kidding.
My reason for saying all of this is to remind you that your boyfriend may just no longer be the sexual animal he was when he was younger, or maybe he just never was one in the first place. But frankly, if he was never the type of guy to rip off your clothes, throw you against the wall and shag you silly, I seriously doubt that he’s going to magically transform into that guy now. If there are loin-centric needs in your life that aren’t being met, perhaps it’s time to move on or — if you can’t bear the thought of life without him despite the sexual frustrations — have a talk about an open relationship of sorts, so you can get what you need from other men.
I'm a single woman in a city where single men are sparse at best. A handsome man just moved next door to me. I'm certain he's attracted to me but if we make any attempt at getting to know each other, we'll be treading on shitting-where-we-eat territory. Thoughts?
I think a lot depends on whether you rent or you own the place you’re currently living in. In other words, how fast can you pull up roots and move to another part of town — or out of town completely for that matter — if shit gets crazy? If you’re living in a place you’re emotionally and financially invested in and hope to live in for years to come, you might want to tread carefully. Otherwise, I say go for it. Sure, it can get messy if things turn sour, but if both of you are sane and mature and it works out it can be glorious. Coming from the perspective of a dude, the thought of having a lover right next door is positively utopian. “Um, hey…can I come over to borrow a cup of sugar and, you know, a blow job?” HEAVEN!
Also, I really think that shitting where you eat has gotten a bad rap. Pigs do it and I can only assume that the term “happy as a pig in shit” exists for a reason.
I’ve been in a serious relationship with my boyfriend for over a year now and we love each other to death. He gets into these depressive/not sexual/working all the time moods that almost ended our relationship the first couple times but then he snaps out of it. At one point, I met a girl who I invited in our bedroom (also to snap him out of one of these moods). He got excited then back into his mood and told me I could be with her alone if I needed to because he couldn’t give me the emotion I needed. Now, it is much later and he does better (like maybe it doesn't last as long or he knows how to talk to me about it) and it definitely hasn’t happened for a while. The girl wants to be with me again (alone) and I really want to. I’m afraid of telling him because it might make him jealous and I like the way things are with us right now. If I do it with out telling him am I cheating?
Okay, seriously, where are you girls finding these libido-less guys? Oh yeah, Brooklyn! Anyway…
Yes, it is cheating if you don’t discuss it with him up front, despite having discussed it previously. That was then, this is now, as they say. To wit: A few years ago I was with a girl who liked girls. At some point, she, like you, invited a girl (we’ll call her “Diane”) into our bedroom and for once a week for about a year the three of us had a great time together. The agreement my ex and I made at the time was that we would only be with Diane, or any other girl for that matter, when we were together. Otherwise we needed permission. So this one time I went out of town for a few days and my girl asked if I would be okay if she and Diane hooked up alone while I was away. I gave her my blessing, and everything was fine. In fact, I remember loving it when she called me after they had sex and told me all of the forbidden things the two of them did to each other while I was away. Then, a few months later, I found out that the two of them had fucked without me again, and when I asked my girl about it she used the ole, “But you were okay with it a few months ago” line on me, and I was livid. Despite the whole thing being a somewhat unorthodox — some would even say freaky — situation, and me being a pretty open-minded guy, something about it just didn’t sit well with me. At all. I felt that my trust had been violated, and we were never really the same after that.
So, by all means, talk to your guy about it. Yes, TALK ABOUT LOVE AND SEX, LADIES! And who knows…maybe the resurgence of his libido will inspire him to want to join in this time.
I want to try anal sex but I’ve been waiting for my long-term boyfriend to bring it up (two years). I guess I don’t want to seem too sexually intense or something? Anal sex has become this thing where it’s supposed to be some gift to a man, when really I just think, based on past positive experiences, I might really like it. What should I do? The concept of having anal sex with a guy who’s doing it as a favor to me is extremely undesirable, and I would rather not have anal sex at all than have that be a concern. Basically, please speak on how to broach anal sex if you are a lady.
Look, I know that I’m beating this cliche to death here, but communication is truly the key to everything in the bedroom. Don’t ever shy away from asking for what you want, or don’t want for that matter. First of all, asking your long-term boyfriend to participate in a sexual act that is, let’s face it, pretty mainstream these days doesn’t make you a “sexually intense” woman. Sounds pretty goddamn normal to me. Asking him if YOU could strap on a dildo and fuck HIM in the ass would probably better qualify one for membership in the “sexually intense” category. Still, any guy who’s turned off by a woman he’s in a relationship with approaching him to have an adult conversation about her fantasies/desires is a guy who should be dumped, because he’s a boy, not a man. Real talk. Other guys who should be dumped immediately and unceremoniously: any guy who asks his girl to bleach her asshole. Just saying.
But while we’re on the subject of anal sex, I’d like to address something you brought up — specifically about how you interpret anal sex as being “some gift to a man.” Can I just say that I’ve had many conversations about sex with other guys over the course of my life, and I can’t recall a single time in which the subject of anal sex has come up as a source of great pleasure. When anal sex does come up, and it rarely does, it’s usually in the context of some sort of weird power trip-y, ego-soothing kind of way along the lines of, “Yeah, I saw my ex and her new boyfriend holding hands in a bar the other day…little does he know that I FUCKED HER IN THE ASS!” Seriously, it’s always like some childish ultimate conquer kind of thing, and never any sort of "OMG ass-fucking feels soooo good" kind of thing. I feel sorry for my gay male friends over their partners not having vaginas. Oh well.
On that same thought, one time I was out with two guy friends, one of which had slept with a girl I also had once slept with, a fact that we were both aware of, and while we were out we ran into the aforementioned girl we had both slept with and we all proceeded to get our chit-chat on. After she walked away, the friend who hadn’t slept with her picked up on the flirty “our genitals all know each other” vibe going around and asked, “So which one of you fucked her?” The friend of mine who had slept with her responded, “We both did, but I’m the only one who she let fuck her in the ass.” Now, given the choice, I’d choose to stick my dick inside of a vagina over a butthole 1000 out of 1000 times, (especially this girl’s vagina, which felt like a vat of warm butter on the inside), but at that very moment, I thought to myself, and I’m so ashamed to admit this, “Damn…I wish I’d have fucked her in the ass too.” I felt one-upped. Sad, but true. Even though anatomically, I don’t think I was intended to put my cock in any girl’s ass. I’ve never really gotten any physical pleasure out of it. In fact, it kinda hurts.
And one last thing on anal — I once had a friend whose girlfriend could only get off by him fucking her in the ass while she used her vibrator on her clit. Poor guy used to complain to me all the time: “Man, I wish I could just have vaginal sex with my girlfriend every now and then.” They eventually broke up over him growing tired of doing nothing but anal with her. It’s a process, a sometimes messy, timely process that’s virtually devoid of spontaneity. In short, anal sex is really not all its cracked up to be (Ba-da-bum).
OK so you’re hooking up with a girl sort of unexpectedly at her house. “I don’t have a condom,” you say. She’s like, “No worries, I do.” Thoughts?
Are you kidding me? It’s 2011, she sure as hell better have condoms at her house! This notion that protection is all the guy’s responsibility is just fucked from here to Moses. As any guy who’s ever ventured off into the night hoping to find a nice lady willing to fuck him can attest, any night you go out with a condom on your person is a night you go out and don’t get laid. Period. It’s like an unwritten law of the universe. Conversely, any night you go out without one on you is the night where the ass comes at you from all directions. As a guy, if you take a girl back to your place, this shouldn’t be a problem since condoms should be well stocked there. But since ladies sometimes fancy taking a man back to their place out of fear that the guy they’re hooking up with might have a power saw and an industrial-sized freezer in his living room, having condoms on hand is an absolute must. Unless, of course, all you want to do is make out and spoon, as I know some of you enjoy doing.PRO TIP: Have a few magnums mixed in with a few regular sized condoms in the drawer of your nightstand. We come in all shapes and sizes and there are few things worse than having to do the sex with an ill-fitting rubber.
This isn't really a question, but guys should really never complain about their bodies to people they sleep with. "My dick is so small," "I'm so fat," "Am I balding? I think I'm balding, do you think I'm balding?" have got to be among the most least-arousing things on the planet. Be fat, have a tiny penis, have a shiny bald head, but own it! Did you know that? Related: Yes, this is probably related to frustration at girls always being like "i'm so fat, I'm so ugly, etc." but I swear to god it's worse when guys do it, somehow. So yeah. That, but in the form of a question.
Seriously ladies, get the fuck out of Brooklyn.
Previously: Fear of Sex, Jealous Boyfriends, and "Am I Just Really Boring?"
A Dude is one of several rotating dudes who know everything. Do you have any questions for A Dude?
26 Comments
What Did Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal Talk About When They Went to Dinner Two Days Ago?
by Edith Zimmerman
The two stars, whose brief relationship fizzled in December, arrived quietly together on Wednesday at Bound'ry, a restaurant near Swift's Nashville condo, and were led back to a table for two, according to another patron.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"So—"
"I wa—"
"Oh, no, you go."
"No, no, sorry, what were you going to say?"
"No, nothing I was just going to be like, 'how are you?'"
"Oh I was too. How are you?"
"Haha, I'm really good, things are really good, how are you, how are things with you?"
"Good. They're good. So, do you want to eat?"
"Oh I don't care and could go either way, obviously. I had a really late lunch but also you know people, they eat! Whennn it's dinnertime! Hahaha, mostly they do, I mean, I guess when people are sick or whatever, they'll skip it if, like …?"
"I guess I'll probably get something."
"Me too, yeah, I was just thinking, 'actually, I will have something.' Because my late lunch was really small, and what is it, seven? Yeah, it wasn't even that late a lunch, it was like one, one thirty, depending, I didn't look at my watch a lot today, though, not that I usually do. I would say I look at my watch a normal amount."
"Yeah, me too. Hmm, what looks good."
"I don't know!?!?! What looks good to you?!!?"
"Ahh, I might go with the burger."
"Oh my god, that does look really good, I bet it's amazing."
"Oh yeah?"
"Oh, I mean, I don't know, no reason, don't most places make good burgers? Hahaha, I have no idea! I really don't know why I said that, because, yeah, I mean, when I think about it I have met a lot of people who're more particular about burgers than me, which makes sense, because people care about the things they care about, just not me! About burgers! I do care about other things, obviously! But back to burgers for a sec, I think the reason I said that I thought they'd be good here is just that I don't eat a lot of burgers — but that's not, like, because of weight concerns, I just … forget? I forget they exist sometimes, I guess. I'm never like, 'burgers,' you know? But I'm remembering now, obviously! Aaand, yeah, I'm definitely going to have a burger."
"Awesome. Do you want anything to drink?"
"Yeah like six glasses of wine, just kidding! That was a joke, I wouldn't usually make that order. Wouldn't ever, I mean. Not 'usually' — never. I would never make that order."
"Haha, yeah, I got it. Jake, is everything OK?"
Ba-dump-bump-chh.
Photo via OK!
7 Comments
Pitchers and Catchers 25 Days Away
Posted in Image
This year, pitchers and catchers report to camp on February 15, with their first workout set for February 17. Position players report to camp on February 19, and the first full squad workout set for February 21. Their first Grapefruit League game will be on February 26 at Digital Domain Park in Port St. Lucie at 1:10 pm.
January 21, 2011
Pharoahe Monch “Clap (One Day)” ft. Showtyme & DJ Boogie Blind
[Listen] / [Purchase] Clap (One Day)Hit the jump for additional info.
Pharoahe Monch W.A.R. (We Are Renegades) + Audio for Clap (one day)
July 27th 2023:
Lieutenant Gaviston speaks of a recon mission in Kabul, Afghanistan where he discovers classified information that changes EVERYTHING that he believes about this W.A.R. This information is uploaded & transmitted through time. If you eventually hear this; you have been ordained or genetically pre-exposed to have received this information. What you will eventually hear is a WARNING.These words are powerfully delivered by Idris Elba to set a tone for Pharoahe Monch’s upcoming album W.A.R. (We Are Renegades). The material presented is a consistent message from start to finish with new epiphanies exposed after various sets of songs. The order of music helps the listener see the vivid stories that Pharoahe is painting through the use of his lyrics. The production compliments Monch’s delivery & takes on a genuine art form that could easily stand on its own. Live instruments resonate at the start & end of certain tracks, such as his title song W.A.R. featuring Immortal Technique & Vernon Reid. Producers Exile, Marco Polo, M-Phazes, Fatin, Diamond D, Mike Loe, Samiyam, Adam Deitch, Eric Krasno & Pharoahe Monch himself help shape the album into what will be Monch’s greatest work to date.
Pharoahe Monch’s vision for the album is supported with guest features that provide an eclectic mix of sounds. Fans can look forward to material with Jill Scott, Styles P, Citizen Cope, Jean Grae, Royce Da 5′ 9,” Immortal Technique, Vernon Reid, Phonte, Mr. Porter, Mela Machinko, Showtyme & DJ Boogie Blind.
W.A.R. (We Are Renegades) is scheduled to impact in late March through W.A.R Media/Duck Down Music Inc.
McSweeney's revamps iOS app, now universal with a bookstore
I've said before that I'm a huge fan of McSweeney's, the publishing group founded by author Dave Eggers. The company has had an iPhone app for a while, but it recently updated to a universal version, so now all of that great content (from daily posts to various blogs, books, and the eponymous quarterly) is available to read on the iPad any time you want.
The app is set up on a subscription basis, so the original purchase of $6.99 gets you access to six months of daily content from the company, plus "semi-eternal delivery" of material from the website (which is publicly available anyway). There's also an ebook store in the new version of the app, where you can buy any books the company has published, at prices from $6 to $15. All together, that may sound like a little much compared to some other apps, but compared to actual print books, that's still cheap, and all of McSweeney's ebooks are manually designed and typeset for the format, which is pretty cool.
Good to see that McSweeney's is improving its iOS presence -- the App Store's a great place for smaller publishing houses like this one to find a bigger audience, I think.McSweeney's revamps iOS app, now universal with a bookstore originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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What The Hell Was That About?
I was just on in the opening segment of Olbermann tonight. And I get home and get this press release from NBC saying this was the last episode of Countdown. At first I figured it had to be a spoof email because, jeez, I was on and I didn't have any sense that any other than a regular Friday evening show was on. But sure enough I pulled up the recording and now I'm watching his final sign off.
I doubt I would have had any heads up or known anything was happening if Olbermann was going to go off the air. But I was a bit more stunned than I might otherwise have been because I was just over there. And I did not have any sense that there was anything any different than normal going on. Everything seemed calm and pretty sedate. I didn't sense anything different in Keith's manner or affect (though it's not like we're tight and I would have been the person to notice.) There were a few more people than I'm used to seeing in the studio -- maybe two or three, seated, who seemed to be there to watch. (Something I don't remember seeing before.) But nothing that made me think twice that anything odd was going on.
I'm sure we'll be hearing soon enough what on earth happened here. But color me stunned. And really disappointed.
(The text of the quite terse press release reads: "MSNBC and Keith Olbermann have ended their contract. The last broadcast of "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" will be this evening. MSNBC thanks Keith for his integral role in MSNBC's success and we wish him well in his future endeavors.")
‘They Were There’ — Errol Morris Film for IBM
30-minute film by Errol Morris, commissioned by IBM to celebrate the company’s centennial. Music by Philip Glass. I’ve only watched the first minute and I’m hooked. (Thanks to DF reader Scott Ivers.)
Portugal's drug experimentation
In 2000, Portugal passed a law decriminalizing the possession of drugs, continued to vigorously pursue drug traffickers and distributors, and improved access to treatment. What happened?
Tags: crime drugs PortugalBut nearly a decade later, there's evidence that Portugal's great drug experiment not only didn't blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon's troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized -- indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.
How should a White House Quora Work?
Summary: The White House is looking to build a web community to get its questions answered, sort of their own Quora, and they're trying to do it the right way. They're asking those who would participate to help shape how the community itself works. They're not trying to create a network from scratch, but instead trying to connect to networks that already exist. And they're not just making a community for the hell of it — they're trying to build one with purpose.
But they've asked for our help, from those of us who build, and know, and love web communities. We're being asked to share our expertise in what does, and doesn't work on successful web communities. Our deadline for participating is on
MondaySunday. Giving them insights into our hard-earned lessons will only take 15 minutes of your time this weekend, and will keep us from having to wonder, "Why wasn't I consulted?"You can go get started, or read on to find out more.
ExpertNet
The White House is advancing this project under the working title "ExpertNet". (There's no official link between ExpertNet and Expert Labs, except that we at Expert Labs are trying to help in the effort, too.) In short, ExpertNet as it stands right now is a spec for a platform for getting questions answered by experts, similar to what sites like Quora and Stack Overflow do. The project was announced in December, and the deadline for responding was extended for two more weeks, but those two weeks are up on
MondaySunday, and we're running out of time.Submitting ideas to ExpertNet is as easy as editing a wiki. Many of the key questions they're trying to address are straightforward:
- Decisions around participation: How do you tap in to existing networks of experts?
- Should there be leaderboards for things like a Top Ten? I don't happen to think so, but if not, then what are the right motivational methods?
- How do you get people with the right expertise and knowledge to know about, and use, this network?
- What's the best way to demonstrate the qualifications of people who submit ideas on such a network?
- And, from a purely tech standpoint, what tools exist to already perform some or all of these functions? Are they free/open source? (Obviously, at Expert Labs, we think ThinkUp is a great answer for many of these questions, since it was meant to address many of these particular requirements.)
We Have The Information They Need
The community of people who care about web communities have a responsibility to share what we know. We know what works on Quora or StackOverflow, and what goes wrong on Yahoo Answers. We've learned for years from Ask MetaFilter. Andy Baio collected a short list of links to best practices just today. But none of those lessons are obvious to people who've been busy defining policy — they haven't been in the trenches like we have.
And it's important to remember that perspective, because even if we don't help, this thing is going to get built. And if we don't help, it's going to be broken or wrong or weird or a failure. The White House has already done one amazing thing, by defining the budget for the technology as zero. The official notice in the Federal Register says:
To be clear, there is currently no funding identified for building this platform nor is it clear if future funding will be available. Hence, respondents should be sure that feedback, when possible, addresses opportunities for implementing solutions at little to no cost, including multi-sector partnerships.
That's government-speak for "if you're just reading this to see what you can sell to the Federal government, bug off." They've reduced the chance of vendors getting in and taking control of the process, which reduces the chance that we end up with some sort of National SharePoint Network. In short, they've met us more than half way and avoided a major pitfall, and now all we have to do is guide them to the tech they should use.
If you care about web communities, and think the right web community with the proper design could positively impact the way our elected officials work, then dive in. I'll make note of some of the people making valuable contributions to the effort, so that we can track this as it evolves. You can get started by following these few simple steps:
- Register for an account on the wiki
- Find one of the relevant topic pages and contribute your insights. Simply adding relevant links could be very valuable here, and of course writing out longer ideas would be great too.
- Tweet or blog with mention that you are participating in helping with ExpertNet, so that we can let people know what you did, and prompt them to respond. We've been using the #expertnet hashtag.
My Agenda
Obviously, there are some disclaimers to throw in here. I'm an unabashed fan of the ideas behind ExpertNet, and it aligns very closely with the mission of Expert Labs, so we're hoping our work and our tech is a big part of the solution. We're a non-profit and all our work is free, so we're not motivated by anything except the desire to see our efforts go to their best possible use. And one of the sites I've mentioned learning from is Stack Overflow, where I'm an advisor. But I think anyone who cares about these things can clearly see that they are succeeding in getting highly technical questions answered by expert responders, and I hope our government can learn from that as well.
I urge you to join the folks who are participating in ExpertNet, whether it's working on building a platform, or simply coming up with a better name for the project. They're asking for our help, and it's our fault if we don't give it to them.
Building a House of Light and Wind
David Biello on the daunting physical logistics of scaling up green energy:
“It’s not just a matter of making the necessary equipment, it’s also a question of finding the space for it. A coal-fired power plant produces 100 to 1,000 watts per square meter, depending on the type of coal it burns and how that coal is mined. A typical photovoltaic system for turning sunlight into electricity produces just 9 watts per square meter, and wind provides only 1.5 watts per square meter.
The challenge is worse for smaller countries: the United Kingdom would have to cover its entire landmass with wind turbines to provide enough electricity for the current Briton’s average consumption — roughly 200 kilowatt-hours per day, according to MacKay, the Cambridge expert.”
Supply Side
On the War of the Poppies:
Myles Ambrose, one of President Nixon’s closest advisers in the War on Drugs, was scathing in his judgement of some of his fellow drug-warriors:
“The basic fact that eluded these great geniuses was that it takes only ten square miles of poppy to feed the entire American heroin market.
And they grow everywhere.”
Movable Type sold to Infocom
Six Apart Japan, Movable Type, and the Six Apart brand will be acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT firm.
We are happy to announce that Six Apart KK (SAKK), a Japanese subsidiary of SAY Media, has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT company, as of February 1, 2011. As part of this transaction, SAKK will assume responsibility for the worldwide Movable Type business, and the Six Apart brand.
We at SAKK are very excited to continue our investment in Movable Type, the Movable Type Open Source project and the worldwide community of developers, publishers and bloggers around the world that use Movable Type.
This depresses me. (via waxy)
Tags: Movable Type Six Apart weblogs
Games that launch companies, games that heal: Q&A with Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal is a game designer with an apparently simple idea: some of the billions of hours we spend playing games can be used to solve real world problems, and it can be done by playing games. Her new book, Reality Is Broken, explores the power of games to change people’s lives. It’s just out this week. The TED Blog caught up with her in the middle of the release to talk about games, saving the world, and the simple power of Angry Birds.
Since your TEDTalk, you’ve managed a full run of Evoke, you social entrepreneurship game.
It was really exciting! We were just formally announcing Evoke at TED. That was our first glimpse to see if people would be interested in it, excited about it. We were able to run the game a few months later, a ten-week crash course in changing the world. Our original goals were to try to enroll a thousand students in the game, and we wound up enrolling just under 20,000. We had them from over a 130 countries, all playing the same game and collaborating with each other, which was really amazing.
The most eye-opening outcomes were how many real-world businesses, real-world social enterprises were founded by players of the game over the course of the ten weeks, and then actually launched in the summer following the game. We have more than fifty social enterprises started by gamers. Companies that were designed to deal locally with issues like food security, clean water access, women’s education. That was pretty much a first; the idea that you could come play a game and ten weeks later wind up with a real social enterprise.
One example is this great project called Libraries Across Africa. The idea is basically, what if there were a McDonalds of libraries? What if you could have a franchise for libraries and that the people who would implement and start a library in a village, or anywhere, that it would be a money-making venture, a self-supporting venture, and that other enterprises could pop up around the act of lending books to people: selling them food, selling them phone service or internet access. What a super-creative, novel idea to try to franchise libraries. That came out of the game, and it’s actually in development now. They have their first library prototype in the field.
That’s fantastic. It sounds like you’ve gotten a great reception.
Yeah, when I talk to the media they really sink their teeth into these problem-solving games, but I want to say, the first half of the book is about the way that games integrate into our real life, to improve our health and happiness. What you would call ordinary video games. When I talk to readers that’s the part they’re interested about, but when I talk to media we almost never get to that.
The subtitle is “Why games make us better, and how they can change the world.” I’m really interested in not just these world-saving problem-solving games, but also in how games like Angry Birds, Farmville and World of Warcraft can actually make our lives better. So, the first half of the book is full of science, looking at things like the fact that people who play Rock Band and Guitar Hero are more likely to learn how to play a guitar. This is fascinating, to see that games, rather than distracting us from our real-life goals, seem to be a springboard to real-life goals. There’s science that shows that when we play cooperative games we’re more likely to help strangers, friends, family members in real life. Thirty minutes of playing a co-op game changes for an entire week how cooperative we are in real life. We’re more likely to see opportunities to help someone, and more likely to act on them.
Playing with avatars that are powerful in a game world, or avatars that we find attractive, makes us more confident and optimistic, so that we’re more likely to successfully flirt with strangers or negotiate in a workplace meeting. Just ninety seconds of playing with an avatar can change your odds for success in a real-world situation for 24 hours.
So, there’s all these ways we’re starting to see that the line between the games we play and the lives we lead is much more porous than we imagined. I think this is really great news. It shows that we don’t have to play fewer video games in order to lead the lives that we want to lead. There are all kinds of games that can actually support our real-life goals, strengthen our real-life relationships. That’s such a transformative way to look at games, to realize that they’re not distracting us from our lives. They’re filling our lives with more strength and better relationships. Even the tiniest game, like Angry Birds, can power us with optimism and resilience throughout the day. It’s really remarkable.
Why do you think the default assumption is the exact opposite?
I think it’s two things, one is very old and one is very new. There’s this old, old sense that there’s a divide between productivity and play, and that playing games is somehow not productive. In fact, my research shows that playing games literally produces some very good things. It produces positive emotion. It produces social bonds. It produces more ambitious goals. Yes, it doesn’t produce economic capital; it doesn’t produce consumer goods. But we should ask ourselves, why does “productive” mean producing economic or consumer things? Why isn’t productive producing things that really matter, like improving quality of life? But that’s an old thing, that goes back before video games — games were seen as not productive.
Then, for the last twenty years there’s the idea that the virtual is somehow removed from real life, that we have avatars that are “alternate identities,” and that’s not who we are really are, we get to be somebody else. Of course, we are the same person when we play games. It’s not like we dissociate and become somebody else; it is us. The games increasingly are real in physical ways. Like the X-Box 360 Connect, and how amazingly physical that is, and how real the dancing is. It’s not fake dancing, it’s real dancing. You look at how many people are playing games on Facebook with their real-life friends and families. I’m playing Cityville with people I know in real life, people I really like. it’s not like playing with “strangers on the internet.”
We have this misguided notion that somehow games are just totally virtual. At the very least, the feelings they produce in us are real. The science shows that it doesn’t matter where you get your positive emotions; if you feel a positive emotion it has the same impact on your health and happiness regardless of where it comes from. We need to stop thinking that just because something is digital that it doesn’t have a real impact on our minds and bodies and hearts.
You had a very personal experience with that, designing a game to help yourself recover from a severe concussion.
When I first decided to make this game, I had a very epic, important meeting with my doctor. It had been about a month, and I was having very slow recovery from the concussion, so they diagnosed post-concussion recovery syndrome. She said that if I was feeling stress and anxiety or depression or loneliness — that these emotions get in the way of the brain healing itself. They see in a lot of patients this vicious cycle. You get depressed because you’re not getting well, and then that depression slows you down even more. You have to break that cycle. If you miss the first month of recovery, then on average it’s three months, and if you miss that window then it’s six months, and if you miss that then it’s a year. I was looking forward to possibly a year of not being able to think straight, of not being able to be in public spaces. It made me so depressed and anxious and despairing that I thought there was no way I was going to break the cycle.
It just came to me, coming home from the doctor, I have to make this a game. If I don’t make this a game I will never get out of depression. I’d already written the first few chapters of the book, and those are largely about the idea that gameplay is the opposite of depression. Clinically speaking, depression is a pessimistic sense of your own capabilities, and despondent lack of energy. The opposite of that, an optimistic sense of your own capabilities and an invigorating rush of activity, is the perfect textbook definition of gameplay.
So if I could just make this a game, I could do it. I couldn’t play regular video games because it was aggravating my concussion symptoms. So I was still in this mental fog, and there are these crazy videos of me from that day online on YouTube where I’m trying to design the game out loud, and you can see how much of a fog I’m in, and how much joy.
It was interesting even in that state to be able to reach into game design and design my way out, but it wasn’t until after I’d been playing for quite a while and was better that I was able to redesign it for other people to play. I started having friends test it for things like asthma, diabetes, knee surgery, chemotherapy. I started to get a lot of anecdotal and subjective feedback about how it was working.
The main point is to take the despair out of a diagnosis. You can use the strength of positive emotions and social connectivity to make the process of trying to get better, much, much better and faster.
I’m actually developing a personal version of this game that will be available to the public this summer. And we’re working right now on clinical trials to demonstrate the scientific medical validity of this game. That’s very exciting because there aren’t many games that have been through clinical trials.
There’s a lot of research now on the placebo effect, and how to harness it. It sounds like this is a way.
It’s interesting, somebody was asking me, “Isn’t it just a delusion? In games, to fly, or have an avatar with magic powers coming out their fingers? It’s just a fantasy, it’s an illusion of power.” But what the science shows is something very similar to the placebo effect, that having this imaginative capacity, that you somehow have this power, activates in us that we feel the positive. When the placebo effect is working, people are looking for positive outcomes, and that’s what they see. I think games — hopefully they have real impact — but even if we are just tapping into the power of people’s imaginations to imagine themselves better, that seems like a really good way to go.
Well, even if you are worried about the social transformation part, getting people used to using games to do things is a first step.
Exactly. The social transformation is a 10- to 25-year project. So, in the meantime we’re building these competencies and these skills.
Back to Evoke, with twenty thousand players, thousands interested in mentoring, it sounds like there’s been a good reception.
The reception was great. That’s the thing. When people ask me, “What’s different about the gamer generation?” I say it’s a sense of wanting to rise to the occasion, a sense of heroic purpose: If there’s a heroic mission and I could be the one who’s destined to fill it, I want to do that; I want to be that person. I want to be on a journey; I want to be on an adventure, or part of an adventure. And when we reach out to people, particularly in that gamer generation, and give somebody an opportunity to do something heroic — and it’s something authentically challenging. We weren’t asking people to donate five dollars. There’s nothing challenging about that other than if you don’t have five dollars — but actually to do something, they do rise to the occasion. That’s where a lot of my optimism comes from. We’re still in very early days of trying to harness what’s amazing about games and gamers, and so there’s a lot we really haven’t figured out yet.
The thing that evokes the most skepticism in the comments on the talk is, how do you translate solutions in the game to solutions in the real world?
That’s a great question. I should really take a lot of responsibility for this misconception. I didn’t really talk about my games in the TEDTalk very much.
The great thing about these games is that you don’t have to translate the solutions in the game to solutions in the real world. The game is all about doing things in the real world. So, in World Without Oil, you’re living your life as if there were an oil shortage. You are doing the things that would be the solution; you’re changing the way you eat and cook food, you’re changing the way you get to work. In Evoke you’re going out and you’re actually starting a community garden. You’re transforming how your laptop is powered from regular electricity to solar, or your iPod is getting powered by riding on your bike. You’re actually doing stuff, and it feeds back into the game.
I’m not a fan of simulations. Where, ‘Oh, we’ll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace’ and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that’s not the kind of games that I make. The games that we make, if it’s going to be a game about world peace, it’s going to be a game in which people go out and actually make friends with people that they’ve had disagreements with; they’re going to go out and do something to actually make a difference.
So, it’s not about simulation, but more about attaching the things about gaming that give people this sense of accomplishment to real-world activities.
Right. Real-world activities needs to be at the core of it.
– Interview by Ben Lillie
Giant, 25-Feet-High Roses Will "Grow" On Park Avenue
Come Tuesday, roses are set to bloom at a very unseasonable time of year. And don't worry, it's not in the same apocalyptical vein as all those dying animals. Instead, all the answers lie with artist Will Ryman, who, in conjuction with the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation and Paul Kasmin Gallery, is transforming Park Avenue into a Tim Burton-esque garden with 38 sculptures of rose blossoms (some reaching 25 feet in height!). Look out for brass ladybugs, aphids, beetles, and bees hanging out in the blooms, plus 20 accompanying sculptures of rose petals—six of which will double as lawn chairs—scattered around the Park Avenue Mall between 63rd and 65th streets. If you can't jet off to, say, Tulum, it's a nice way to inject some summer goodness into this bleak mid-winter. (A Cup Of Jo)
Two iOS apps meant to teach toddlers valuable lessons
There is a new trend starting in interactive children's media: books that don't really tell a fully formed story, but are meant to teach a lesson. As with many new ideas, the first ones are pretty rough and may not be worth bothering with, but the potential is vast.
Loris and the Runaway Ball (US$1.99), the first app from Pointed Stories, is meant to teach toddlers what to do if their ball gets thrown into the street accidentally. This is an important lesson, which drew me to the app, but in testing it out, it left quite a bit to be desired and is hardly worth the price. This universal app relays a very short story told by Lincoln (Loris' older brother) about what happened when the ball wound up in the street. The app is just a handful of pages, it has no sound, and the animation is extremely limited. The graphics may be sweet to some toddlers, but the water-colored pictures looked rough and quickly tossed together to me. With no sound, there is no narration. The app seems to be little more than a strip of pictures that you swipe to get to the next one. The only interaction is a decision point where you can choose who Loris should ask to help get the ball back. You can ask Lincoln, Loris' dad or a neighbor named Mrs. Seal. Each choice branches to three specific pages, then goes right back to the story for the ending. That's about all there is to it, and it's not a lot.
The lessons Loris and the reader are meant to learn? Mrs. Seal is glad to help and tosses the ball back. Lincoln, who has crossed the street before, knows to listen, wait and make sure it's clear before he crosses the street. Dad always knows what to do. He holds Loris' hand and tells her to look left, look right, look left again, then they cross together. That's the whole app. You can get through it in less than three minutes, and I would question its worth at even $0.99, much less the $1.99 Pointed Stories is asking for.Continue reading Two iOS apps meant to teach toddlers valuable lessons
Two iOS apps meant to teach toddlers valuable lessons originally appeared on TUAW on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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What Pays on the Web, Expressed by the Order That HuffPo Launched Sections
Shared by Jake Dobkinby Choire Sicha
This should have been titled "what gets traffic on the web", which isn't the same as what gets paid. Otherwise you launch tech first.
Proto-Vertical: Blogs
1. Politics
2. Media
3. Business
4. Entertainment
5. Living
6. Green (June 4, 2008)
7. Style (July 29, 2008)
8. Chicago (August, 2008)
9. World (December 4, 2008)
10. Comedy (January, 2009)
11. New York (June 22, 2009)
12. Tech (September, 2009)
13. Denver (September, 2009)
14. Books (October 5, 2009)
15. Sports (October, 2009)
16. "Impact" (October, 2009)
17. Los Angeles (December, 2009)
18. Religion (February, 2010)
19 .College (February 22, 2010)
20. Food (April 12, 2010)
21. Arts (June 16, 2010)
22. Travel (July 20, 2010)
23. Education (October 4, 2010)
24. Health (October 25, 2010)
25. Divorced People (November 10, 2010)
26. Black People (March, 2011)
27. Latinos (Forthcoming)
14 Comments
We’re Going Streaking (Again)
In the first part of this piece, I established a framework for evaluating streakiness, using David Wright’s consistent performance in 2007 and his streaky performance in 2010 as examples. Now that we have a methodology for assessing the streakiness of players, we can extend it to all players. I repeated the same process I applied to Wright for all 1,545 players with 500 or more PA in every year dating back to 2001. To save computer processing time, I only ran 1,000 simulations for all players, rather than the 10,000 I ran for Wright in the first part of this piece (this is the difference between the calculations taking days and their taking weeks). While this reduces our precision slightly, the distributions are very nearly identical:
So, let’s just get right to the red meat. Here are the five most and five least streaky players in every year from 2001 to 2010:
So what do we see? Looking at 2010, there are some great names at both the top and bottom of the list. I don’t think anyone would be disappointed to have the streaky Carlos Gonzalez or the un-streaky Joey Votto on their team. And certainly, no one would take 2010’s super-steady Skip Schumaker over either one. Looking back at earlier years, Mark Kotsay looks pretty consistent. Not listed here, however, is Kotsay’s 2004, in which he posted a true streakiness of .987. Chone Figgins also goes from among the most consistent players in 2005 to the streakiest in 2007. Neither of the two David Wright seasons we looked at earlier makes the list, but his concussion-marred 2009 season was the streakiest in the league that year. So it seems that Wright is not the only one whose streakiness jumps around from season to season.
The surprising jumps we see from Wright, Figgins, and Kotsay, it turns out, are not a fluke. One way to assess the extent to which a statistic represents an inherent skill, as opposed to randomness, is to calculate the correlation coefficient across seasons. The correlation coefficient, represented by the letter r, tells you how closely related two variables are—in this case, that means how reliably you can predict a player’s performance in a given season based on what he did the year before. A correlation coefficient close to 1 suggests a strong relationship, and a correlation coefficient close to 0 suggests no relationship at all. Negative relationships are also possible, but shouldn’t be relevant in this case. A high correlation across seasons is a good indication that what you’re looking at is related to a player’s actual skill. Strikeout rates for pitchers, for example, tend to correlate across seasons at around 0.7 or 0.8. Voros McCracken’s groundbreaking work on BABIP found that it only correlates across seasons at about 0.3, which lead to an increased emphasis on strikeout and walk rates instead of ERA. With streakiness, the correlation coefficient is -0.014, which is not statistically different from zero (p = 0.667). Here is a scatterplot of player streakiness, with the x axis reflecting a player’s streakiness one season, and the y axis showing his streakiness the next season:
In this sample, there were 938 players who had 500 plate appearances in consecutive seasons (a player can count more than once, e.g. playing from 2001-2003 means that both the pair from 2001-2002 and the pair from 2002-2003 are included). Each blue dot represents a player’s streakiness in two consecutive seasons. How far the dot is to the right indicates how streaky he was in the first season, and how far the dot is toward the top indicates how streaky he was the next season. This is just a sea of randomness. Clearly, there is no relationship at all between the two. Compare that to the scatterplot for a true skill like batter contact rate (Balls In Play)/(Balls In Play + SO), which has an extremely strong year-to-year correlation (r = 0.893):
We can see very clearly that a high contact rate in one year almost guarantees a high contact rate the next year. At the most, players might shift by about 10% from year to year, but a high-contact player will almost never become a whiff artist, nor will a strikeout king close every hole in his swing. This means that, if we know a player’s contact rate in one year, we can make a very accurate guess about what it will be the next year.
With streakiness, however, it is quite the opposite: Knowing a player’s streakiness in one season effectively gives us no ability at all to predict his streakiness in the next. In fact, even knowing a player’s streakiness in three consecutive seasons gives us no ability to say anything about the fourth. Streakiness also appears random within a given season: correlation between streakiness from one month to the next (minimum 100 PA) is r = 0.013, which is, again, not statistically different from zero (N = 3,844, p = 0.413). In short, if we believe our methodology—which I personally have no reason to doubt, although I’m open to suggestions—streakiness among hitters appears to be completely random.
While streakiness may be random for individual hitters, there is reason to think that streakiness overall is not. Here’s a histogram of the total distribution:
For those unfamiliar with histograms, this simply cuts the range of streakiness scores into 20 bins, (i.e. 0.00-0.05, 0.05-0.10, etc) and displays the number of players who fall into each bin. If streakiness were truly random, we would expect a uniform distribution, with roughly the same number of players in each bin and the bars forming a flat horizontal line. What we see, however, is a greater proportion of players in the top half of the distribution than in the lower half. This means that, on the whole, a greater proportion of players appear streaky than appear unstreaky. Moreover, this shift toward the streaky end of the spectrum, while not extreme (mean = 0.537, median = 0.566), is highly statistically significant (p < 0.0001, using both parametric and nonparametric methods). This suggests that players may tend to be streaky, on the whole, even if individual players are not. Although, as commenter Lee noted yesterday, this may also be a function of the non-random nature of the schedule—park effects and opposing pitchers undoubtedly play their part as well.
I should add a couple of things about the methodology. Although I did not start this research knowing if I would find a very strong measure of streakiness, I did set out to find something that would be useful for identifying streaky players. I was, to be honest, completely shocked by the utter absence of a relationship between a player’s streakiness in one year and his streakiness in the next. In an effort to find something, I tried this study several different ways. I tried increasing the size of the moving average window. I tried using different measures of streakiness, such as the difference between a player’s maximum moving wOBA and his minimum, variance in moving wOBA, or even using strikeout and homerun rates instead of wOBA. I tried adjusting for luck on balls in play, giving extra credit for line drives over pop-ups. I also tried with pitchers, albeit in fewer different ways (the calculations take much longer to run, for a variety of reasons). I used xFIP, which effectively gives a pitcher’s luck-and-defense-independent ERA, with fifteen-day windows for relievers and twenty-five-day windows for starters. Again, the correlation was basically zero. No matter how I sliced it, the results came back the same. Each time, there was no relationship from one year to the next.
Furthermore, streakiness did not show any relationship at all with any conventional statistics (batting average, on-base percentage, slugging, wOBA, BABIP, walk rate, or strikeout rate), suggesting true randomness. The one relationship that was statistically significant was a very weak negative correlation between streakiness and plate appearances (r = -0.061, p = 0.016). It is tempting to think that this may suggest that better players (who play more) are less streaky, but this is unlikely. The fact that streakiness shows no relationship with any other hitting statistics suggests that any relationship with plate appearances is, if anything, a function of strategic usage in response to streakiness. My best guess is that when a player has a streaky season, he is more likely to have a prolonged cold stretch and spend some time on the bench. However, given the fairly large size of the sample and the weakness of the correlation, it may also just be a fluke.
So what, ultimately, can we take away from all of this? Although the analysis is complicated, the lessons it teaches us are straightforward. Streaky seasons undoubtedly exist. However, it appears that there is no such thing as a streaky or unstreaky player. Rather, the truth seems to be that all players are streaky players. Being human, they have their ups and downs, and they are inherently streakier than random chance would dictate. They are not dice, and they are not random number generators. If Murray Chass ever read Fangraphs, I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear that. But, again, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that a player who is especially streaky in one season will continue to be so in the next. Is this the final word on this issue? Almost certainly not. But right now there’s just no reason to believe that a player’s inherent streakiness, even if it exists, will have any greater impact on his performance than random chance. So, perhaps the next time you hear another owner in your fantasy league complain about how streaky David Wright is, you can offer Skip Schumaker one-for-one, and see what happens.
A Google Doc containing the results of this study has been made available for your perusal. The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at “www.retrosheet.org”.
Francour says Citi Field is a joke
Posted in MetsBlog
Last season for the Mets, Francouer hit .226 at Citi Field with 5 home runs, but .270 with 8 home runs on the road, though he had twice as many doubles at home.
Dodd is the Royals beat reporter for the Kansas City Star.
Schmidt and Sosin
Google's Eric Schmidt, now in the news at Google, is one of the few people I can think of who went from theoretical researcher to billionaire CEO without really being an entrepreneur. I knew of him in the 1980s when I worked at Bell Labs because of the program lex that he co-authored, a beautiful piece of work that was part of the UNIX toolset and allowed you to create lexical analyzers without writing them yourself. You specified the regular expression you wanted to search for, it generated the program to do it. A program that wrote programs, classic UNIX stuff. From there he went to Sun, Novell, etc, but always as far as I recall in technical roles. Until Google. A nominally similar person he brings to mind is Howard Sosin, who started out as a business school professor at Columbia, and co-wrote a paper that defined and valued one of the first really exotic options, the lookback. From there he went on to found AIG Financial Products. The rest, as they say, is
Hells Bells, Trudy.
It’s not secret that I am a big fan of Emma Pillsbury. Well, I am actually more a fan of her clothing choices than I am of, well, her. Although, she does get to shtoop Uncle Jesse, so, you know, there’s that. But, sigh, the cardigans. The Mary Janes. The clean lines. And after THE PRECIOUS METALS SWEATER incident…you know, there was the whole argument over who had it first, and we worried that we might pull a Brenda and Kelly and (gasp!) both wear the same sweater on the same day and we know how *that* turned out, don’t we? (It was a pregnancy scare, wasn’t it?)
(photo courtesy of WWEPW, one of the best sites to ever exist)
So, there it was. I am Canada’s Emma Pillsbury. You know, officially. Even my Twitter bio says so. (No. It really does.)
ONLY.
Then. Something happened. There was a revelation.
Hells Bells, Trudy! I am NOT Emma Pillsbury after all. I am Alison Brie….as Annie on Community. And Trudy on Mad Men. (Has their ever been a luckier lady to ever be? I think not. Dudes. She is on Community AND Mad Men)
So, I forgive Trudy that horrific pink pregnancy nightie nightmare getup, because well, a) she has to be married to the icky Pete Campbell and b) DAY DRESSES. She is kind of a little piece of perfection all wrapped up in a sad little marriage.
(Did I mention the day dresses?)(Not unlike, you know, someone else we know…)
But, it’s really as I watch Community each week that I have started to realize that
I AM ANNIE EDISON.
(And not just because of the pen episode.)(What? THERE ARE NEVER ANY PENS!)
Remember when Annie wore this?
Remember when I wore it?
How about when she wore this?
And then when I did?
And then, you know, there was last night.
…which you may have remembered seeing here…
I think I need to change my Twitter bio…
Open City
Alec Icky Dunn Open City $15 This is a silkscreen about simple lawlessness and hot summer days in the city. It's the basis for my page in the AK Press/Eberhardt/Justseeds calendar. 2 color silkscreen 19" x 20" signed
January 20, 2011
Leading with my chin
It was a problem finding the right material. Two original models were too stiff, so that my head held upright reminded me of Erich von Stroheim in "Grand Illusion." I couldn't look down easily, which was a problem for walking and typing. Two weeks ago, David was back with a softer silicone that was much more wearable. Since I'd last met him he'd been in Haiti and Guatemala fitting false limbs for children who had lost arms or legs in natural calamities. My problems are small potatoes. David snapped the photo below after the fitting, and before the final coloring had been completed. I'd say he and Julie did a pretty wonderful damn job. I like my new prothesis and know from observation their work was painstaking and done with love and care. via blogs.suntimes.com Even when he is writing about his new prosthetic chin, Roger Ebert is writing about the movies.
Justseeds In Action!
Mary Tremonte is having an artist in residency at Wonderland!
See photos of the studio where the magic happens!
And Mary making magic!
And Jello living the magic!
Leadership changes at Adaptive Path
Over the last two-and-a-half years, Michael Meyer, in his role as Adaptive Path’s CEO, steered us through the difficulties of the recession without resorting to layoffs, architected the company’s growth (in terms of people, capabilities, and projects), and, with Henning, opened our first international office in Amsterdam. We are now nearly twice the size we were before, which, considering the economy of the past few years, is a remarkable achievement.
With these accomplishments under his belt, and having put a strong leadership team in place, Michael decided it was time to move on to new opportunities and even greater challenges, and stepped down on January 3rd. I have stepped into the role of CEO.
While we haven’t been keeping this a secret, we’ve waited a few weeks before making a public statement because I wanted some time to get my CEO legs under me. I want to thank Michael for his efforts, and I am eager to carry forward the work he was doing. I’m also grateful for the amazing people I work with, and excited to see where they take this company. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to discuss in future posts, so stay tuned!
Tony Judt: The Distinctions
Thomas Nagel
The Memory Chalet
by Tony Judt
Jennifer Homans
Tony Judt, Zermatt, Switzerland, 1993
The title of The Memory Chalet refers to its method of composition. Locked inside a body made inert by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and faced with his shrinking future and approaching death, Tony Judt decided to revisit his past. Physically unable to write, but with a mind as sharp and active as ever, he plotted the twenty-five short essays that compose this book in his head, while he was alone at night, using a mnemonic device taken from accounts of the early modern “memory palace,” whereby elements of a narrative are associated with points in a visually remembered space; but instead of a palace, he used a small Swiss chalet that he had once stayed in on vacation as a boy, and that he could picture vividly and in detail. He was then able to dictate these feuilletons the next day from the resulting structure. All but four of them were originally published as separate pieces in The New York Review, but their impact is much enhanced as a single book, a book that is at once memoir, self-portrait, and credo.
theatlantic:
Getting To Know Your Favorite Bloggers:
We all...
Getting To Know Your Favorite Bloggers:
We all have our favorite blogs. And, if you visit them every day or with some frequency, you might find that you start to get to know the bloggers behind them — or, at least, you get to know exactly as much as they reveal to you through their words and writing style. With her new project, Bloggers, Gabriela Herman puts faces to all of those names and shows popular bloggers in the environments in which they work. More often than not, that means otherwise average people sitting in dark corners in local cafes or curled up on the couch, the glow of a laptop screen illuminating their face.
Read the full article here
Image: Fimoculous/Gabriela Herman
I look so retarded in this photo, but the verisimilitude factor is decent. The Stella Artois bottle makes it cinéma vérité.
We All Want Something
Thanks to Listener Scott for sending this to me!
A Postscript
In our January 2011 issue, we featured just a few of the works included in Postcards of the Wiener Werkstätte, a recent exhibition at the Neue Galerie of about 500 postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder collection. If you missed the show, which closed a few days ago, take heart: the curator Christian Witt-Dörring has edited the museum’s visual feast down to a digestible bite of six postcards. Here he presents his personal favorites and explains what makes them special.
Postcard n° 540
Meat Market: Old Roofs (1911) by Adalberta KiesewetterThe topic of this postcard is the unspectacular or, to put it another way, the familiar. It tries to capture the atmosphere of the fast disappearing old city of Vienna around 1910. Nostalgia embraces contemporary artistic expression—the ambiguous play between the flat plane and a perspective rendering. The image breathes tradition in the Secessionists’ interpretation of the term as a revival of a lost quality.
Web Clip: Mets have the best logo
From a post on ESPN Page 2, Jim Caple says the Mets have the best logo in MLB:
Well, obviously, I agree, though the old-school Brewers logo, combining the glove and the M is pretty genius.
Thanks to Dave S for sending in the clip.
The Three Private Graves In Manhattan
If you’re ever up at Riverside Park around Grant’s Tomb, be sure to take a moment and visit a slightly smaller grave nearby.
Consisting of a simple urn and pedestal surrounded by a small fence, it’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it…
But in a way, it’s a pretty important monument: this is one of only three private graves on public land on the entire island of Manhattan. The first is Grant’s tomb…
The second, located in Worth Square north of the Flatiron Building, belongs to military General William Jenkins Worth, who fought during the Mexican American War.
And the third…
…belongs to a five year old boy.
On July 15, 1797, young St. Claire Pollock died, presumably from a fall off the nearby cliffs onto the rocks below. In the late 1700′s, the property surrounding the grave was owned by George Pollack, either St. Claire’s father or uncle, and he was buried on the site.
In 1800, George Pollock sold his property to a neighbor, with a request:
There is a small enclosure near your boundary fence within which lie the remains of a favorite child, covered by a marble monument. You will confer a peculiar and interesting favor upon me by allowing me to convey the enclosure to you so that you will consider it a part of your own estate, keeping it, however, always enclosed and sacred.”
Over time, the surrounding area became known as Claremont Hill, site of the Battle of Harlem Heights during the Revolutionary War, and later, the very popular Claremont Hotel.
The Claremont Hotel eventually became a restaurant. Below, a picture of the Claremont taken by photographer Karl Struss in 1915.
Sadly, the building burned down in 1950 and was replaced by the Claremont Playground (a marker commemorates the location of the original hotel).
Incredibly, over the years, little St. Claire’s grave was always respected. In fact, at one point, the city supposedly attempted to relocate the remains for the construction of Grant’s tomb, only to be met with a surge of opposition from citizens. Nearby St Clair Place is named for the boy.
The monument has been replaced twice due to deterioration, the most recent having been installed in 1967.
St. Claire’s grave is one of my favorite monuments in the city. There’s just something incredibly touching about the fact that, despite sitting in the shadow of a gargantuan tomb for a military hero and former president, the grave of a little boy has almost an equal importance, ultimately touching the lives of millions.
-SCOUT
January 19, 2011
3 Birds
Jesse Purcell 3 Birds $25 No comment 3 colour silkscreen print 24"x18" cream paper Unsigned - Unnumbered
Five emotions invented by the internet
My favorite of the bunch is the first one: "A vague and gnawing pang of anxiety centered around an IM window that has lulled."
During this time an individual feels unsure whether they have offended the IM recipient, committed a breach of IM etiquette, or have otherwise spoilt the presentation of themselves carefully crafted thus far thanks to the miracles of the textual medium. The individual must be at least vaguely aware that they are being vaguely paranoid, and must tell themselves things like 'he probably just stepped away from the keyboard' or 'I know she is at work right now so perhaps she has stopped replying because she is busy.'
A possible sixth emotion might be "Unnecessary pagination irritation", which emotion I experienced reading this otherwise fine article. :(
Tags: lists
Mad Men’s Furniture Showroom
Part of the awesome responsibility inherent in having your own blog is admitting when you’re wrong. People should do it more often, including me. So here goes: I was wrong about “Mad Men,” cable television’s zeitgeisty dramatization of life in the American advertising industry at its mid-century peak. I originally pegged it as being tedious and overblown, but now, having just caught up with all four of the seasons that have aired to date, I have to correct the record and say that it is not tedious at all, and that it is in fact, a very, very good show.
Baltimore No More
The origin of my premature judgment is understandable, I think: I tried to watch a few episodes when it debuted, and then tried again several times thereafter, based on the uniformly good reviews I’d heard from lots of people that I respect. But, I was living in the wake of “The Wire,” which to my mind remains unmatched as the best television show ever, and I was feeling dispirited by what dramatic shows had left to offer. I’d heard amazing things about “Battlestar Galactica” and “Lost,” but neither of them were ever able to escape the awkward confines of the hour-long format the way David Simon’s Baltimorean epic did. Where television comedy is an art form unto itself, it’s always been true that most dramatic shows play like cut-rate facsimiles of movies, and that never felt truer than in these few years since “The Wire.”
Cut-rate was exactly how “Mad Men” struck me during its the first few episodes, which seemed to sorely lack for subtlety. Those scripts signaled too loudly, conspicuously and self-consciously that the show’s early 1960s milieu is wackily similar yet outrageously different from how we live today, can you believe it? At least at first, the show seemed preoccupied with consoling us in the knowledge that we’ve come a long way, baby, from the chain smoking, liquor lunching, rampant sexism of a half-century ago. Which is to say that what it had to offer was more of what we already knew, rather than revealing things we’d never known before (which, again, is one of many reasons that I think “The Wire” was such a triumph).
Familiarity Breeds
In many ways, I still think it’s true that the show trades in familiarity. I stuck with it and ultimately found it to be rewarding but I still feel there’s nothing inherently revealing about “Mad Men,” nothing that you’d be much the poorer for if you can’t be bothered to watch it yourself. Everything that makes it work is an idea you already know: people have difficulty reconciling their private and public lives; those internal conflicts lead people to treat one another poorly; and everyone used to dress much, much better before hippies ruined it for all of us.
What drives “Mad Men,” and what made me stick with it past those first few episodes, is not inspiration so much as incredibly polished storytelling mechanics. Series creator, executive producer and writer Matthew Weiner has one of the surest narrative hands I’ve ever seen; story arcs, plot details and character development are all so well paced, so exacting that it’s truly a marvel to behold.
The universe that Weiner has created achieves a kind of naturalism that has eluded virtually every television series that has preceded it. Nothing feels rushed, nothing feels opportunistic or adversely reactive to the constraints of the format or the commercial interests that make it possible. Every facet of the show is thoughtful, decisive and precise — though it’s not the kind of precision that feels hollow, either. Its craftsmanship sticks with you; its meticulousness is mesmerizing but it delivers an emotional wallop that’s substantive and truthful, without pretension or histrionics. And its drama is resonant, too. Yes, the show deals in what you already know, but it doesn’t take those things for granted. Rather it uses the familiarity of its ideas to make them unexpectedly meaningful. I often find myself turning over plot twists in my head long after I’d expected to forget them, and long after I feel like I should be thinking about characters on a TV show.
Unnatural Acts
Actually, it’s ironic to call this ‘naturalism’ because its beautifully evolving story arcs aside, “Mad Men” can also be shockingly artificial. Its scripted dialogue is surprisingly wooden and often delivered woodenly, and much of the acting is underwhelming at best. None of the actors’ performances are particularly illuminating (aside perhaps from John Slattery’s unremittingly hilarious Roger Sterling, but then he usually serves only to remind us of the artifice of the whole affair) though I would also say that they’re all effective enough.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this artificiality, wondering how it’s caused me to like “Mad Men” so much, almost in spite of myself. As it turns out, what sometimes seems like a liability actually turns out to be an asset: “Mad Men” revels in its artificiality.
This is perhaps most prominently true in this cast, who are unreasonably, unrealistically, unconscionably good looking. From top to bottom, male and female, nearly ever member of the cast is off-the-charts attractive. Of course that’s not unusual for a television show, but to see a collection of beautiful people shaped by exceptional writing and storytelling is surprisingly rare. Watching gorgeous specimens of humanity wrestle with the mundanity of living is a perverse pleasure in which we can all share, especially when it’s done with such delicate precision. This was the secret behind many of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, and it’s no accident that much of “Mad Men” is highly reminiscent of — to say nothing of being contemporaneous with — the alienation that was rife in movies like “L’Eclisse” and “La Notte” (in fact, the show has established that the lead character, Don Draper, is a fan of these films).
What They’ve Done with the Place
It’s not just that these people are good looking, either. They’re surrounded by beautiful spaces, gorgeously recreated environments from the 1960s: offices, board rooms, nightclubs, hotels, middle class homes — and the furniture that fills them. Like many television shows with limited budgets, “Mad Men” is rarely able to let us see the buildings that occupy these spaces, but we do get a good look at what fills the buildings. More than a good look. The camera lingers over desks and chairs, pulls back so that long, reflective corridors and wide windows are in full view, frames faces against cabinets and wall hangings so that they’re as prominent a participant in any dialog as the actors themselves.
Furniture is truly central to this universe. It’s impossible to watch this show without watching the furniture, without noticing the diligent mix of the oaky decades that preceded the 1960s and the sleek Modernism that was then taking over. Heck, even the show’s logo is the silhouette of a man relaxing on a sofa, as seen from behind, a pose that reflects the way furniture lets us regard the world.
At first, I suspected that the show’s furniture accounted for as much of the show’s popular appeal as its actors did, but then I realized that its actors are a kind of furniture. They’re as beautiful as the objects that surround them. They too are shiny idealizations of a time gone by, expertly arranged so that we may luxuriate among them, contrasting the familiar but strange way of life that they evoke with our own, all for an episode at a time. “Mad Men” is the best show about furniture ever and I admit I think it’s great.
Before posting the photos and voice mails, Daulerio argued with Gawker's lawyer and chief operating officer, Gaby Darbyshire, over legal exposure. "She's like, 'You're willing to go to jail for this? It's just a dong shot,' " Daulerio recalls. "And I'm li
Before posting the photos and voice mails, Daulerio argued with Gawker's lawyer and chief operating officer, Gaby Darbyshire, over legal exposure. "She's like, 'You're willing to go to jail for this? It's just a dong shot,' " Daulerio recalls. "And I'm like, 'It's fucking Brett Favre's cock shot.' So yeah. If Brett Favre sued or [the pictures] were subpoenaed—I don't think they'd send me to jail for that, but given the choice, sure." In the end, Daulerio agreed to sign documents assuming responsibility for protecting the source's identity.:What’s funny is that sometime shortly after reading this, Nick will stop by Gaby’s desk, and quietly note that she needs to stop holding back his writers so much. I was once in a conference room being lectured over a blatant violation of Fair Use that Nick called me in on, and it ended with him and Gaby snipping at each other over Nick’s accusation that she’s scaring me off ‘from work’ or something. It was bizarre.
How to Use Replica Set Rollbacks
Rollin' rollin' rollin', rawhide!
If you’re using replica sets, you can get into a situation where you have conflicting data. MongoDB will roll back conflicting data, but it never throws it out.
Let’s take an example, say you have three servers: A (arbiter), B, and C. You initialize A, B, and C:
$ mongo B:27017/foo > rs.initiate() > rs.add("C:27017") { "ok" : 1 } > rs.addArb("A:27017") { "ok" : 1 }Now do a couple of writes to the master (say it’s B).
> B = connect("B:27017/foo") > B.bar.insert({_id : 1}) > B.bar.insert({_id : 2}) > B.bar.insert({_id : 3})Then C gets disconnected (if you’re trying this out, you can just hit Ctrl-C—in real life, this might be caused by a network partition). B handles some more writes:
> B.bar.insert({_id : 4}) > B.bar.insert({_id : 5}) > B.bar.insert({_id : 6})Now B gets disconnected. C gets reconnected and the arbiter elects it master, so it starts handling writes.
> C = connect("C:27017/foo") > C.bar.insert({_id : 7}) > C.bar.insert({_id : 8}) > C.bar.insert({_id : 9})But now B gets reconnected. B has data that C doesn’t have and C has data that B doesn’t have! What to do? MongoDB chooses to roll back B’s data, since it’s “further behind” (B’s latest timestamp is before C’s latest timestamp).
If we query the databases after the millisecond or so it takes to roll back, they’ll be the same:
> C.bar.find() { "_id" : 1 } { "_id" : 2 } { "_id" : 3 } { "_id" : 7 } { "_id" : 8 } { "_id" : 9 } > B.bar.find() { "_id" : 1 } { "_id" : 2 } { "_id" : 3 } { "_id" : 7 } { "_id" : 8 } { "_id" : 9 }Note that the data B wrote and C didn’t is gone. However, if you look in B’s data directory, you’ll see a rollback directory:
$ ls /data/db journal local.0 local.1 local.ns mongod.lock rollback foo.0 foo.1 foo.ns _tmp $ ls /data/db/rollback foo.bar.2011-01-19T18-27-14.0.bsonIf you look in the rollback directory, there will be a file for each rollback MongoDB has done. You can examine what was rolled back with the bsondump utility (comes with MongoDB):
$ bsondump foo.bar.2011-01-19T18-27-14.0.bson { "_id" : 4 } { "_id" : 5 } { "_id" : 6 } Wed Jan 19 13:33:32 3 objects foundIf these won’t conflict with your existing data, you can add them back to the collection with mongorestore.
$ mongorestore -d foo -c bar foo.bar.2011-01-19T18-27-14.0.bson connected to: 127.0.0.1 Wed Jan 19 13:36:27 foo.bar.2011-01-19T18-27-14.0.bson Wed Jan 19 13:36:27 going into namespace [foo.bar] Wed Jan 19 13:36:27 3 objects foundNote that you need to specify -d foo and -c bar to get it into the correct collection. If it would conflict, you could restore it into another collection and do a more delicate merge operation.
Now, if you do a find, you’ll get all of the documents:
> B.bar.find() { "_id" : 1 } { "_id" : 2 } { "_id" : 3 } { "_id" : 7 } { "_id" : 8 } { "_id" : 9 } { "_id" : 4 } { "_id" : 5 } { "_id" : 6 }Hopefully this sort of thing can tide most people over until MongoDB supports multi-master.
Live @ Citi Field: Kids go crazy
Posted in Image
I’m jealous of these kids, who are totally losing their minds right now.Turns out, they have no idea that players are even here, let alone that they will get to meet them and get autographs, before they get their tour of Citi Field.
First they do a quick Q&A, followed by an autograph session, after which they all play video games in the player’s lounge, and then the kids get a tour of the ballpark… very cool… good for them.
Make script files executable automatically
You can force Emacs to make a file executable (respecting your
umasksettings) if Emacs considers it a script. To determine if it is a script, Emacs will look for the hash-bang notation in the file and treat it as a script if it finds it.Add this to your .emacs and Emacs will then make the file executable if it is a script.
(add-hook 'after-save-hook 'executable-make-buffer-file-executable-if-script-p)
Joe Coffee Ready For Their First Day of School
This is pretty exciting – Joe is opening on January 24th way uptown at Columbia University. Brown bags and Blunts for everyone!
Related posts:
- Joe Coffee is Coming to Columbia University
- Dora Coffee on the LES
- Video: Cold Cream Mixing with Hot Coffee
Crossword Puzzles!
What a great pattern by studiofibonacci. It's almost that time of year again ...
January 18, 2011
So much to offer
Query: Why don't you tell us something interesting?
Answer: I think you can guess for yourself.
I am always at my very most boring when I am also anxious. And I have been rather anxious, this week, as it has slowly drifted across my consciousness that there are looming work things that I am actually responsible for bringing to pass. It seems that I would vastly prefer it if my responsibilities could just tick along at the same modest and predictable level week after week after week. This attitude, as everyone knows, is an excellent recipe for success in any career.
What I'd really like, naturally, is very few actual responsibilities at all, just a nice salary and the option for someone to applaud appreciatively when I happened to do something accidentally, every now and then. I would be very ready to provide an annual output of, oh, let's see:
- One academic paper (absolutely no quality guarantee of any kind included)
- Several whimsical drawings (ditto)
- A story or few (ditto, ditto)
- 260 dinners
- Several batches of baked goods
- The solving of 52 crossword puzzles
- A lumpy craft project to be named later
- Dozens of blog comments
- Informal commentary on several films and works of light fiction
- Five or more animated gifs.
All that and I'll play with the baby too. A bargain at twice the price!
Red Rooster: Well Designed But Still Finding Its Legs
VIEW SLIDESHOW: Red Rooster: Well Designed But Still Finding Its Legs
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Red Rooster
310 Lenox Avenue, New York NY 10037 (b/n 125th and 126th Streets; map); 212-792-9001; redroosterharlem.com
Service: Extremely friendly but still getting its bearings
Setting: Comfortable but stylish
Must-Haves: Shrimp and red Grits, Helga's Meatballs, Chicken & Egg
Cost: Appetizers $9-15, Entrees $14-32
Grade: B+. Exceptional menu design with spotty execution.Here's the truth: as a Harlem native, I really, really want Red Rooster, Marcus Samuelsson's new 125th Street soul-food-with-a-twist spot to succeed. Despite the busloads of tourists scarfing down mediocre ribs and fried chicken from nearby Sylvia's, the dining landscape in my neck of the woods is pretty grim, devoted mostly to fast food and steam tables. I'm really excited at the prospect of a hangout that doesn't require a late-night subway ride home.
The 39-year old Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised, current Harlem resident planned the restaurant as an homage to the original shuttered Red Rooster on 138th Street, a Harlem institution where locals would commingle over drinks with the likes of Willie Mays and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The brand-new 3,400 square foot space is beautifully designed. A large bar with a few communal tables occupies the front half of the restaurant, divided from the dining area by shelves housing jugs of spice-infused bourbon. The bourbon is for their killer drinks program which plays a large role in fueling the convivial atmosphere of the space. The large basement is slated to be opened as a multi-purpose lounge/speakeasy/art space.
He's brought along Executive Chef Andrea Bergquist, a New York restaurant vet with a resume that covers Gramercy Tavern, Craft Steak, and Tabla (her stint at Samuelsson's fizzled Merkato 55 is conspicuously left off the list). She runs the day to day kitchen operations and mans the downstairs commissary while Samuelsson gives face time at the open upstairs kitchen during service.
A large proportion of the staff are locals, many of whom have little past experience beyond the fast food and fast-casual restaurants that dot the neighborhood. There's been a sharp learning curve, but in the month or so that Red Rooster's been open, the quality of service has increased dramatically, and you can't help but applaud a chef who puts his money where his mouth is in attempting to make this a real neighborhood spot. Chatting with the throngs that pack the crowded bar area at night (a 2-hour wait on a Tuesday night!), I get the impression of a 50/50 mix between locals and visitors looking for a slice of downtown vibe up in Harlem.
If restaurants could be run on ideas alone, Red Rooster would be phenomenal, and indeed the food often soars to great heights: The appetizer-sized Dirty Rice & Shrimp ($9) made with cured Basmati rice and fragrant curry leaves may be one of the best shrimp dishes in the city—smoky, complex, and fragrant. But the problem is when great—even ingenious—ideas are occasionally held back by spotty execution.
The good news is that with each of my half dozen visits, the food's been getting better and better.
Chicken and Egg
Take the Crab Cakes ($10). They've have always come packed with sweet crab, but in earlier versions, there was only a thin Pomegranate reduction saucing the plate. It's a much more balanced dish now—great even—with a creamy spiced mayo.
A stew that falls somewhere between a classic Ethiopian doro wat and a Southern-style chicken pie filling, the Chicken & Egg ($15) comes served with a runny fried egg, a small hunk of seared foie gras, and appropriately sour and spongy injera bread. It's a brilliant melding of cross-cultural comfort foods, but toned down spices and lack of salt detract from it (we still licked the cute little cast iron cassolette clean).
Similarly, a rich Spiced Duck Liver Pudding ($14) flavored with garam masala had no problems with seasoning, but arrived with a slightly curdled texture. The the dense and meaty, thick-sliced duck breast pastrami it came with was perfect.
Pulled Pork
The bar snacks are great and fill the much needed late-night quick-bite-and-a-drink hole. The Pulled Pork ($8) isn't smoky, but plenty juicy and tender with warm spices and goes great with the Big Red Rooster, a Manhattan-based cocktail made with Averna and cinnamon-infused bourbon. It comes piled on a moist slab of sweet potato bread. I also loved their beef patties, which have a flaky crust and filling more closely related to South American empanadas.
On two different occasions I've seen waiters unfamiliar with the menu mislead patrons at the expense of their wallet. On one occasion, a lone diner sitting next to me at the bar was told that his Fried Yard Bird ($18) came with no sides, so he ordered the Smoked Collard Greens ($7) only to find that his chicken already came with them. The (excellent) Yam & Sweet Potato Puree ($7) was recommended to our table as a good side dish, despite the fact that the Braised Oxtail ($26) we had ordered was served on a massive pile of them.
Braised Oxtail
About those two dishes: while the oxtail was intensely flavored, it was texturally off—slightly leathery around the edges, making this the least favorite dish (in fairness, I've only tried it once). The use of plantain in the dish is a nice nod to the local Caribbean culture, but it was starchy and dry—a tender sweet plantain would have done much better in its place.
Easily leading the pack for the spot of signature dish is Samuelsson's take on fried chicken. Bell & Evans birds get brined in a mixture of coconut and buttemilk overnight, then dredged in cornstarch and flour. Deep fried and served smothered with a mace-scented gravy and a metal can of their signature spicy "Shake," it's still a work in progress. At times the crust is too crunchy, bordering on tough, and the meat is occasionally dry despite the brining. I've had it three times, and each time it's been better. Hopefully, fourth time's a charm.
Lemon Roasted Chicken
Their other chicken dish, the Lemon Roasted Chicken, is a strongly North Africa-influenced plate flavored with grilled preserved lemon (the whole thing is edible, rind and all) and tender cous-cous dotted with raisins and pomegranate. We found ourselves digging for the seriously delicious cous-cous, which was moister than the slightly overcooked chicken, a problem which also plagued the Red Snapper ($26), which came in a kaffir-lime broth that tasted mostly of tomato soup.
When the stars align and the kitchen is firing on all cylinders, the results can be stunning. Their Gravlax and Purple Mustard ($13) brilliantly pairs lightly cured salmon with crisp and sour chips of dehydrated injera (the brunch version comes with pumpernickel and dill cream cheese), and the Shrimp and Red Grits ($22) is amongst the best versions of the dish I've had, despite it's huge departure from tradition. Spicy sausage and perfectly cooked shrimp swirl around in a juicy pool of creamy grits cooked down with a powerful shellfish stock dotted with basil and a soft poached egg.
Shrimp & Red Grits
Not surprisingly, Helga's Meatballs ($15), a straight-forward, no-twists version of Swedish Meatballs are also extraordinary with buttery mashed potatoes, tart lingonberry preserves, and a few fresh dill-flavored quick pickles. You'd be hard pressed to find a better plate of food anywhere.
Chocolate Tart
Desserts are pretty consistently strong. The best are the Sweet Potato Doughnuts ($8), which are light and yeasty. The Spiced Pudding ($8) is also a winner with a moist, coarse crumb, as is their Chocolate Tart ($9), essentially a high-end Snickers bar that strikes the right salty and sweet balance.
So is Red Rooster the killer neighborhood hangout that I've been hoping it'll be? Absolutely. The atmosphere is great, the prices are reasonable, and the service is as personable as you could hope for. But is it a destination restaurant worth the trek uptown? Perhaps not quite yet, but if the still-being-tweaked food continues with its upward progression and the inconsistencies with execution get worked out, it will be.
Until then, I'll be waiting for you at the bar.
The Big Picture creator moves on
Two and a half years ago, Alan Taylor started The Big Picture at the Boston Globe; he basically ran the site in his spare work time as a web developer for the company. Now he's moving on to The Atlantic, where he will edit a new photo site called In Focus.
I wanted the opportunity to do this -- telling news photo stories -- as a fulltime job, and the Atlantic has offered that to me, for which I am grateful. I also think the Atlantic is a better overall fit for the type of international, wide-ranging storytelling I've practiced over the years. The Globe has been a good home and a great platform for over 425 entries since 2008 and I am truly grateful, but I've chosen to move on now, and really hope you'll come along and see what I'm up to. I feel very fortunate for what I've been able to accomplish to date, and for the opportunity given to me now. I really can't believe this is going to be my fulltime gig!
Smart move by The Atlantic, which is increasingly looking like one of the media properties that may make a smooth-ish transistion from print to online/app media. As for The Globe, well, I don't think they quite knew what they had there. Eight million page views per month out of nothing with a less-than-maximal effort...that's the kind of thing you want to encourage if you're in the media business.
Tags: Alan Taylor journalism photography
Amy Sedaris's YouTube Channel
by Edith Zimmerman2 Comments
Amy Sedaris, beloved author of Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People and star of Strangers With Candy, is now on YouTube, where she's teaching us how to roast hot dogs on a rake and cook fake-fingernail baked potato ships.
We Are Seriously Getting So Stupid
by Edith ZimmermanAfter two years in college, 45% of students showed no significant gains in learning; after four years, 36% showed little change.
Oh no! Quick, though, think of something you learned in college. [...] All I can hear is the AIM door creaking open and slamming shut. Creak, slam, creak, slam. Plus,
Students also spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.
This is terrible! We are so stupid. Seriously, we're so stupid it's out of control. What's going to happen to us? Who will save us?
Dear Aliens,
OMG we need your help sooo bad! Do you even know how weak and idiotic we are now? It is TOO sad, for real, but we just don't know anything anymore — when people ask us a question, we'll be like, almost every time, "I have no idea."
Can you please come help us get our groove back? If you come and … give us some medicine that you invented (?? or whatever!!), we'll be so grateful. Personally I would do anything you wanted, no matter how weird.
I know you guys are busy (like with what, out of curiosity, also?), but if you get some free time, please consider my request. THANK YOU!
Best,
11 Comments
Edith
Today in Hangover Cures
by Liz Colville
A study of rats in Philadelphia claims that the easiest way to cure a hangover is so obvious you're probably already doing it; you just continue to relax in hangover pose on the weekends (weekdays? Fine!) because your brain needs the down time. The cure is aspirin and coffee, and the scientists found this out by giving rats hangovers and then trying to take them away.
Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia induced the rats' hangovers with ethanol, i.e. "pure alcohol." The idea was to block the chemical acetate, which is produced by alcohol—even small amounts of it—and causes headaches. Caffeine has been used for this purpose quite a bit: it's an ingredient in Exedrin, the headache medicine, and aspirin has anti-inflammatory properties, so paired together, they apparently do great work. Caffeine is sometimes frowned upon as a hangover cure because it allegedly dehydrates the already-dehydrated drunk. But the scientists say the rats were not dehydrated by their hangovers.
The only trouble is that aspirin is hard on the liver, which is "already stretched trying to deal with all the alcohol from the previous evening." So this was a total waste of time: go back to eating spoonfuls of honey and chasing them with bloody marys, or whatever. But seriously, what do you do…that works? Home fries? Green smoothies? Acidophilus? A beer? Vicodin? Rom-coms? All of the above?
[Via]
25 Comments
Crime in the emptiness of Los Angeles - Our far-flung correspondents
Shared by Jake DobkinMichael Mann's "Heat" ranks right up there with the best of the crime genre from "Rififi" to "The Godfather". In fact, it is in my opinion the single greatest Los Angeles crime epic of all time, for it encompasses themes and visuals rarely achieved by productions. "Heat" is very ambitious and the end result is nothing short of a larger-than-life epic grandeur of a film.
Via Ebert on Twitter
Apple Reports First Quarter Results
Apple PR:
The Company posted record revenue of $26.74 billion and record net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $15.68 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.38 billion, or $3.67 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. […]
Apple sold 4.13 million Macs during the quarter, a 23 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 16.24 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 86 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 19.45 million iPods during the quarter, representing a seven percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company also sold 7.33 million iPads during the quarter.
I’m almost certain Apple has never before sold 4 million Macs in a quarter. And I love the almost off-handed tone of the sentence announcing the iPad number.
They really did beat Wall Street’s revenue consensus by $2 billion.
Tigers DFA Armando Galarraga
Posted in MetsBlog
Yesterday, Armando Galarraga and Tigers agreed to terms on a one year, $2.3 million contract, and avoided arbitration.
If the Tigers were going to designate Galarraga for assignment anyway, I’m not clear on why they came to terms with him to begin with.
At any rate, Galarraga has to clear waivers before being sent to the minors, but I would expect him to garner quite a bit of interest. He would be a good fit for the Mets and the back end of their rotation, and he would only cost them the league minimum, with the Tigers picking up the remainder of the $2.3 million owed.
Last year, Galarraga, who just turned 29, went 4-9 with a 4.49 ERA while appearing in 25 games, 24 of which were starts. He allowed 21 home runs and 51 walks in 144 1/3 innings, and held left handed hitters to a .241 average.
11 of those 21 home runs allowed came at Comerica Park.
He pitched 8 2/3 innings of perfect baseball against the Indians on June 2, and if not for a blown call by first base umpire Jim Joyce, would have thrown a perfect game.
The Doree Chronicles: Favorite New York Fiction, In Alphabetical Order by Author
The Doree Chronicles: Favorite New York Fiction, In Alphabetical Order by Author:Winter’s Tale is my favorite novel of all time (it’s a shame about Mark Helprin’s politics, but there you are) so I endorse this message.- Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
- Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
- Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City
- Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
- Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
- John Cheever, The Collected Stories
- Junot Diaz, Drown
- Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the…Winter’s Tale, for sure.
How to Destroy Baseball Immediately
Sure, they exhibit excellent plate discipline, but zombies’ll also eat your brain. Earlier today, my colleague Dayn Perry submitted for the readership’s consideration a plan to improve baseball. Though I can’t necessarily speak to the virtues of his proposal — one which, it needs to be said, involves praising, if only implicitly, the works and days of the American South — I certainly commend Mr. Perry for his efforts.
It seems only natural, given Mr. Perry’s submission, that we might turn our gaze in the other direction — that is, towards those rule changes which might destroy baseball immediately. One might note — and not incorrectly so, I think — that Major League Baseball itself has frequently been on the front lines of this effort, whether by instituting bizarrely significant rewards for winning the All-Star Game or proving notoriously stingy with their online media. Still, there are some means to the end of baseball’s destruction left unplumbed by even their tireless efforts.
Here are ten ways that the sport of baseball could be destroyed posthaste:
Raise the pitcher’s mound to, like, 14 or 17 feet or something.
Now everyone can be Bob Gibson!Lower the pitcher’s mound to, like, negative-six feet.
I don’t know what the effect on the game would be necessarily, but it’d definitely screw big-time with Pitch f/x.Make the season 367 days long.
There aren’t even that many days in a year! What is this, a frigging Charlie Kaufman movie?Award a run to the pitching team for every batter HBP’d in the beanbag.
This would certainly be a sign that the Players Association had lost its bargaining powers.Forbid unfortunate facial hair.
J.P. Howell would be the only relief pitcher left in the entire major leagues.Enforce a minimum Wonderlic score for players.
A league in which Ross Ohlendorf is that ace-iest of the aces probably isn’t providing great baseballing action.Enforce a minimum Wonderlic score for fans.
Otherwise, who’d go see Phillies games?Destroy North America, either via warfare or natural disaster or another way.
That’s where most of the world’s baseball players are, duh.Allow zombie players.
They probably wouldn’t run in the baselines, for one thing. Also, they generally feast on human flesh — which, that’d make for awkward rides on the team plane, I’m guessing.Allow Carson Cistulli to run a team.
“I’m pleased to announce the signing of Colby Lewis to a 27-year, $1 million-billion contract.”
Forever
Mandy Brown eloquently explains why most people have a hard time grasping forever.
On many an occasion, I’ve spoken with someone about their reluctance to get a tattoo and heard something to the effect of “I can’t imagine making a decision that would last forever.” My somewhat cheeky response has always been to say it won’t last forever; it will only last as long as you do, which is to say, not very long at all. But most of the time, and for most people, “forever” is that piece of time that we can see with our own eyes. Forever is the length of a single, human life.
She goes on to relate it to the sunsetting of web services like Delicious, which caused incredible upheaval amongst those who depend on it.
Instead of a single life, I hope that we think of forever as the amount of time in which a piece of information is useful. Beyond that point, it is best laid to bed.
Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2011/01/forever.php
This Week: One More Chance to Defend the PPW Bike Lane
If you want to relive the excitement of last October’s rally for the redesigned Prospect Park West, when supporters swamped the opposition, or if you couldn’t make the rally and wish you had the chance to stand with other Brooklynites who support safer streets, we have good news. There is one more public forum to support the new PPW, stand up to its opponents, and show your appreciation for NYC DOT’s efforts to calm traffic while creating room for safer biking and walking.
The Prospect Park West bike lane, January 16, 2011.
This Thursday, DOT will present its final report on the effects of the redesign to the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 6. We know from the preliminary data that the street redesign has curbed dangerous speeding without causing congestion. We know from the survey data collected by the local City Council members that the project enjoys broad public support. Still, a small but well-organized group of bike lane opponents want to go back to the old speedway configuration, and they weren’t shy about speaking up at the last CB meeting on the project.
You can expect more reporters, microphones and cameras to be trained on the event this Thursday when DOT presents its data. Supporters need to pack the room and make a strong demonstration that Brooklynites want their streets to stay safer.
Also on the calendar this week:
- Wednesday: Manhattan CB 4 discusses the results of DOT’s Safe Streets for Seniors Program, as well as the potential for pop-up cafés in the area. 6:30 p.m.
- Also Wednesday: NYMTC presents its recommendations for the Canal Street area and hears public input twice on Wednesday. They’ll be downtown at 3:00 p.m. and in Chinatown at 7:00 p.m.
- Thursday: The main event. Head down to the Old First Reformed Church (729 Carroll Street at Seventh Avenue) to hear DOT’s findings on the new Prospect Park West and support the redesign. 6:30 p.m.
Keep an eye on the calendar for updated listings. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.
Lyndon Johnson buys pants
This is a hoot: in want of slacks, President Lyndon Johnson called up the Haggar clothing company and requested several pairs be made in the style of a pair he already owned. Except a little bigger in the crotch..."down where your nuts hang" as Johnson put it. Just listen:
Tags: fashion Lyndon Johnson video
January 17, 2011
Rogue: MongoDB Scala-based Query DSL
Rogue is a type-safe internal Scala DSL for constructing and executing find and modify commands against MongoDB in the Lift web framework. It is fully expressive with respect to the basic options provided by MongoDB’s native query language, but in a type-safe manner, building on the record types specified in your Lift models
Open sourced by Foursquare.
Original title and link: Rogue: MongoDB Scala-based Query DSL (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)
'The Daily' to Lead the Way on iPad Magazine Subscriptions, Skip iAds - Mac Rumors
Shared by Jake DobkinDespite the fact that the launch of News Corp.'s tablet-focused news publication has reportedly been pushed back by a few weeks from its rumored introduction next week and with the prospect of a joint
Only $30 per month! That's more expensive than the New Yorker! It's 2X as expensive as the NYPost delivered to your door.
David Wertheimers I don't know
I am not any of these people, but over the years I have been mistaken for the following:
Group manager of display pricing at Microsoft. Twice received job leads from recruiters. I get a lot of personal email meant for him, too.
CEO of the ET Center at USC. This David Wertheimer and I have swapped some emails over the years, and for awhile our companies were in the same New York office building. (He's also the smartest of this list, as he grabbed wertheimer.com.)
Law partner at Hogan Lovell. My favorite: I grew up in the same town as this David, 9 or 10 years his junior, and have been hearing about him my entire life. From 2003-2007 we lived 11 blocks apart. We've gotten each other's mail and once the Harrison restaurant booked his Thanksgiving table under my name. Someday we'll have coffee, but we haven't yet.
Senior program officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This mistake hasn't been made, but I wanted to call out my namesake. Cool career.
Teaching Race to (Your) Children
by Oliver Wang
Allow me to reintroduce myself...[1]
I'm Oliver Wang, full-time sociology professor, part-time journalist, all-the-time record junkie. I originally guest-blogged for TNC last summer and feel honored to be asked back, especially in the wake of last week's all-star team.
My daughter, Ella, turns six in a few weeks and she's currently in kindergarten. As with most schools, major holidays are folded into the curriculum and MLK Day was no exception. Last week, the school librarian read Ella's class a book on MLK Jr. and the Civil Rights movement; afterwards, she came home and explained what she learned, and I had to come to grips with the fact that my daughter now has become introduced to American race relations and identities. I've been dreading and postponing the day until I had to break this down for her. Now, I realized, "oops, someone did it for me."
Let me pause for a moment to point out some obvious ironies: my PhD is in Ethnic Studies, my college minor was in Asian American Studies and I was hired at Cal State Long Beach specifically to teach classes dealing with race/ethnicity and popular culture. My mentor/advisor, Michael Omi, literally co-wrote the book on contemporary American race theory. To boot, my wife writes on race and art and both sides of her family were interned during WWII.
So yeah, I knew, eventually, this day would have to come. And believe me, I'm definitely not one of those folks arguing "we should all strive to be colorblind!" just because they don't want to deal with the realities of racism. But it's one thing to try to tackle race amongst adults vs. trying to explain it to a child, let alone my child.
Consider: prior to last week, Ella's perspective on race was more or less this: "my friends S___ and A___ are very tan" (they are African-American). Prior, Ella saw skin color, not as something immutable, let alone tied to an identity, but rather, just a physical feature. She, like her mother's side of the family, tans easily and quite darkly (unlike my I-burn-under-light-bulbs melanin), so having "very tan" friends didn't seem to make them fundamentally different from her.
Frankly ... I loved this quality to her world view—that peoples' appearances weren't intertwined with group identification—and that terms such as "black people" and "white people" wouldn't have held much meaning for her. They do now, though: she knows that, "once upon a time, black people and white people couldn't go the same schools" and that "white people had nicer drinking fountains than black people" and that "white people got to sit in the front of the bus and black people had to move to the back ... until Martin Luther King."[2]
Of course, I think it's important that she know this history. I think it's absolutely crucial that, at some point, she understand how race works in America, not the least of which is because she'll inevitably learn it the hard way (and I suppose it says a lot about how sheltered a life she's had thus far that she hasn't been confronted with it)[3]. Most importantly, I want to raise her with an investment in social justice and that means she's going to have to intimately understand the history and function of race and racial inequality.
I just hoped this would all come "later."
The truth is, I doubt my pedagogical skills in this realm. I hadn't figured out how to explain to her what I break down to my college-age students all the time: that race is a biological fiction that attains reality because we, as a society, have made it real. I teach that there's no inherent logic to race aside from our own propensity to create and sustain differences between people but nonetheless, that social reality has very real, pernicious and horrific consequences. Thus, we have to do this delicate balancing act between dealing with the realities of race whilst simultaneously denying its reality. I trust (hope?) my 18-21-year-olds "get this" but when it comes to trying to explain it to my child, I just didn't feel confident that this paradox is something I could communicate and have her comprehend.
At this point, I no longer have the choice to postpone; the moment (the first of many) is here.[4] And I hope I'm doing an "ok" job in explaining to her that the categories of "white people" and "black people" are ways in which we have unjustly treated people and that the categories shouldn't matter...but do. As she gets older, I'm sure we'll have more of these conversations and that she'll learn to process all this better than I probably could have at her age. For now, I have to take a deep breath, try my best, hope for the best, and nod vigorously when she repeats the other thing she learned last week: "friendship isn't based on color."
I'd really love to hear from other parents—including TNC—about their own approaches to teaching race to their kids).
Notes:
[1] Along with LL's "don't call it a comeback this ranks as one of the most re-usable opening rap lines, ever.
[2] At some later point, I'll have to school her on the fact that the good reverend didn't exactly accomplish any of this alone. I wonder how early I can get her reading I've Got the Light of Freedom.
[3] This isn't completely true. This past Halloween, after costume shopping and seeing a parade of Aryan-featured poster children modeling princess dresses and fireman uniforms, Ella told my wife, "blond hair is better than black." We assume she came to this conclusion because she didn't see anyone who vaguely resembled her reflected back to her on the costume packaging. Regardless, we were both horrified and tried to disabuse her of this notion. As I began reminding her, black is the color of (both) my true loves' hair. And then Sesame Street came to our rescue too.
[4] Just so I'm clear on this: I'm not at all upset that her school wanted to talk to students about the meaning of MLK Day. I could quibble with the fact that I'm sure they've elided the fact that, in Los Angeles especially, many white children and black children (to say nothing of brown and yellow children) still attend different schools. But that said, I appreciate that they're willing to talk about Jim Crow to a bunch of 5 year olds rather than acting like our adult, elected leaders in brushing the uncomfortable parts of American history under the rug.
MLK
kottke.org is off today in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Here's his I Have a Dream speech, which remains as powerful and relevant today as it was in 1963.
Tags: Martin Luther King Jr.
What Makes Peaberry Coffee So Special?
"Fans think they taste noticeably sweeter and more flavorful than standard-issue beans; naysayers insist they can't tell the difference."
Peaberries. [Photographs: Erin Meister]
You can't bake a pie with these 'berries, but you can brew yourself a delicious cup of coffee. If you've heard the term before, perhaps you're wondering: what are peaberries, and what makes them so special?
A peaberry (also called caracol, or "snail" in Spanish) is a natural mutation of the coffee bean inside its cherry. Normally coffee beans grow two to a fruit, flat against each other like halves of a peanut, but a funny thing happens in about 5% of the world's coffee, and a bean is born an only child.
And, perhaps just like that only child, the peaberry beans get kind of spoiled by not having to share with anybody else. They tend to be smaller, denser, and, let's face it, just a little bit cuter than their flat cousins. Fans think they taste noticeably sweeter and more flavorful than standard-issue beans; naysayers insist they can't tell the difference.
A peaberry next to a normal "flat" bean.
Because there's no way to tell from looking at the cherry itself whether there's a single- or double-header inside, these little guys need to be hand-sorted after picking and processing in order to be sold separately. As a result, in many cases the peaberries are sold for roasting right alongside their normal counterparts. Occasionally, growers will hand-select the tiny mutants for special sale, sometimes at a premium—not only because of their taste, but also because of the amount of labor involved, as well as their relative rarity.
Want to try some yourself? Stumptown Coffee Roasters has a lovely, tart, and juicy Kenyan peaberry lot from Gachami ($17.25 for a 12-ounce bag). Or, for a rare treat, check out Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea's beautiful and bright Sulawesi Taarco:the roaster is currently offering both its peaberry and regular lots for $20 a pound.
Are you a peaberry person?
About the author: Erin Meister trains baristas and inspires coffee-driven people for Counter Culture Coffee. She's a confident barista and an audacious eater, but she remains a Nervous Cook. Her latest project is Eat This Neighborhood, wherein she attempts to eat at least one thing at every single restaurant in the vicinity of her Chelsea apartment.
Judging Books by Their Covers: 41
The real game changing book for prison studies was Michael Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Interestingly, the covers of the book in English, from the first hardback to the current paperback, don't focus on it's inventiveness or trailblazing qualities, but seem to want to brand it a classic straight out of the box. Over the covers I'm only going to show three, but they are a fair sample of all the English-language editions I've seen. The one to left us the first (I believe) Penguin edition. The classic penguin style laid over the expressionist painting of the prisoners really works for me. I don't have the actual book for this edition, so I am unsure of the painter, but it is almost reminiscent of Van Gogh, and carries with it that sense of being classic. The early American hardback (not shown) and paperback (below to the left) use historical etchings to evoke the classic quality. I do like the inventiveness of the type of the paperback, if it does feel a little dated today. And finally the current American edition, which follows the post-modern style of the entire series of Vintage-published Foucault trade paperbacks. Objects referenced by the text float in a empty space that is given depth through shadow, and then a classic (yup, there's that word again) titling box is laid on top. As a whole series, these are quite nice, even if as a one off this cover doesn't do to much for this particular title.
Another cover that evokes the classic, but in some ways is much more challenging, is the Yee book to the left, below. The historical etching of a prison is both illuminated and split by a bold red spotlight, the book's contents shining the light of public scrutiny into Soledad prison. The image literally holds up the title of the book, with not even a hairline between them, while the subtitle and author's name have plenty of space below the image. The Soledad book to the right couldn't be more different. The image is reproduced in a bright attractive orange, and the text is rounded and bold, almost friendly. I wonder if the designer was trying to lighted up the dark subject matter—"the House of the Dead":
The book to the left here is the simplest of all the prison covers I have and am looking at in this series. Black bars on a white background close in the title, which is typed in a simple tall trade gothic. No frills from this self-published work, but it is actually kind of nice and effective (other than the fact that the thickness of the bars doesn't quite resonate write with the thin title). The cover to the right is also austere and effective, the guard tower dominates the page, shoving the text up and cramming it in at the top:
Both of the books below are classics of the 70s prison exposé genre, and both covers represent people caught within the confines of the prison system. The Minton cover to the right is the more straightforward of the two, with a portrait of a prisoner that invites you "inside," just as the bold red title says. The Mitford book is more of an anomaly. A specific prisoner's face is front and center, which is rare for these books, and the eyes are barred out, leaving us only a number to identify the person by. The use of the painting as opposed to a photograph is quite smart, make the person seem softer and more unique, yet also more unknowable, which sits well with the black bar across the face:
And last but not least, one of the big genres of prison books of this era are the prisoner confessionals. They are not something I ever read much of or collected, so I only have a couple examples. The Sands cover returns to the trope of bars, but they double as the shadow of the title, running away from the prison. The Abbott cover is an 80s pocketbook toss off, my guess is the designer had to do it quick, so they used a bold type treatment and made some tweeks to the key word, "beast":
Next week I'm going to focus on the more recent rash of prison books, from the mid-90s to the present.
Do Over
One thing I’m coming away from CodeMash with is a desire to clean up a lot of my old habits and dig into tools and techniques I’ve long known were available, but haven’t used. In some ways, I’m still stuck in my iPhone OS 2 ways in an iOS 4 world.
Daniel Steinberg has taken a pretty extreme position, but one that makes sense: he no longer has any private instance variables in his header files, since the current SDK allows you to put them in the implementation. Combined with the use of a class extension in the .m for helper methods, this makes it possible for the header to be exactly what it’s supposed to be: an exposure of the public interface to your class, with no clues about the implementation underneath.
To my mind, Daniel was also the winner of the “mobile smackdown” session, in which one presenter each from the iOS, Windows Phone 7, and Android camps was given 15 minutes to develop a trivial Twitter app that could manage a persistent list of user names and, when tapped, nagivate to that user’s twitter.com page. I say Daniel won because his iPhone app was the only one to complete all the features in time (actually, Daniel needed an extra 30 seconds to finish two lines of code). The Windows Phone presenter never made it to adding new names to the list, and the Android guy didn’t get around to showing the user’s page. One of Daniel’s wins was in using the “use Core Data for storage” checkbox: by graphically designing a data model for his “Twitterer” class, he picked up persistence and his table view in one fell swoop. Now that I think of it, I don’t remember how, or if, the other platforms persisted their user lists. I don’t use Core Data often, but after this demonstration, I’m much more inclined to do so.
There was a whole session on unit testing for iOS, something I just explored on my own for my first day tutorial (and even then, I was using it as much for illustrating the use of multiple targets in an Xcode project as for the actual testing of features). I’ve never been religious about testing, particularly given that GUIs have long proven difficult to make fully testable, but with a testing framework buit into Xcode (not everyone’s favorite, but it’s a start), it’s well worth rethinking how I could use it to get some measure of test coverage and fight regressions.
All of this makes me worry about the status of the iPhone SDK Development book I wrote with Bill Dudney. That was an iPhone OS 2 book that slipped far enough to be an early iPhone OS 3 book, with the addition of new chapters for important new frameworks like Core Data and Game Kit. But with iOS 5 surely looming, some of it is starting to look pretty crusty. In particular, the arrival of Grand Central Dispatch means that means that it’s no longer safe to blithely ignore threads, as we did, since there are scenarios where you can have even simple code that unwittingly manages to get off the main thread, which means trouble for UIKit. Furthermore, new frameworks demand blocks for completion handlers, so that’s something that now needs to appear early (and given that the block syntax is pure C, readers will need to be acclimated to C earlier than they used to). And I’ve long wanted to move the debugging and performance chapters (my favorites, actually) much earlier, so readers can figure out their own EXC_BAD_ACCESS problems. Not that I can currently even plan on a rev to that book – I still have four chapters to go on Core Audio, and would need a long and difficult conversation with the Prags besides. But I certainly see where my guidance to new developers has changed, significantly, in the last few years.
Betweeen Christmas break, a week of CodeMash prep and home office reorganization, and CodeMash itself, I feel like I’ve been off for a month (and my MYOB First Edge financial status would seem to agree). I feel ready to start anew this week, and making a clean break with the past suits this mood nicely.
Cassandra 0.7: Large Row Support
Something I’ve missed from the what’s new in Cassandra 0.7:
The other big new feature is large row support for up to two billion columns per row. In previous Cassandra releases, there was a limit where a single column value could not be larger than 2 GB.
But number of columns vs size of columns data is quite different…
Original title and link: Cassandra 0.7: Large Row Support (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)
January 16, 2011
Serious Rule At The Yonkers Public Library
Some libraries have NO SMOKING or NO CELL PHONE signs on the front door. At the Yonkers Public Library?
I’m amazed that this is such a problem as to necessitate a laminated sign. I mean, I wasn’t planning on bringing any balloons inside…But it’s sort of a downer to know I couldn’t if I suddenly got the urge.
-SCOUT
Make CSS3 buttons like a boss
Shared by Plutor
CSS3 gradients are so amazing.High-quality interface elements are a great way to add that extra bit of refinement to a website. I’ve been maintaining a repo of CSS3 buttons for the past few months and I’m starting to see them slowly make their way out into the real world. This tutorial is going to give you a deeper understanding of the design thinking that goes into making these buttons and show you how to make them from scratch.
For this tutorial, we’re going to be building the button that Peter Vidani recently named 2010 Button of the Year. As you can see, we’re aiming for an almost exact reproduction of the image-based button that appears on the Apple website:
Take a look at the live button
Mind your light sources
When designing buttons and other interface elements, it’s important to be consistent about where the light source on your page is coming from. If you look at the button we’re building, you can see that the light source is coming from directly overhead. This means there is a slight highlight at the top edge of the button, the background color goes from lightest at the top to darkest at the bottom, and there is a slight shadow underneath the button. We’ll make sure to keep the light source consistent as we add the hover and active states later on.
Let’s look at the code for the normal state of the button.
First, we use CSS3 background gradients for Mozilla and WebKit, with a solid color for all other browsers.
button { background: #3b88d8; background: -moz-linear-gradient(0% 100% 90deg, #377ad0, #52a8e8); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#52a8e8), to(#377ad0)); }Next, we add the border color. Keeping in mind the light source concerns we mentioned above, the top border is slightly lighter than the bottom edge, with the left and right edges being somewhere in between these two values.
button { border-top: 1px solid #4081af; border-right: 1px solid #2e69a3; border-bottom: 1px solid #20559a; border-left: 1px solid #2e69a3; }We then add two box shadows: one to create the slight highlight at the top of the button and another for the drop shadow underneath the bottom.
button { -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 0 0 #72b9eb, 0 1px 2px 0 #b3b3b3; -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 0 0 #72b9eb, 0 1px 2px 0 #b3b3b3; }Finally, the text shadow declaration. Because we want the text to appear slightly inset into the button, we add a slight shadow at the top of the text. If we wanted the text to appear raised, our shadow would have gone at the bottom.
button { text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px #3275bc; }Next, let’s look at the hover state of the button
For the hover state, we want to imagine that as we move our mouse over the button, we cast a slight shadow on it, causing it to get darker. This means that we need to make the background, border, box shadow and text shadow all a bit darker. We also want to change the cursor style to what you normally see when hovering over a link, to reinforce the clickability of the button.
button:hover { background: #2a81d7; background: -moz-linear-gradient(0% 100% 90deg, #206bcb, #3e9ee5); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#3e9ee5), to(#206bcb)); border-top: 1px solid #2a73a6; border-right: 1px solid #165899; border-bottom: 1px solid #07428f; border-left: 1px solid #165899; -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 0 0 #62b1e9; -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 0 0 #62b1e9; cursor: pointer; text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px #1d62ab; }Now, the active state
For the active state, we want to imagine that we’re depressing the button into the page. This means that the button will darken and have a shadow cast over it. We achieve this affect by adding a darker, larger inset box shadow to the button, along with making other elements of the button darker.
button:active { background: #3282d3; border: 1px solid #154c8c; border-bottom: 1px solid #0e408e; -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 0 6px 3px #1657b5, 0 1px 0 0 #fff; -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 6px 3px #1657b5, 0 1px 0 0 #fff; text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px #2361a4; }Finally, the disabled state
You make a disabled button like this:
Download iTunesWe add the disabled style to the normal, hover and active states of the button to ensure that it appears fully disabled. We also changed the cursor style to reinforce that no action can be taken. (I tweaked my version a bit to remove the white bottom border found in the original.)
button[disabled], button[disabled]:hover, button[disabled]:active { background: #999; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#dadada), to(#f3f3f3)); border-top: 1px solid #c5c5c5; border-right: 1px solid #cecece; border-bottom: 1px solid #d9d9d9; border-left: 1px solid #cecece; color: #8f8f8f; box-shadow: none; -moz-box-shadow: none; -webkit-box-shadow: none; cursor: not-allowed; text-shadow: 0 -1px 1px #ebebeb; }Extra credit
Rounded corners in CSS can sometimes look a bit jagged. In WebKit browsers, you can use this line to improve their appearance:
-webkit-background-clip: padding-box;You’ll want to add this line after you declare the background, as described in this post.
In Firefox, the
buttonelement gets a bit of extra height that you can partially eliminate using this declaration:button::-moz-focus-inner { border: 0; }In my experience, buttons in Firefox still end up a bit taller than in WebKit browsers, however.
And now the caveats
This almost exact reproduction of the Photoshop button is possible in Chrome and Safari on the Mac, with Firefox being almost there. Chrome on Win/Linux currently has a bug that affects buttons that use both rounded corners and an inset box-shadow. A fix should be coming soon. As expected, in Internet Explorer these buttons will fall back to a lesser-styled, but still functional look.
Why and How I Switched to a Standing Desk
I spend about 45 to 50 hours a week working on my computer. Up until a week ago, I did that work sitting on my ever-expanding behind.
Last Monday I adjusted my desk to standing height (pictured right). I spent the week working on my feet, and I'm never going back to a sitdown desk again. Here are some questions and answers about the change.
What made you switch to a standing desk?
Ever since I wrote about a "treadputer" treadmill desk at Lifehacker in May of 2006, I've been curious and inspired by alternative desk setups. My workday--which consists almost entirely of typing on or talking into a computer--is completely sedentary, and as a result I'm more than 20 pounds overweight. Burning more calories while I work is a better use of that time.
But, building or buying a treadputer is too expensive an undertaking for something I'm not sure I'd like or have the space to accomodate. A standing desk, however, is doable. In July of 2010 I featured an Ikea Jerker treadmill desk, and mentioned I might just adjust my Jerker to standing height. This has been something I've been thinking about a long time.
Three straws finally broke the camel's back. First, I'm using RescueTime to monitor how I spend my time on my computer, and the weekly report made me realize how many hours I really do spend sitting down (last week: 48). Second, I'm actively working on losing weight right now, and this seemed like a small way to add to the effort (down 12 pounds in 3 months so far). Finally, Macworld posted a guide to setting up a treadmill desk, and unequivocally recommended that you go from sitting to standing to walking, not straight from sitting to walking. That did it.
Why use a standing desk?
Two reasons: Higher calorie burn and better posture. When I'm sitting at my desk, even in a fancy ergonomic chair, I tend to slump, with my back curved and shoulders forward, which closes my chest and makes my breathing more shallow. When standing at a desk where my forearms are at a 90 degree angle on the desk surface, my shoulders go back, which makes my spine concave and opens my chest. Besides the initial foot pain and muscle aches of engaged thighs and calves, it feels great.
I didn't discuss the switch to a standing desk with my doctor, though there have been some studies about the negative health effects of excessive sitting. I'm not a doctor, but it seems obvious that human beings aren't meant to spend 45 hours a week sitting still in a chair. Now that I'm standing, I pace, dance, and fidget a lot more freely, which is just more natural activity and calorie burn built into my day.
But don't your feet hurt?
Yes, very much. In fact, the first three days were brutal, so painful I doubted the whole endeavor. By mid-day 2, I had to sit down every hour or so. I was distracted and had a hard time focusing on anything but how much my feet hurt. At night I sat on the couch with my feet elevated. I collapsed into bed totally exhausted. I never appreciated sitting as much as I did the first three days.
Then, on the fourth day, it wasn't so bad. On day 5, I got lost in work for 2 hours before I thought about the fact that I was on my feet once. Now it's my new normal.
How did you convert your desk to a standing desk?
I have a (sadly discontinued) Ikea Jerker desk, which is designed to let you set the table to any height you want when you assemble it. So, I put in the 3 hours it took to break down my whole computer setup, dissemble the desk, and put it together at standing height. I don't have a lot of willpower, so I wanted to make the change difficult to undo. Adjusting the desk back down to sitting height will take another half-day of tooling with Ikea furniture, not something I'll want to do again any time soon. Besides, if I want to sit, I always have the dining room table. Here's what my new setup looks like:
If you don't have a desk that you can assemble to standing height, you can always create a temporary standing desk by putting shelves on your current desk.
Or you can use Coke cans, like Marco did:
Or you can use printer paper, like tbone7770 did:
Or you can just buy a standing desk.
What about those treadputers?
They're cool, aren't they? I'm not sure if I'll ever actually make it to the point where I'm walking and computing all day. I'm going to put in several months of standing before I consider it.
What shoes do you wear?
I wear ordinary running shoes, which are fairly new, well-padded and supportive. Changing your shoes seems to help the feet, too. Sometimes I go barefoot, but I don't usually last long.
Do you stand on a soft mat? If so, which one?
Not yet, but I've ordered a squishy mat to put under my desk. It's not one of those fancy $100 kitchen gel mats, it's more like a $25 cash register/factory mat. It arrives this week. I'll let you know how well I like it.
Did you use any other gear in your switch to standing?
I bought a $20 monitor riser to get my screen to the right height so I'm looking straight ahead at it, not down.
How long did it take you to get used to standing all day?
I'm not entirely used to it yet, but I'm through the worst. I started Monday. By Friday I felt comfortable. Monday through Wednesday were pretty tough, though.
Do you take sit-down breaks?
Yup. I sit down at lunchtime, and maybe once or twice for 5-10 minutes at other times in the day. One day I was pretty exhausted and achy so I treated myself to a sitdown beverage at the coffee shop, which was a double treat. But for the most part, I'm not even thinking about it any more.
Who else uses a standing desk?
More people than I'd realized, especially techies! Former Twitter developer and founder of BankSimple Alex Payne. Creator of Instapaper Marco Arment. Podcaster extraordinaire Dan Benjamin. Novelist Philip Roth. Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Lifehacker editor Jason Fitzpatrick. Now, newly, my fellow San Diego techie Mitch Wagner. Who else?
Any more questions re: the standing desk? Post 'em in the comments.
Shortchanging Your Business With User-Hostile Platforms
Alex Payne on services that do things like use Adobe Air instead of building proper native apps:
Imagine a new restaurant that wants to make the most of their burgeoning lunch traffic. They start serving low-quality meat: after all, it’s cheap, plentiful, and requires nothing more than placing a different order with their distributor. For a few weeks, profits are up. But pretty soon, so are customer complaints, and the stars on their Yelp page are rapidly dwindling. The owner doesn’t understand. The meat isn’t great, sure, but it’s perfectly edible, and for a while it seemed like the restaurant was making more money and attracting new customers. What went wrong?
Unpublished Hammett Story Found in Archives
From CBC News:
An unpublished story by crime writer Dashiell Hammett is to be released in Feb. 28 in The Strand magazine.
So I Shot Him is one of 15 undated short stories by Hammett found in the archives at the University of Texas at Austin. The 19-page crime thriller uses the spare style Hammett is known for.
Hammett turned his experience as a Pinkerton detective to create hard-boiled detective characters such as Sam Spade.
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