Jesse Thorn, photographed by Rian Johnson, Feb 9, 2012.
Jesse Thorn, photographed by Rian Johnson, Feb 9, 2012.
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February 11, 2012
Jeremy Lin is no fluke
Nate Silver looks at past players who have scored 20 or more points, had 6 or more assists, and shot better than 50 percent in four or more games in a row. It's an illustrious list of all-stars, including Jordan, Bird, and Magic, with only a handful who were just so-so.
Like everyone else, I was skeptical. I saw him play with the Warriors, and it was never that impressive. However, watching last night's game against the Lakers it was hard not to buy in to Linsanity. We'll see if he can extend the streak tonight against Minnesota, but even if the Knicks do win, should we read that much into it? Remember, there aren't that many other scoring options on the Knicks right now, two of the past four wins were against horrible teams (New Jersey and Washington) and the other two, the Lakers and the Jazz, were teams just slightly above .500.
Toad
Shigeru Miyamoto talks about Zelda, Mario, and…Toad.
I have an important question. Nintendo has also just released Mariokart 7 for the 3DS. In every iteration of Mariokart, I’ve always preferred to play as Toad. Who’s your favorite character?
That’s the most challenging question! I’m sorry that I cannot come up with an interesting answer. Somehow, it’s habit to me, but I play with Mario. He’s a very balanced character.
Who’s your least favorite character?
Toad. [Laughs]
My favorite character is your least favorite character?
I understand that he has some popularity. Somehow.
Our household loves Toad! Somehow.
Have you visited Inside Out Project lately?
Since the Inside Out Project launched last year at TED, more than 70,000 individual photos have been shot and pasted in almost 9,000 locations around the world, sharing a vision of individual identity for the world to see. To house this astonishing collection of portraits online from around the world, Inside Out recently revamped their website — insideoutproject.net — so you can explore and browse the gallery and sign up to take part in a portrait pasting of your own.
Visit insideoutproject.net >>
A New Obama Cinema?
J. Hoberman
A lone lean figure strides purposefully through a dark tunnel, maybe a highway underpass. There’s no fear. A familiar husky voice whispers that “it’s half time—both teams are in their locker rooms, discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.” One needn’t be a genius like Karl Rove to catch the drift of the two-minute Clint Eastwood-narrated Chrysler spot shown mid-Super Bowl last Sunday and everywhere else ever since. But get it Rove did.
First thing Monday morning, America’s preeminent propagandist was on Fox & Friends to whine that “the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.” What he meant was that a grateful automobile industry was engaging in some sneaky subliminal payback, hiring no less than Clint Eastwood as the mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s reelection bid. Well before the Giants edged out the Patriots, Obama adviser David Axelrod had wiped his boss’s fingerprints off the spot. “Powerful spot,” he slyly tweeted to his followers. “Did Clint shoot that, or just narrate it?”
By Monday evening, Eastwood—a life-long Republican—had given a statement to Fox’s O’Reilly Factor, “I am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama.” (Note the use of “mister”—Eastwood may be a secret Ron Paul supporter but, as a good American, he’s bound to give the president props.) Eastwood was actually a critic of the automobile bailout, having told the Los Angeles Times last November that “we shouldn’t be bailing out the banks and car companies.” By Wednesday, Chrysler executives were uniformly declaring that the ad had no political agenda: “It was designed to deliver emotions,” the company’s chief marketing officer was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “and I don’t think emotions have a party.” (He did not, however, complain about extra publicity generated by the controversy.)
In its casting, content and positioning (little more than an hour after Obama told a pre-Super Bowl interviewer that he deserved a second term because of his successful economic policies, in the midst of the most widely watched telecast in American history), “It’s Halftime in America” was a most effective bit of political theater—maybe the best of its kind since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America.” Like that ad, “Halftime” is a dense yet leisurely montage. All over America, in country hamlets and on Manhattan island, people are waking and up and going to work, thoughtfully, resolutely. An urban dweller rolls out of bed; a guy with a marked resemblance to Dennis Haysbert (the president in 24) ponders the bathroom mirror and knots his tie: “It’s halftime in America too. People are out of work and they’re hurting—wondering what they going to do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared because this isn’t a game.” Are these two guys going out to look for jobs?
The music is solemn, soothing, just short of uplifting, and Eastwood’s narrative is suddenly specific: “The people of Detroit know a little something about this—they almost lost everything.” Cue rusty factories. “But we all pulled together—now Motor City is fighting again.” Eastwood is back in the frame, walking towards the camera in kind of a purposeful, Bin Laden-is-dead strut. He’s reflecting on his long life as Rowdy Yates and The Man with No Name, Dirty Harry and Walt Kowalski, the protagonist of Gran Torino—a grumpy old auto worker stuck in a changing Detroit neighborhood. His is the voice of experience: “I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life.” There’s been “discord and blame” (quick cut to pro-union protestors outside the State Capitol Building in Madison, Wisconsin) “but we all rallied around what was right” (black and white snapshot of uniformed firemen). “That’s what we do—we find a way through tough times.”
That’s what we do. The spot has a sense of gentle but firm forward motion, created by slow dolly shots and moving cars. “How do we come from behind—how do we come together?” Clint in close-up squints his eyes on some distant prize. “Detroit’s showing us how it can be done.” Obama bailed out Detroit when Romney (the son of an automobile industry executive) said it couldn’t and shouldn’t be done. Mega close-up on the star: “This country can’t be knocked out with one punch!” [And neither can recession!] “We get right back up again and when we do, the world is going to hear the roar of our engines.” [Even in China!] Hint of trademark clenched-teeth snarl: “Yeah. It’s halftime in America—and our second half’s about to begin.” Cut to black but, instead of something like AMERICA IS COMING TOGETHER AND COMING BACK. RE-ELECT PRESIDENT OBAMA there’s Chrysler’s cute new slogan: IMPORTED FROM DETROIT. (No doubt, some clever mash-up auteur will add the president’s impressive a cappella rendition of “Let’s Stay Together.”)
Who is the auteur? The Hollywood Reporter revealed that two members of the spot’s Portland Oregon-based ad agency had been Obama volunteers in 2008 although it is unclear what input, in any, they had in the concept. The ad itself was directed by 36-year-old David Gordon Green, the earnest oddball regionalist (in films like All the Real Girls) turned maker of stoner action comedies (most recently Your Highness). The only personal touch would seem to be Green’s goofy sanctimoniousness and lyrical feel for derelict rural landscapes, although it’s a bit uncanny that his first movie, the 2000 indie production George Washington would have as its hero a silent, self-contained black kid with a justified sense of destiny, nicknamed for the first president of the United States. “Halftime in America” seems to be one of these presents that America gave to itself.
Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Wall-E, Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in Milk
I’ve been wondering for a while now when we were going to see an Obama-inflected Hollywood cinema. The longing for Obama (or an Obama) can be found in two prescient 2008 movies—WALL-E (the world saved by an endearing little dingbot, community organizer for an extinct community) and Milk (portrait of another creative community organizer—not to mention a precedent-shattering politician who, it’s very often reiterated, presented himself as a Messenger of Hope). Nothing comparable has appeared since Obama’s inauguration although there is a mildly Obama-iste aspect to any movie featuring an unconventional protagonist, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Haywire (both with very tough gals) or even The Social Network (celebration of world-historical nerd), as well as the not undeserved love showered on The Hurt Locker—a two-fisted, Howard Hawks-type war movie directed by a lady!
The political corollary is the parade of outlandish “front-runners”—Palin, Trump, Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich—who have entertained cable news watchers over the past months in the course of a largely predetermined Republican nomination contest. As Obama is an American president unlike any other, he naturally suggests the opportunity for comparably unlikely figures in otherwise standard scenarios. (The president’s own tastes are a bit edgier. His favorite TV show is said to be Homeland and he evidently had the cult-thriller indie Martha Marcy May Marlene screened at the White House.)
Recent films like the lost wagon-train Western Meek’s Cutoff or Eastwood’s own J. Edgar are still pondering the Bush years (poor leadership in the first and anti-terrorist panic in the second). Obama hasn’t really come up with a persuasive story beyond cleaning up Bush’s mess and that’s hardly great movie material—unless, of course, you figure out how to have a walking chunk of Mount Rushmore do your talking for you. Set to music and narrated by the nation’s last living cowboy, “Halftime” has considerably more rhetorical pow than the prosaic platitudes of Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech: “We’re the nation that puts cars in driveways.” Indeed, Eastwood’s manager couldn’t resist representing the spot as a personal statement from his client: “Chrysler just sponsored what he had to say.”
SPD judging 2012
After a day sifting through the Magazine of the Year and Redesign categories, today is the main day of judging at the SPD47 Awards in New York.
Francesco Franchi, IL
Janet Froelich, Real Simple
Marissa Bourke, UK Elle.
Hi-tech music system.
The digital team has the toughest task; entries up from 300 last year to over 600 presented a huge task made harder by the difficulties of downloading and the apps then finding the relevant part for each entry.Follow #SPD47 for updates.
Cassandra Data Modeling Examples with Matthew F. Dennis - NoSQL videos
Continuing the Cassandra NYC 2011 video series, made available by the folks from DataStax, this week we have Matthew F. Dennis which covers a couple of different Cassandra data modeling use cases.
For watching more videos from this event follow the Cassandra NYC 2011 tag.
Original title and link: Cassandra Data Modeling Examples with Matthew F. Dennis - NoSQL videos (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)
Raiding the Lost Ark
incredible fan-made compilation of archival commentary on Raiders of the Lost Ark
February 10, 2012
Big Data Search: Perfect Search
Tim Stay (CEO) talks about Perfect Search a solution for searching Big Data that:
- offers a unique architectural approach that significantly reduces the total computations required to query
- creates terms and pattern indexes (basically combinations of terms at indexing time)
- uses jump tables and bloom filters
- heavily optimizes disk I/O
- doesn’t require indexes in memory
- “can often do same query with less than 1% computations”
- “when compared to Oracle/MS SQL, Perfect Search can be from 10x to over 1000x faster”
- according to the chart, the significant speed improvements are for cached results, while for first time queries I see numbers from 2 to 59
- if Perfect Search is a search engine why comparing with relational databases?
- “Google takes over 100 servers to search 1 billion documents. Perfect Search can do it with 1 server”
- Google is using 100 servers for reliability and guaranteeing the speed of results
- “Lucene: 0.1 billion documents per server; CPU maxing at 100%. Perfect Search 1.6 billion documents per server; CPU idling at 15%”
With this preamble, you can watch the video after the break:
Here is the thing. When I hear about a product claiming 10x better results, 100x better speed, 1000x whatever followed by no mention of limitations or trade-offs, I raise a red flag. Actually… I raise an army of red flags.
Original title and link: Big Data Search: Perfect Search (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)
Jeremy Lin’s line vs the Lakers tonight: 38 PTS...
Jeremy Lin’s line vs the Lakers tonight:
38 PTS 13-23 4 RB 7 AST 6 TO
As a Knicks fan, I was holding my breath all week waiting to see what he’d do in tonight’s game vs the Lakers. Fortunately he was phenomenal.
Best part, though, was at halftime when ESPN reporter Lisa Salters didn’t believe Lin when he said that he was going to the locker room to study film of the first half to figure out what he could do better. Can’t wait to see that clip online.
Laughing and crying
“Writing about the buddist here has been public display, of course, but it’s been a public display of trying to figure something out, I’m not sure what it is – something about desire, obviously, and the trajectory of mourning – but also about boundaries, about secret/public, about embodiment and meaning, and the fragility of the ego, about the embarrassment and shame of being left or rejected, about pushing myself into ever uncomfortable spaces in writing. I’m not talking about my life here because it’s particularly interesting, it’s more the whole ‘push the personal until it’s universal’ cliché, though of course nothing is ever universal. I’m not an essentialist.” […]
“But I’ve had enough of my cyber vulnerability and honesty. It’s time to direct these forces into book projects I want to finish. So, I’m saying goodbye to the buddhist vein here. I already said that, but I mean it this time. Any more I’d have to say about this stuff needs the intense focus and discipline of Real Writing to tease it out,” Dodie Bellamy writes, in one of the blog posts that became her book the buddhist. This post comes about halfway through the book.
Luckily (and obviously) she does not make good on her promise to “say goodbye to the buddhist vein,” and in her next post she revisits this question of blog writing versus “Real Writing.” “I’ve always considered the whole Writing Practice idea as yet another example of some poets’ insufferable egotism, a total guy thing, like they think they’re such geniuses their shopping lists should be bronzed. Would these guys consider a woman blogging about her heartbreak as part of a serious writing practice? I doubt it. Is my refusing to consider this blog Real Writing an internalized misogyny?” In the post after that one, she explains the idea of the “extradiegetic” while drinking “organic unfiltered sake, the creamy white kind” (these details are so important to the Dodieness of Dodie’s writing that I can’t leave them out). “Intradiegetic refers to the reality that exists within the narrative of a movie or fiction” – plot, characters, dialogue, first-person narration – while “extradiegetic refers to elements that exist outside that narrative” – third-person narration, the musical score of a film, the audience’s preexisting knowledge of the ‘real life’ a narrative is based on, the audience’s knowledge about the lives of actors who play characters in a film. The example that Dodie gives is how Heath Ledger’s death “added a frisson” to The Dark Knight.
The example that springs most easily to my mind is: the first time I heard the song “Video Games” I was lying in savasana at Go Yoga in Williamsburg. This was during the month that Ruth and I were doing vinyasa yoga every day in an attempt to keep from going insane as we launched Emily Books. During that month we comparison-shopped for discount class deals in a way that I, as a sometimes yoga teacher, find obnoxious, but what can you do? It was the only way to afford it. In the end it was fun to experience a lot of different styles and I ended up finding out that I like dancey sweaty vinyasa more than I’d thought, even though it sometimes contradicts my training and even though I am (though I tell students there’s no such thing as “bad at yoga”) not, uh, naturally inclined towards graceful movement, let’s put it that way.
Lying on the floor and hearing this song turned out to be an amazing stroke of good luck. Having my initial experience of this stupidly controversial musician’s hit occur in a situation that was so distant from any context gave me the opportunity to know what I really thought of the song. Lana Del Rey has had so many people’s worst tendencies projected onto her that now she’s interesting for that reason alone, but as I lay there, distracted from my single-pointed relaxation by those melodramatic churchbells and catchy “Honey, is that true?s,” I made a point of memorizing enough of the lyrics so that I could Google them when I got home. And that’s how I know there’s something to her music besides blog-churned controversy and images of images of images, whereas if I’d learned the other stuff first – if my experience of Video Games had been tempered by extradiegetic factors — I’d probably be more inclined to agree with the haters. This concludes the one and only thing I will ever say about Lana Del Rey, because mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors are boring, and there are still many beautiful flowers that haven’t yet been pressed between the pages of the Internet and I am determined to pluck as many of them as I can right now before this coffee wears off.
I loved learning the word “extradiegetic” because it allows me to explain something about blogs that I hadn’t been able to, before. Last week Molly Fischer’s essay about “ladyblogs” got way under my skin, and I dashed off a quick response to it on my blog and thought I’d be able to leave it there, but then I woke up still thinking about it the next morning, and that night I went to a party and had a fight with someone I think of as a peer but who is a lot younger than me, a fight I tried to end by saying, “Well I’m 30, so I win!” (Getting to the point where you say this is an absolute guarantee that you didn’t just win, in case you’re wondering.) We were fighting about the short memory of the Internet, and how it might legitimately be possible for something that seems so obviously like an evolution to me to seem like a devolution to someone younger. I was reminded that it’s hard for women five years younger than I am to imagine growing up in a time when the only information about being a woman came to teenaged you via a pile of dogeared Sassys in the corner of the public library. And during this fight, I started to realize that I was jealous of these young women, and maybe clinging to something that it’s time to release.
I liked that Fischer celebrated the tits-out, smelly-tamponed era at the dawn of Jezebel, which for a time was genuinely radical. I love Moe’s lost-tampon post so much. But how, I wondered, could Fischer have missed noticing that this golden age was quickly corrupted? Gawker Media employees were rewarded financially at that time based on pageviews. The line between posting your goriest, druggiest, drunkest humiliations because you’re giving everyone permission to let go of their shame around these behaviors and doing so because you’re being paid more to write about that stuff is thinner than the thinnest bloodied maxipad imaginable. Fischer sees things as going downhill from there – she focuses on the cute-overload, whimsical aspects of The Hairpin and Rookie, quoting their silliest posts, calling them conformist and slumber-partyish, missing the ways that they’re heirs to radical-era Jezebel’s most fearless, honest aspects. I didn’t pause to consider that a lot of the information that informs my opinion about these blogs is – you guessed it – extradiagetic. I only know about the circumstances surrounding Jezebel’s beautiful, bloody birth because I worked at Gawker while it was happening and because I felt the same strange tension between feeling free to (here it comes) overshare and being egged on towards it. Let me just pause to make clear that no one ever told me to do it, my bosses explicitly told me NOT to do it, and I’m sure no one encouraged Moe or Tracie to do it either. But we could see the numbers; how could we not have been influenced by them?
Also: I tend to forgive blogs their sillier moments because I understand the exigencies of being an editor tasked with pumping out a day’s worth of content and this makes me sympathetic to the idea that a blog is less a text to be teased apart the way you’d dissect a novel but a performance to be critiqued based on its peak moments.
But there’s more to it than that. I stayed so upset about this. A few days later Keith and I were talking about the essay in the kitchen and I was trying to explain what I appreciate about the Hairpin. Specifically I was trying to explain why Edith is a genius. (For the record: I’ve met Edith maybe … three times?) I said that creating a new comedic aesthetic – a new style of being funny – is a huge achievement, one Fischer didn’t give her enough credit for. We were still having a normal conversation at that point, not a fight. I started talking about the post “Women Laughing Alone With Salad,” a very popular Hairpin post Fischer dismisses in passing as representative of the Hairpin’s “observational, peculiar, and irrefutable” brand of media criticism. This post has zero text. It’s just stock photos of women, laughing, alone, with salad. There are a ton of them. They look familiar to anyone who has ever seen any advertising. “Molly Fischer reads that post as mere absurdist humor, pure whimsy,” I said. I think this is approximately when I started shouting in a tremulous, high-pitched voice:
“But HOW. Can ANY WOMAN. NOT UNDERSTAND. HOW THAT IS A COMMENTARY ON THE FACT! THAT THE REASON! THERE ARE SO MANY STOCK PHOTOS OF WOMEN LAUGHING ALONE WITH SALAD! IS BECAUSE WOMEN ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO BE SHOWN AS HAPPY!!! WHILE THEY’RE EATING!!! IF THEY’RE EATING SOMETHING “GUILT-FREE”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“Stop yelling at me! You’re scaring me!” said Keith. “I’M NOT YELLING AT YOU!” I yelled. A minute later I was sobbing. “I’m just so angry,” I told him. “What are you angry at?” “At everything,” I sobbed. “Well, you have to find a way to hold onto that,” he said. “I would rather not!” I sobbed.
Those photos of women finding salad hilarious are absurd, but they’re also, depending on how you look at them, a symptom of a serious horrible malevolent force in our culture that hurts and even sometimes kills (yes! kills!) women. But instead of calling them out in the classical Jezebel style of LOOK AT HOW THIS TERRIBLE THING HARMS WOMEN, GET ANGRY AND COMMENT, Edith just stacked them up in a big pile. The overall effect of this post is so subtle and so hilarious that these images’ power– instead of being exaggerated because now we’re all up in arms! comment!! — was diffused in an instant. A reader – well, let’s not generalize, this reader– goes, in those ten seconds of scrolling, from feeling secretly obscurely injured by a giant force outside her control to snickering at that force, which is revealed as idiotic and petty. That is genius. It’s also something only the blog medium, which is what Edith’s a genius of, can achieve.
What’s extradiagetic here: being aware, on some level, that a lot of the stuff that filters in through the periphery of our cultural consciousness is telling women to hate and hurt ourselves. And if Fischer and women Fischer’s age aren’t aware of this, why try to teach them how to be? If they’re not in pain, if they’re not enraged, why tell them they ought to be? Maybe I’m too attached to my anger and my pain. Maybe a lot of us are. The girls and teenagers who are growing up now with Rookie tutorials on masturbation and exhortations never to fake an orgasm at their fingertips – maybe they won’t “get” Women Laughing Alone At Salad, either. I desperately that hope they don’t, but I’m also glad it’s there for them if they need it.
I talked on the phone yesterday to an author whose book I hope we’re going to feature as an Emily Books pick soon, someone whose autobiographical novel, written in the first person, is full of lucid, skillful, sometimes frankly horrifying descriptions of exploitative sex and bulimia. “Do you think you’re crazy? I’m crazy,” she told me. “I … try to keep the different aspects of myself in balance. I like that you’re crazy,” I told her. And then I said something that I didn’t realize I believed until I said it out loud. “Women who don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them are crazy. But men who don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of them are … just men.”
Obviously many men give a fuck what people think about them. But if they don’t, it doesn’t mean they’re insane. Whereas for a woman not to care – that’s actually pathological, self-destructive behavior, in the context of our culture. I love and valorize this kind of female craziness and the art it produces – I created a business to celebrate these women and their art. But I fear not giving a fuck, for myself. I wonder what it would be like to let go that much.
Today I went to PS1, which longtime readers of this blog will recognize as something I tend to do in melancholy moods. This particular museum often works for me as a way of scraping something off the lens of my whole perceptual apparatus. Something about the incredible old building it’s in and the way that building is situated — the views out its windows of ugly-gorgeous Long Island City’s big skies and schizoid new-old building hodgepodge – works for me. And I love the ancient classrooms and the ghosts of all the work that’s been in them; they ennoble whatever’s there and endow it with extra art-oomph.
I started on the second floor, enticed by a warm, carnivalesque loop of recorded music that it took a minute to place: it was the beginning of “Like A Rolling Stone.” It led me to a room with two wall-mounted speakers that on first glance seemed empty. On second glance there was a little wall plaque that read: “chicken burrito beef burrito.” And on third glance there they were on the windowsill:
In spite of not having been in a good mood a minute earlier I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Another girl entered the room and saw the burritos. Our eyes met and she laughed too. She took a photo and I was emboldened (obviously) to do the same. The rest of Darren Bader’s work included: a disassembled oven filled with pizza, a room full of fruits and vegetables prettily displayed on plinths in a room with a sign listing times when fruit and vegetable salad would be served and a room where “celebrity sculptures” will assemble if any celebrities volunteer. Another room contained a croissant and an iguana — “iguana and croissant,” read the plaque.
And in the final room, in which only four visitors are permitted at a time, there was a couch, a stack of magazines, a PS1 employee, and three cats who are available for adoption. These are very charming cats — if you’re in the market for a cat, go get ‘em! (The iguana is also available for adoption, though it’s illegal to own one in the 5 boroughs of NYC, as I’m sure you already knew.) The obligation I felt to make awkward conversation with the PS1 employee rather than besotted babytalk conversation with a new cat friend was the only thing that dampened my enthusiasm for this artwork, which otherwise, obviously,
!!!!!!
So I felt then like the museum had worked its magic. Maybe it hadn’t given me any new ideas but it was getting to be around the time I’d thought I would leave and so I made my way in the direction of the exit.
As an afterthought, though, I hit one last gallery. At the entrance to the hallway leading to a large room that in PS1’s earlier incarnation could’ve been a gymnasium a sign said:
I found this unpromising – oof, sound art – but could hear strains of music coming from the gallery so I went in.
40 speakers stood in a ring around the room at almost exactly the level of my head and a single voice sang from each of them, recorded so well and reproduced so perfectly by the speakers that, when you stand near the speaker, it’s like someone is singing in your ear. Standing in the center of the room I could hear the cumulative effect of 40 voices merging: a choral piece, I guess in Latin, Deus Domine were the only words I picked out. But walking near the speakers I could hear each voice’s singular human-ness – the glorious, virtuosic trill wasted in the cumulative muddle, but also the tiny stutter, the fading weakness at the end of a held note. Maybe the most striking aspect of this artwork is the 3 minutes of recorded intermission between the 14 minutes of song: coughs and giggles and deep, resonant expectorant sniffs emanate from the corners of the room, creating the almost creepy sense that you’re surrounded by a ring of invisible people.
When I first entered the room there was no one there but me and a young male guard, but more people came in as I walked the circumference of the room. I pretended not to notice them, but I knew they were there and I became even more aware of them at the moment when, standing between two speakers at the crescendo of the motet and staring fixedly out the window, I realized that I was about to start crying and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
I didn’t sob but tears came to my eyes and squirted out uncontrollably, like sweat from a cartoon character’s brow. I wiped them away furiously with my sleeves. I wanted so badly not to be crying. How ridiculous to be moved so much by art (never mind that I had come to the museum in hopes of being moved). But I felt manipulated – “I’m so easy,” I thought. It’s true that something about the frequency at which spiritual music vibrates often makes me inexplicably, uncontrollably weepy, a phenomenon I have hesitated to explore lest I find myself having to Get Religion in some dumb time-consuming careworn-narrative way. Then I realized (this all happened in less than thirty seconds, probably) that the other reason I didn’t want to be crying was so much simpler: I just didn’t want anyone to see me crying. I was embarrassed about crying, the weakness and vulnerability that crying inevitably conveys.
I have made so many decisions based on my desire to never seem publicly weak or vulnerable.
And then I thought: what if I just didn’t care?
I thought: do any of those people care that I’m crying? Will they even notice, and will they think less of me if they do? I don’t even know them so why do I even care what they think?
And for the first time, for just a moment, I didn’t care.
And I started crying harder, because now I was crying with joy.
And when I finished crying I sat down on the bench and listened to the rest of the motet, watching seagulls swoop by outside the windows and refusing to notice whether anyone was watching me.
Easy and Attractive Graphs with Chart::Clicker
Today's CPAN experiment was 15 minutes with Chart::Clicker. I'd heard great things about this distribution before, but had never tried it.
I've been working lately on financial analysis of publicly traded companies. In particular, I've been analyzing trends in the growth of owner earnings, given a ten year window of SEC reports. (Don't worry if you don't know everything that means yet.) The goal of this work is to find a trendline which smooths out yearly ups and downs and gives a good idea of the company's expected growth.
(That number is particularly important if you want to project the intrinsic value of a company into the future to decide the value of an individual share of that company right now. This is very standard Graham/Dodd/Buffett stuff, but it's also specific domain knowledge interesting only to this post as background information.)
My statistics are a bit rusty, so I wanted to see the resulting information before I trusted my calculations. My first instinct was to copy and paste information into a spreadsheet and create a graph there. Yes, I did that manually a couple of times. Then I remembered I have the full power of Perl available.
Chart::Clickerinstalled easily. Its documentation is a bit on the thin side, if you need to customize things (and I did), but if you poke around at the various components and their methods, you can make sense of things. (In particular, I wanted to change the underlying grid lines to correspond with the data points on the X axis. They're years, after all.)My analysis code produces a list of values for free cash flow in thousands of dollars over a ten year range. It also uses the least square fit technique to plot a line representing the change in those values. That line should show the trend in values with as much accuracy as possible. While I have ten points for the free cash flow line, I need only two points for the trend line, because it's a straight line.
Chart::Clickermakes it really easy to add two datasets with different numbers of points. (I'm fortunate that the first and last X coordinates are the same.) Here's the code:use Chart::Clicker; use Chart::Clicker::Data::Series; use Chart::Clicker::Data::DataSet; my $chart = Chart::Clicker->new; my $fcf_line = Chart::Clicker::Data::Series->new( keys => [ 0 .. $#{ $fcf_values } ], values => $fcf_values, name => 'Free Cash Flow (thousands)', ); my $trend_line = Chart::Clicker::Data::Series->new( keys => [ 0, $#{ $fcf_values } ], values => [ $first_y, $last_y ], name => 'Free Cash Flow trendline', ); my $dataset = Chart::Clicker::Data::DataSet->new( series => [ $fcf_line, $trend_line ], ); $chart->add_to_datasets( $dataset ); my $context = $chart->get_context('default'); $context->range_axis->format('$%.0f'); $context->domain_axis->hidden(1); $context->domain_axis->ticks( $#{ $fcf_values } ); $chart->write_output( "${symbol}.png" );A chart contains one or more datasets, and a dataset contains one or more series. Each series corresponds to a line. Populating a series is easy, given arrays of data; keys represents the X axis and values represents the Y axis.
Most of the rest of my code customizes the display of the data. I haven't found the right way to display the X axis yet, so I've elided that for now. I also had to customize the underlying graph lines, as mentioned before. That customization was the only tricky part of using
Chart::Clicker, and that only because it took a few minutes to figure out how to do it.The results are attractive. Here's a chart showing the earnings for Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) over the past decade:
Figure 1. Free Cash Flow and Trendline for NYSE:KO.
Chart::Clickeris fast, too. I added this to my analysis step for the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and I can't measure the increase in time required to create these images. (This analysis step has network IO as its bottleneck.)I'm not often wholly impressed by Perl and the CPAN anymore; I expect things to work. I didn't expect things to work as easily as they did today. The whole experiment demonstrates the best the CPAN has to offer.
The New York Observer: One Year In
I started at the New York Observer a year ago this week as editor in chief and editorial director of Observer Media Group, and it’s been a fantastic year. We introduced a lot of changes, launched several new properties and gained some nice momentum in expanding the Observer editorially and on the business side. Here’s a rundown of what’s happened in the last twelve months:
WE HIT SOME SIGNIFICANT MILESTONES:
PROFITABILITY: The Observer is profitable by a thin margin for the first time in its 24-year history. This is a big, big deal. Credit to Christopher Barnes, who runs the business side, and his sales team.
TRAFFIC INCREASED: When I got to the Observer, the Observer digital properties were getting about 890K uniques a month in total. Now they’re at 2.1M. I think our traffic should be a lot higher than that, and sooner rather than later, but more than doubling traffic with no additional budget resources isn’t anything to sneeze at.
BIG DIGITAL BUYS: The Observer is just in the beginning stages of building its digital sales team (led by Jamie Forrest) and they scored several big campaigns in Q3 & Q4, most notably large sponsorship and display buys from Jaguar and FedEx. Being able to move from small local buys to large national brands is important for us and sales is doing a great job of positioning us for real growth.
And we just did some great stories. Which is what gets us out of bed in the morning. You can see some of my favorites here.
WE MADE SOME NEW THINGS:On the web side, we launched
BETABEAT, our New York tech site helmed by Adrianne Jeffries and Nitasha Tiku (and we’re hiring!) with contributions from Foster Kamer.GALLERISTny, our visual arts site; helmed by Andrew Russeth, Dan Duray, and Michael H. Miller, and overseen by Observer culture editor Sarah Douglas.
and we spun off POLITICKER, our politics vertical, run by David Freedlander, Hunter Walker and Colin Campbell.
The Observer also now has iPad apps for Betabeat and Observer.com.
We also launched several new print publications in areas that have been very promising for us. Among them:
YUE, a dual-language Mandarin/English luxury magazine for Asian visitors to New York, edited by Chiu-Ti Jansen. On the biz side, it gave us a better foothold in the luxury fashion category and it’s a growing market. The first two issues performed so well, we’re considering an LA edition, and I’d like to do a location-based app to accompany it.
SCOOTER, a reworked version of the Observer’s Playground magazine, helmed by former web editor of Cookie (among other things), Peter Feld. Scooter targets New York City parents and the next issue comes out in March. It will feature a guide to NYC schools.
WE REDESIGNED AND RECONFIGURED SOME THINGS:
THE BULLPEN: This may seem like a minor thing, but it’s not. When I got to the NYO, everybody was sitting at desks with high cubicle walls–the sort of thing you’d see at a monthly magazine. We got rid of them, and it opened up the space, allowed people to more easily talk about stories and frankly, gave us more seating, which is important because we’re in expansion mode.
THE WEBSITE: We relaunched Observer.com in a cleaner, more readable format. Credit here goes to Hard Candy Shell (Kevin Kearney, Courtney Lewis and Dan Maccarone.)
THE PAPER. TWICE. We did the first redesign to make it more aesthetically consistent and closer to what we believe is the Observer’s original brand. We modernized fonts and layout a bit and went back to justified columns. We also restored the cover illustrations that are a key part of the Observer’s identity. The paper had been doing a lot of photo illustrations in heavy saturated colors, which doesn’t look great on salmon newsprint, and in my opinion, made the whole thing look like a downtown alt-weekly. (Heavy saturated colors work well for alt weeklies because they’re sitting in boxes with scratched up windows and it’s going to be difficult to make out the covers if they don’t look like that. But the Observer sits on the news-stand next to the Post and the Daily News and in tabloid format with photo illustrations, we don’t look a whole lot different. And we should–it’s a different kind of paper with a different audience. So we commissioned a bunch of retro-illustrations for the columns (all a play on the Observer man you see on the nameplate) and killed a lot of the magazine-y whitespace that works on glossy paper and is completely wasted on newsprint. We liked it a lot better–and so did advertisers.
Which is why when we had to change printers (our printer in Brooklyn was going out of business) we decided to go back to the broadsheet format. (Mini-broadsheet technically–halfway between a full-sized broadsheet and a Berliner). Again, my opinion, but it feels more upscale and premium to me.
THE PAPER’S TAGLINE: In this case, we didn’t re-do it; we just put back the original. When I got here, the tagline had been changed to “Money, Power and The City” which struck me as cheesy and a little too nose-pressed-against-the-glass. So we put back “Nothing Sacred But the Truth” which was the Observer’s original tagline and frankly, also the reason why we all get out of bed in the morning. And, as one of my staffers put it, “It sounds kind of badass.”
All of this meant absorbing a lot of change in the bullpen and that’s difficult to do. We tried to communicate everything that was happening before it happened and I think that helped, but executive editor Aaron Gell, deputy editor Brian Gallagher and culture editor Sarah Douglas deserve credit for keeping everyone sane during the process. Including me.
WE LEFT SOME THINGS ALONE, BECAUSE THEY AIN’T BROKE:
The Observer’s real estate trade publication COMMERCIAL OBSERVER, has been successful since day one. We’ve tightened it up significantly (credit to CO editor in chief, Jotham Sederstrom) and it looks better than it ever has. And it’s one of the most profitable things that we do. Print is definitely alive and well in certain categories.
We also have several ancillary publications that chug along and do their thing: the twice annual HOME OBSERVER, the annual COLLECTOR mag (for watch collectors), various education and real estate supplements and our annual US Open special issue TENNIS mag (this year put together by managing editor Michael Woodsmall.)AND NOW WE’RE GETTING READY TO DO SOME NEW STUFF:
New launches in the next few months include the Peter Davis-edited Scene magazine, which is being prototyped now, a new site that covers events, nightlife and the social scene in New York, and a couple of other web properties we’ll announce later. We’re also revamping Very Short List, creating a companion to Commercial Observer that’s a commercial mortgage magazine, launching some new newsletters and apps and looking to build in-house capabilities to do original video and re-designing Observer.com so that it works as a national property with an eye toward major expansions in the (likely near) future.
So 2012 will be exciting. And I think we’ll have a lot to show for it this time next year.
Video Friday
Well hello. It's that time again, Video Friday. Which does not actually occur every Friday, but just whatever Friday I feel like sharing a video. These are the benefits of having no boss and just a small group of readers. The drawbacks include no income or status, but let's be positive, shall we? It's Video Friday! And Video Friday almost always happens when I am feeling positive. This despite the fact that I just ran into to some well-groomed friends while I was still greasy in yoga clothes, shopping for Valentine's Day candy at CVS. There was no excuse for my yucky state, as class had ended 3 hours earlier. I ate lunch and got on the internet and one thing led to another and here we are, sharing "Bad Feeling" by Veronica Falls. I know about it because it was posted by a Facebook friend, none other than Erin Smith of Bratmobile. I sure do like this, but I can't tell you anything about the band since I don't have time to google them before picking up my daughter. I will say that the song kind of reminds me of "Hazy Shade of Winter" by the Bangles, which I am posting below. I decided to use the version from the Less Than Zero soundtrack for extra sweetness. Anyway, good video Friday to you. See ya.
On second thought, that version is kind of cheesy. Here is another one.
DIY sperm donors and the virgin father
Trent Arsenault is a computer security engineer, a 35-year-old virgin, and also the father of fifteen children (and counting). Arsenault non-anonymously donates his sperm for free to couples who need it to have children.
After a woman from his hometown posted repeatedly to say she couldn't find a donor, Trent knew she was the one. "I thought, I'm probably not going to hurt anyone. The worst that can happen is someone will waste their time with me." He met the woman, a 37-year-old lesbian schoolteacher, and her partner, in December 2006 at a nearby Barnes & Noble, where the couple's 3-year-old adopted daughter played while they questioned Trent for two hours. They liked that he'd been raised Christian and worked in technology. The recipient provided a donor contract, drafted by a lesbian-run law firm, negating both his paternal rights and responsibilities. The couple gave him a box of Ziploc food containers from Wal-Mart and scheduled a first appointment. On that day, they texted Trent when they were twenty minutes from his house, and he set to work on the "recovery," as it's known. When they rang his bell, he handed over a Ziploc. Two weeks later, they sent Trent another text, with good news. After a year of fruitless trips to a sperm bank, the recipient had gotten pregnant on Trent's first try.
(thx, patrick)
Tags: parenting Trent Arsenault
Things Cheaper Than FanGraphs+
Over at the dad’s house, FanGraphs+ 2012 has been being touted as a “steal” or “deal”. The subscription includes over 1,100 player profiles written by the FanGraphs and RotoGraphs contributors, 11 in depth fantasy-themed articles — including the second annual Cistulli-Sarris faceoff, Mike Trout vs. Bryce Harper, and my new best friend “Ottoneu Strategies for Every Setting.” Oh, and it also includes 2-3 weekly articles written by FanGraphs staff for ESPN throughout this year, AND the FanGraphs+ archives from the last two years. Whew. That’s all for $4.99, which may lead you to believe that you would be hard pressed to find anything so awesome for such a small price tag. You’d be believing wrong. I present: Things Cheaper Than FanGraphs+:
Crafts
- This original Kenny Powers cross stitch pattern (PDF format) — Etsy, $4
- A collection of miniature baseball caps made in polymer clay — Etsy, $2
- Crochet baseball beer cozy pattern — Etsy, $3.50
- “We interrupt this marriage for baseball season” digital embroidery machine pattern — Etsy, $4
- Baseball and bat magnet – Etsty $1.50Art
- Painted American baseball rock! – Etsy, $4
- Boston Terrier wearing a Boston Red Sox hat magnet – Etsy, $4.25Ephemera & Cards
- Vintage baseball boy photo – Etsy, $2.50
- Upcycled vintage baseball valentine – Etsy, $4.50
- Tony Tiger HOLOGRAM Baseball Card – Ebay, $2.50
- Schlitz sponsored Brewers beer coaster – Ebay, $1.49
- 1978 Unused All-Star Ballot – Ebay, $1
- 2006 Long Island Ducks pocket schedule – Ebay, $1
- 1988 Topps Roger Clemens baseball coinApparel and Accessories
- Strike out Pog earrings – Etsy, $4
- Baseball neck tie – Ebay, $4.95
- Chicago Cubs fingernail tattoos – Ebay, $3.05
- Baseball party hat! – Party City, $1.93Movies, Music, and Games
- Queer Eye for the Red Sox DVD – Ebay, $0.99
- Baseball songs with Let’s Talk Puppy Dog – Ebay, $4.75
- Major League II mini movie poster (for your cubicle?) – Ebay, $1.15
- Tecmo Baseball for NES – Ebay, $1.81
- Bo Jackson Baseball for NES – Ebay, $1Books
- Juicy by Jessica Canseco – Ebay, $4
- Dominate Your Fantasy Baseball League by David Sabino – Ebay, $3.49
- 1989 National League Rookies of the Year by Donald Honig – Ebay, $3
- Nomo: The Inside Story on Baseball’s Hottest Sensation by Herb Fagen – Amazon, $4.35Etcetera
- Baseball cap for your pet ferret – $1.98 from Amazon Merchants
- Christian baseball fish car decal – Ebay, $1.99
- Fantasy baseball “playas” refillable lighters – Ebay, $4.95
- Baseball million dollar novelty bill – Ebay, $1.25
- Astros Suck Urinal Toilet Bowl Sticker – Ebay, $2.99
After ‘Dark Knight’: What if Tim Burton took back Gotham?
BAT FILMS OF THE FUTURE?
The end is near — when the credits roll on “The Dark Knight Rises” this July, it will mark the close of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and the final adventure for Christian Bale as the caped crusader of Gotham City. Warner Bros. executives have made it clear they won’t leave the iconic property sitting on a shelf, however, and a new director and star tandem could be inhabiting Wayne Manor by 2014. But how on Earth will any filmmaker follow the work of Nolan and company? Working together, Hero Complex lead writer Geoff Boucher and graphic artist Sean Hartter came up with 15 imaginary Batman reboots — and, yes, they did it with tongue in cheek.
Tim Burton: "The Dark Knight Returns" (Sean Hartter / For Hero Complex)
Tim Burton’s “The Dark Knight Returns” Long before Christopher Nolan set foot in the Batcave, iconic director Tim Burton made Hollywood history with two Gotham City films. Now he returns with a film that adapts the landmark Frank Miller mini-series “The Dark Knight Returns” that finds Batman (Michael Keaton) returning from retirement for the final battle with his arch-enemy, the Joker (Jack Nicholson). Also starring Chloe Moretz as Carrie Kelly, Michael Douglas as Superman, Helena Bonham Carter as Selina Kyle and Jeff Bridges as Oliver Queen.
Zack Snyder: "World's Finest" (Sean Hartter / For Hero Complex)
Zack Snyder’s “World’s Finest“: Producer Chris Nolan and director Zack Snyder are bringing Superman back to the screen in 2013 and that sets the stage for this 2014 film — the ultimate superhero pairing and a way to ease Batman into a DC on-screen universe where other heroes exist. Gerard Butler (Snyder’s “300″) stars as Batman, Henry Cavill returns as Superman and the two better find a way to work together with Lex Luthor (Bryan Cranston) and the Joker (Jackie Earle Haley) on the loose.
Ridley Scott: "Batman Beyond" (Sean Hartter / For Hero Complex)
Ridley Scott’s “Batman Beyond”: After three decades, Ridley Scott has returned to sci-fi with ”Prometheus” and now keeps it going with”Batman Beyond,” an adaptation of the well-regarded animated series. Scott’s favorite leading man, Russell Crowe, portrays the aging Bruce Wayne while rising star Josh Hutcherson is Terry McGinnis, a brash young street kid who finds himself wearing a high-tech battle suit as the protege of the still-fierce hero of Gotham City. Sigourney Weaver reunites with her “Alien” director to play Commisioner Barbara Gordon and her “Avatar” co-star Stephen Lang is Derek Powers, the tycoon who takes control of Wayne Enterprises but is destined to become the radioactive menace called Blight.
— Geoff Boucher and Sean Hartter
READ THE REST OF THE SERIES
Tuesday: Rob Marshall’s “Gotham!”; Brad Bird’s “Mr. Freeze’s Icy Revenge”; Guillermo del Toro’s “Batman”
Monday, Feb. 13: Vote for your favorite — and submit your own Batfilm ideas.
RECENT AND RELATED
Christopher Nolan opens up about Bane choice
Hathaway: Catwoman modeled on Hedy Lamarr
Christian Bale says goodbye to Gotham
‘Dark Knight Rises’: Tom Hardy as Bane
Nolan on his favorite scene in ‘Dark Knight’
‘DKR’: Anne Hathaway as Catwoman
‘DKR’: The Bat, the Rat and the Cat
Michael Keaton’s dark memories of ‘Batman’
Nolan: Hollywood takes too many shortcuts
FIRST LOOK: ‘Dark Knight Rises’ toys
Downton Abbey Valentine's Day cards
For the Anna to your Bates, the Matthew Crawley to your Lady Mary, or the cutting comeback to your Dowager Countess, a selection of Downton Abbey-themed Valentine's Day cards.
Tags: Downton Abbey TV
Bi-Rite Market's Sumac-Roasted Chicken du Monde
[Photograph: France Ruffenach]
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food to give away this week.
Sour, citrusy, and totally at home with both meats and vegetables, sumac is one of those spices that we just can't get enough of. This Sumac-Roasted Chicken du Monde from Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food showcases how easily it can be incorporated into all sorts of dishes.
This particular roast chicken begins with an Indian curry powder heavy brine that stains the halved chicken a bright yellow. After a day of soaking up all of that sugar, salt, and curry it's rubbed with olive oil and sumac and roasted over a bed of red onions, balsamic, and thyme branches. It's a blend of flavors from Italy, France, India, and the Middle East that seem unlikely when the chicken goes into the oven, before it starts to roast and really fill the kitchen.
Why you should make this: Apart from being a delicious and inventive take on roast chicken, this is a dish that highlights the fact that we should all be more familiar with the glorious spice that is sumac.
Next time we might think about: Cooking the chicken over a bed of onions makes for a lot of drippings and some pretty tasty onions. Next time around we're definitely throwing a few potatoes in there too.
Adapted from Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food by Sam Mogannam and Dabney Gough. Copyright © 2011. Published by Ten Speed Press. Available wherever books are sold. All Rights Reserved.
Ingredients
serves Serves 2 to 4, active time 1 hour, total time 1 hour plus brining time
- Brine:
- 7 cups water
- 1 cup dry white wine
- 6 tablespoons kosher salt
- 3 tablespoons sugar
- 2 tablespoons yellow curry powder
-  :
- Chicken:
- 3-pound chicken, cut into two halves
- 2 medium red onions (about 1 pound)
- 4 sprigs fresh thyme
- 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
- 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 teaspoons ground sumac
Procedures
The day before you plan to cook: Combine all the brine ingredients in a large pot and stir until the salt and sugar have dissolved. Put the chicken in the pot and top with a plate, if necessary, to keep the chicken submerged. Refrigerate for at least 6 hours or overnight.
When you’re ready to cook the chicken: Heat the oven to 450°F and remove the chicken from the refrigerator.
Peel and trim the onions, keeping as much of the root end intact as possible. Cut into 1-inch wedges, cutting through the root end so the layers stay connected. Put the onions and thyme in a large roasting pan, drizzle with the balsamic, and stir to combine.
Remove the chicken from the brine, dry off with paper towels, and rub with the olive oil. Sprinkle the sumac all over the chicken. Put the chicken halves skin side up in the pan, arranging the onions around them.
Roast, stirring the onions occasionally, until the skin is golden and an instant-read thermometer reads 165°F at the deepest part of the chicken’s thighs, about 40 minutes. Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside on a cutting board. Stir the onions so that they pick up some of the juices and browned bits on the bottom of the pan. Taste and add a sprinkle of salt if needed.
To serve, spread the onions across the bottom of a serving platter and top with the chicken.
Kickstarter's craziest 24 hours
a minute-by-minute breakdown of the most insane day in Kickstarter history
Where Were You In ’92: Part 2
Thanks for all your diverse answers to last week’s question, where were you in ’92? Quite a few readers mentioned watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in completely deserted theaters, but there was a big crowd out front of at least one cinema playing the movie. Do you recognize where? Or even better, can you spot yourself in this anxious bunch?
Stay tuned for more…
Visit Welcome to Twin Peaks.
Tumble-blogging at Subtraction.com
For the past week or so, I’ve been playing with a slightly different kind of content here at Subtraction.com. This is something I talked about in a recent post in which I rambled on about the state of several different blog tools; I’m now experimenting with Tumblr-style image blogging that in most cases is purely about the image, with only a short line of additional text, if any. Here’s one example. (There are still some kinks to be worked out, so bear with me.)
This might seem unremarkable to regular readers since I already publish short, image-heavy, posts with just a bit of text. On the back-end though, it’s quite different, or at least meaningfully different. With the help of my friend Adam Khan, we’ve customized an ExpressionEngine ‘channel’ that presents a much more succinct publishing interface than the one I normally use. In essence, there are fewer fields to fill out and the fields themselves are physically smaller, which dissuades me from writing at any great length. On top of that, we’ve cooked up a bookmarklet that drives a simple script for grabbing images and auto-populating the forms, so creating a new post when I come across something I like only takes a few clicks.
None of this is novel in the least, as plenty of Web apps already do this much than what we cooked up in an ad hoc fashion. But it’s long been a struggle for me to post here as regularly as I’d like, especially as my schedule just keeps getting busier and busier, so anything that makes it easier for me is something worth experimenting with. It’s also a useful reminder that interface design does matter — having a simpler, more concise publishing U.I. directly influences the kind of content that gets produced.
To be clear, this does not mean I’m not giving up on posting longer pieces of real writing here. I still enjoy that a great deal; it’s just a matter of finding the time. Hopefully this supplemental style of blogging will help fill the void, but if you have any thoughts on how successful — or unsuccessful — it is, please let me know in the comments.
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Made in Japan, perfectly
The long recession in Japan has led to a curious result: the Japanese are no longer just importing American and European goods and services...they're perfecting their own take on everything from cocktails and cusine to fashion and hotels.
Tags: JapanImagine going into an espresso bar, as I did in Tokyo, ordering a single shot, and being told that it's not on offer. The counter at No. 8 Bear Pond may feature the shiniest, spiffiest, newest La Marzocco, as well as a Rube Goldberg-esque water-filtration system, but the menu, which lists lattes and Americanos, makes no mention of espresso or cappuccino.
"My boss won't let me make espressos," says the barista. "I need a year more, maybe two, before he's ready to let customers drink my shots undiluted by milk. And I'll need another whole year of practice after that if I want to be able to froth milk for cappuccinos."
Only after 18 years as a barista in New York did his boss, the cafe's owner, feel qualified to return home to show off his coffee-making skills. Now, at Bear Pond's main branch, he stops making espressos at an early hour each day, claiming that the spike on the power grid after that time precludes drawing the voltage required for optimal pressure.
Bookshelves
I suppose it cuts down the need for bookends.
Found at Book Porn.
Top Chef: Season 9, Episode 14: Mentors
…And the beat goes on…
If you watched the last Last Chance Kitchen, the edit lead you to believe that Grayson was the winner, which is why it was utterly unsurprising to see Beverly return at the start of the episode. The Magical Elves seem to have a love of ham handed misdirection.
The quickfire was disappointingly insipid, even more so because it conferred the opportunity for immunity and a guaranteed spot in the Final Four. The chefs that second-guess Sarah’s decision to not take the car are only fooling themselves. At every stage of the game, the priority is to advance. Period. Plus, she got to have a relaxed day and decent night’s sleep, which at this stage of the competition is remarkably valuable.
I loved when the mentors walked in and the cooks last their collective shit (well, except for Edward.) It was one of the most honest displays of emotion I’ve seen on television, and Paul’s inability to contain himself had >me choking up while I was on the elliptical trainer, which makes staying in rhythm hard. Even for all the editing trickery that goes on with the show, the authenticness of its participants means that Top Chef taps into real human emotion unlike anything else out there.
There’s not one fan of the show who didn’t know that Edward was going down the moment he bought the smoked oysters.
Given all the grief she’s received, Beverly’s success makes for Good TV.
Paul continues to operate on a plane utterly separate from the rest of the competition. Gail’s blog post points out that the TV edit underplays the quality of Paul’s dish — she says it’s the only truly memorable plate she’d had all season, and among the tops in all seasons.
If he doesn’t win it all, it would be a huge surprise.
Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo
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One Not To Miss: Hybrid Thinking Closing Day Reception, Sat Feb 11th in NYC
Please join us tomorrow afternoon, Saturday February 11th, at 3 - 5pm for a closing day reception of our new group show HYBRID THINKING at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York City. The show features new work by Herakut, ROA, Vinz, Hyuro, Dal, and SIT. While much of the original show has sold out, there will still be pieces available for purchase.
Hybrid Thinking Closing Day Reception
Saturday Feb 11th, 3pm - 5pm
Jonathan LeVine Gallery | 529 W 20th St Ste 9E | New York, NY 10011
CoffeeCon: The Dubious Anti-Trade Show Trade Show
“I want to change lives. I want you to be able to enjoy that getting-more-expensive-all-the-time coffee you bought with your hard-earned money. Really enjoy it. Trade marketing has its place but not at CoffeeCon. Welcome to the real thing.”
Hmm… Geoff Watts and George Howell are presenting? Curious.
Saturday, February 25th, 2012
9:00am-5:00pm
IBEW Local Union 701
28600 Bella Vista Parkway
Warrenville, IL 60555[COFFEE Con 2012 — All the experts, equipment, beans all in one place]
Catching Up With the Corset Queen
The Times has a neat piece on the wonderful fashion historian and curator Valerie Steele.
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See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
February 9, 2012
February 2012
MORE UPDATES:
1) If you haven’t seen our video and musical remix for pictureplane’s “body mods”, here it is:
Pictureplane “Body Mods” remix by Extreme Animals from Jacob Ciocci on Vimeo.
This was blogged about on rhizome and dis magazine, 2 of my favorite websites of all time! #proud
2)Some of my drawings and “color photos” (screenshots) are in this DFW zine. Other artists include Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Isaac Lynn and Barry McGee. Apparently these are “going fast” so you better get it now or wait until you see me and I’ll tell you I ran out:
3) I designed the cover to the new issue of Incite! Journal , and below is an image of my design. Inside is an interview between myself and Jesse McLean, which was a lot of fun.
I think you can “grip” your copy of this journal here
4) The single-channel version of my video “Am I Evil” is in a couple of upcoming screenings: “Video INFusion” on February 11th at Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn and “Astral Projection Abduction Fantasy” at Monster Truck Gallery in Dublin, Ireland.
5) I only have a couple of quick images for now, but I just finished a new collage/video project entitled “COPY CATS” for CAM Raleigh for their exhibit “Born Digital” (which also includes work by LoVid and Karolina Sobecka along with many other heavy hitters). My work is made of 40 new collages displayed in a grid-like pattern and a new animation which is projected on top of them. I will have better documentation soon, but get ready for another piece about “cats” and “copy cats”:
6) Oh yeah and here is a link to documentation of the 1-day workshop I did in conjunction with the exhibit. It was called “OMG LOL GIFS made IRL” and we made animated gifs using both digital (3frames) techniques and analog (collage and markers) techniques.
Season Two - the Starks
I've saved the Starks for last. Scattered through the lands of Westeros, we have
THE LADY OF WINTERFELL
Catelyn Stark played by Michelle Fairley-Helen Sloan/HBO
THE HOSTAGE
Sansa Stark played by Sophie Turner-Helen Sloan/HBO
A STARK IN WINTERFELL
Bran Stark; Hodor played by Issac Hempstead-Wright ; Kristian Nairn-Helen Sloan/HBO
ARRY THE ORPHAN BOY
Arya Stark played by Maisie Williams-Helen Sloan /HBO
And that's it for now.
Enjoy... and remember... winter is coming, and so is season two. Time to get HBO!
I Just Spent $50 on Baseball Cards and I Blame You
The damning evidence.One of my favorite games to play is the Blame Game, which is why I’d like to begin this post by blaming the parties most directly responsible for my heinous actions on the afternoon of February 9th, 2012 — which actions involved mainly the prolonged research, and subsequent purchase, of 24 baseball cards, coming to a total of approximately $50.
I blame the internet’s Common Man for forcing me to attend TwinsFest the weekend before last, an event (i.e. TwinsFest) that forced me to become curious about The State of the Hobby. I blame the editors of BaseballCardPedia (and recent podcast guests) Chrises Harris and Thomas for patiently answering all my questions about The State of the Hobby. I blame my wife for leaving me at home, unattended, for hours at a time, as if I knew how to take care of myself. I blame the neurotransmitter dopamine — and the reward system of my brain, generally — for somehow allowing the research, and subsequent purchase, of baseball cards to provide me with great pleasure. And finally, I blame Big Oil — which, even though they didn’t do anything specifically, they’re probably somehow involved.
Phrased differently, what I mean to say is that, just today, I’ve made my first meaningful purchase of baseball cards since probably 1990. I don’t know if, in this case, meaningful is synonymous with fiscally sound.
I’ve listed my purchases below. Essentially, my strategy has been to target players whom I see as perhaps being undervalued relative to their future potential. In some cases (Mike Stanton and Mike Trout), it’s because I view the player in question as an eventual Hall of Fame candidate. In other cases (Brent Morel, Juan Nicasio, Chris Sale, Dayan Viciedo), it’s because I suspect the player in question will considerably raise his profile this coming season in the eyes of fans and collectors.
In every case, my goal has been to find at least two versions of each player’s rookie card — both from a base set and then some kind of numbered parallel set (gold or black, it generally is, for Topps), which I’m assuming will be more valuable than the base version.
I purchased all the following cards using the site Check Out My Cards, which gives dealers and collectors a very clean forum for selling their cards — and gives buyers a chance to see a scan of literally every card they’re considering for purchase. And again, I’ve found the site BaseballCardPedia very helpful.
Below are today’s purchases. I’ve included a key at the bottom of this post.
Player Year Set Series Card# Insert/Parallel #d RC? # $ Brent Morel 2011 Bowman - 196 AU Chrome RC - Y 1 $3.00 Brent Morel 2011 Bowman - 196 Base - Y 2 $1.50 Brent Morel 2011 Topps 1 322 Base - Y 2 $1.50 Brent Morel 2011 Topps 1 322 Gold 2011 Y 1 $1.50 Chris Sale 2011 Bowman - 220 Base - Y 2 $1.50 Chris Sale 2011 Topps 1 65 Base - Y 2 $1.50 Chris Sale 2011 Topps 1 65 Gold 2011 Y 2 $2.00 Dayan Viciedo 2010 Topps U US2 Base - Y 2 $3.00 Dayan Viciedo 2010 Topps U US2 Gold 2010 Y 1 $2.00 Juan Nicasio 2011 Topps U US203 Base - Y 2 $2.00 Juan Nicasio 2011 Topps U US203 Black 60 Y 1 $9.50 Mike Stanton 2010 Topps U US50 Base - Y 2 $4.50 Mike Stanton 2010 Topps U US50 Gold 2010 Y 1 $4.50 Mike Trout 2011 Topps U US175 Base - Y 2 $4.00 Mike Trout 2011 Topps U US175 Gold 2011 Y 1 $6.50 Series — Generally either First (1), Second (2), or Update (U). Bowman appears to produce just a single series each year.
#d — For inserts and parallels, how many cards were produced.
Insert/Parallel — AU means autographed. Everything else is pretty self-evident.
RC? — Is it a player’s rookie card?
# — How many I bought.
$ — Total spent on all cards bought, rounded to nearest half dollar.
Congratulations to Amit Singhal on his election to NAE
This morning, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced the election of 66 new members, including our very own Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and lead on Google Search. Amit joins a list of nine of us Googlers who have previously been recognized by the NAE: Sergey Brin, Vint Cerf, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Dick Sites, Ken Thompson and myself.
Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. The Academy recognized Amit for his contributions to information retrieval and search, where Amit has creatively applied and extended the science of information retrieval to new heights that were almost unthinkable when the field was founded. In so doing, he has had a tremendous and beneficial impact on the world with sustained excellence of Google’s search.
Amit was similarly recognized by the Association of Computing Machinery two months ago. I encourage you to read more about his important contributions in our blog post from December. Congratulations to Amit!
Posted by Alfred Spector, VP, Google Research
Wine Bottle Chandelier by Chris Weylandt
A wine bottle chandelier literally lights up the tasting rooms at Maison Estate, a South African winery created by designer Chris Weylandt.
When Weylandt designed the tasting rooms at his Maison Estate winery, located in the Valley of the Huguenots (an hour outside Cape Town), he decided to have a bit of fun with the lighting. Weylandt owns the South African furniture and homewares store Weylandts, and he gave the tasting room a minimalist interior, dominated by massive dining tables sourced from his shop. But just above the tables, suspended from black cords, are clear, green, and brown unmarked wine bottles: chandeliers that Weylandt custom made to add a burst of color and whimsy to the otherwise spare, all-white spaces.
Above: The wine-bottle chandeliers hang above the heavy organic form of the Raw Nero stainless steel and wood dining table; the transparent Igloo chairs disappear into their surroundings.
Above: Rough-hewn shelves hold bottles of wine from Maison Estate.
Above: A solid stainless steel table dominates another part of the tasting room; The Kitchen, a restaurant devoted to fresh fusion cuisine, can be seen in the background.
Jesse just got interviewed by Say. Big thanks to the folks over...
Jesse just got interviewed by Say. Big thanks to the folks over there for giving us some shine!
Also, for those curious about Bobby from Boston, which Jesse mentions in the interview, check out this video on Bobby Garnett.
Bi-Rite Market's Fennel, Blood Orange, and Avocado Salad
[Photograph: France Ruffenach]
As always with our Cook the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food to give away this week.
By mid-February many of us living in the chillier states are in need of some freshness, and bright flavors. This Fennel, Blood Orange, and Avocado Salad from Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food might not be seasonal or local across the board, but man, it's a breath of fresh air for those of us living under grey skies. Bright, tangy citrus, licoricey fennel, and creamy avocado have the transportive ability to bring you to a place that's warm and sunny.
Why you should make this: This salad is the edible equivalent of a SAD light, bringing sunshine into even the gloomiest of winter cooking routines. If you're in a cold weather cooking rut, this salad is a real pick-me-up.
Next time we might think about: We can only imagine how much more vibrant this salad would taste when made from locally sourced, in season ingredients. In a perfect world, next time we'll be tossing this one in Southern California.
Adapted from Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food by Sam Mogannam and Dabney Gough. Copyright © 2011. Published by Ten Speed Press. Available wherever books are sold. All Rights Reserved.
Ingredients
serves serves 4 , active time 30 minutes, total time 30 minutes
- 4 medium blood oranges
- 1 large or 2 small heads fennel, with fronds
- 1 small shallot, minced
- Juice from 1/2 medium lemon (preferably Meyer lemon)
- 1 1/2 tablespoons champagne vinegar
- 1/4 teaspoon honey
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
- 2 medium avocados
Procedures
Slice the tops and bottoms off the oranges to expose the flesh. Using a paring knife, cut off the remaining peel and pith. Slice the oranges crosswise into 1/4-inch slices and arrange on 4 salad plates, leaving room in the center of each for the fennel salad. Set aside.
Trim off all but about 1/2 inch of the fennel stalks, reserving the bulb and fronds. Remove the first outer layer of fennel and discard or save for vegetable stock. Rinse the remaining bulb and set aside.
Chop 1 tablespoon fennel fronds and put them in a small bowl along with the shallot, lemon juice, vinegar, honey, a pinch of salt, and a few grinds of pepper. Whisk to blend, then drizzle in the olive oil as you continue to whisk. Taste for salt.
Halve the fennel bulb, cutting lengthwise through the narrow side of the bulb (this will make it easier to shave thinly). Using a sharp knife (or a mandoline or food processor), slice the fennel crosswise as thinly as you can—about 1/16 inch is ideal. (Too thick and it will dominate the salad; too thin and it wilt and lose its texture.) Transfer to a bowl and drizzle with half the dressing. Toss, taste, and add salt and pepper as needed. Divide the fennel among the 4 plates, mounding in the center of the orange slices.
Halve the avocado lengthwise, remove the pit, and cut 1/4-inch slices into the flesh. Using a large spoon, scoop the slices out and nestle them on and around the mounds of fennel. Sprinkle a little salt over the avocado and then drizzle the remaining vinaigrette all over the salad. Finish with a bit of pepper.
Cleveland: Stunning Burgers at The Greenhouse Tavern
The Greenhouse Tavern
2038 E 4th Street, Cleveland, OH 44115 (map); 216-443-0511; thegreenhousetavern.com
Cooking Method: Grilled
Short Order: Phenomenal restaurant with heavy bent towards sustainability puts out a pair of top-notch burgers
Want Fries With That? Yes, especially the animal frites
Price: Beef burger, $15; lamb burger, $17; both include fries; animal style frites, $13Cleveland native Jonathon Sawyer, one of Food & Wine's "Best New Chefs" in 2010, made a name for himself before he opened The Greenhouse Tavern three years ago. With multiple stints in New York and Cleveland under his belt, including multiple positions under chef Charlie Palmer and a stint as the opening chef de cuisine at Michael Symon's Lolita, there was no question he had the chops. But when he went out on his own at Bar Cento in Cleveland (he no longer has a connection to the place) and then at The Greenhouse Tavern, he established himself as one of the best and most conscientious chefs you'll find anywhere.
From the commitment to local food sources and suppliers to a heavy reliance on recycled materials throughout the restaurant to the greenhouse on the roof to Sawyer's personal involvement in the Slow Food Movement, Sawyer's commitment to sustainability, passionately articulated in this speech, permeates every aspect of the restaurant. But social conscience only carries a restaurant so far; it ultimately comes down to the creativity and execution in the kitchen. And in that regard, Sawyer is even more impressive.
At a restaurant of this caliber, even the most devoted burger lover will surely have second thoughts on ordering a ground meat patty rather than something a little more special. Fortunately, The Greenhouse Tavern offers a compromise. For $44, diners can customize a four-course tasting menu by selecting virtually any item they want from each section of the menu (and for an upcharge, absolutely any menu item can be had). I ate with two friends and each of us ordered a four-course menu and shared everything as well as an extra burger. It was one of the more gluttonous dining experiences I've had in quite some time and, given the quality of the food, one of the better values I've ever had at a restaurant.
The grass-fed beef burger starts with eight ounces of brisket and chuck from Dee-Jays Custom Butchering in Fredericktown, Ohio. It's unfortunate that there isn't a better word than beefy to describe the flavor of a burger, but the intensity of this thing made it a show-stopper even though I was already full by the time I tried it. By opting for two extremely flavorful cuts of beef, Sawyer avoids any problems of stunted beef flavor that can plague grass-fed meat. Of course, the extra dose of fat from the particularly gooey raclette cheese doesn't hurt matters. The roasted tomato doesn't do anything in terms of fat, but it does add a nice bit of zest to a burger that a raw tomato is incapable of in the middle of winter.
I ordered the burger medium rare and got exactly what I wanted, a nice pink interior with a solid crust around the outside. The toasted bun, a soft buttery brioche roll that was not remotely too sweet, came from On the Rise, a small local bakery whose owner Sawyer met through his involvement with Slow Foods. The light bun had no problem holding up to the juicy burger, completing the simple and outstanding plate of food.
Like the beef burger, the lamb burger also features meat from Dee-Jays and a bun from On the Rise. The lamb burgers are not limited to a consistent blend of cuts, but they do benefit from some beef fat mixed in. The result is a 72/25 burger with plenty of lamb flavor, but without much of the gaminess thanks to the added fat.
Again, medium rare was requested and delivered. The patty came topped with feta cheese and shallots, which worked well, but I'm a little envious of the stinky cheese fondue topping that on the current version of the constantly changing menu. The lamb burger comes with a side of tangy yogurt that is theoretically there for the fries, but I actually thought made for an interesting twist on what was already a delicious burger.
Regular fries.
Speaking of fries, I managed to try three different kinds, all of which were great. The beef burger comes with straightforward pomme frites. And by straightforward, I mean marvelous fired potatoes with an extra crispy exterior and a truly fluffy interior. The fries that come with the lamb burger start with that same base but get Greekified with "olive dust," a tangy blend of dehydrated olives, salt, red pepper, rosemary, and a tiny bit of lavender.
As good as both sets of fries that come with the burgers were, they paled in comparison to the Animal Style Frites, which are basically poutines on steroids. Again starting with delicious fried potatoes, this massive plate of food includes two fried eggs, mozzarella cheese curd, a generous amount of brown gravy, Maille whole grain mustard, and some thick chunks of outstanding chewy bacon made from local pork by the same farm that supplies the meat for the burgers. I was past full by the time this heart attack on a plate made it to the table and couldn't stop myself from eating well over a third of them.
I truly loved both burgers I had at The Greenhouse Tavern, but if you go here and order nothing but those, then you are a fool. From the crispy hominy with pork skin cracklins, pickled red onion, and lime juice to the crispy chicken wings confit served with roasted jalapeño, lemon juice, scallions, and garlic to the 40 clove garlic roasted chicken, virtually everything I had was, at a minimum, great. If you live in Cleveland or are going for a visit, gather friends, go to The Greenhouse Tavern, take advantage of the four-course deal, and enjoy the feast.
About the author: Daniel Zemans is looking forward to going back to Cleveland so he can keep the family streak of heart attacks intact. If you have a little time to waste, you can follow him @zemanation. When he's not eating, he spends a decent chunk of his time suing crappy landlords and crappier employers.
Love hamburgers? Then you'll Like AHT on Facebook! And go follow us on Twitter while you're at it!
Banksy + Tom Hanks = Hanksy
The Awl has an interview with a street artist named Hanksy, who takes images from Banksy and incorporates Tom Hanks into the mix. WIIIILLLSONNNN!!
I've come across comments or stories written about Hanksy saying I'm directly ripping off Banksy's style. Like, "Where does this guy get off, stealing Banksy's work?" They are completely missing the point. It's a satire. My goal was never to make a profit. It came about and there was a genuine excitement around the people at the gallery and the community in general.
I'm pretty sure the interviewer, EA Hanks, is Tom's daughter and she got her dad on the record about Hanksy:
Regarding your work, Tom Hanks sends the message, "I don't know who Hanksy is, but I enjoy his (her?) comments via the semi-chaos of artistic expression."
But the T.HANKS trash can remains my favorite Tom Hanks street art:
Tags: art Banksy EA Hanks graffiti Hanksy Tom Hanks
Spice Hunting: How to Increase Your Spice Tolerance
Fruity, chocolatey pasilla chiles. Worth your while even if you're a spice wimp. [Photographs: Max Falkowitz, unless otherwise noted]
A common complaint I hear from spice newbies is that their palates just can't take hot dishes. And while I'm not one of those people who eats spicy food just for the sake of it, some of the world's best cuisines employ heat as an essential part of their flavor profile. So what's a globally-minded spice wimp to do?
If you didn't grow up eating spicy food, and don't have a natural tolerance for it, there's good reason to not to love it. The capsaicin in chiles is interpreted by the body as pain.* Plants developed capsaicin so we wouldn't eat them, which is enough to make you question why we started eating them in the first place. No wonder spice-fiends are often regarded as cultists by outsiders.
* Is there a German word for the awkwardness when your girlfriend gives your father a habanero burn—the first time they meet?
But chiles carry powerful, vibrant, and wonderful flavors that really are worth your while, even if they cause some pain. Here are some tips to strip chiles of (some of) their fire while keeping their flavor intact.
Buy Whole Chiles and De-seed Them
With pre-ground chiles, you're stuck with whatever heat level the blender decided to use. If you buy whole chiles to grind or soak yourself, you've got some options. Most of a chile's capsaicin lies in the pale membrane-like ribs that cling to the interior flesh, and to a lesser extent the exterior of the seeds. Remove those and you'll significantly cut down on a chile's heat while keeping its flavor intact. To de-seed, lop off the top half-inch of the stem end with a knife and dump out loose seeds. Rub the chile between your fingers to dislodge more seeds (wear latex gloves while doing this if you're really sensitive), then split the pepper in half lengthwise (like splitting a vanilla bean) and pick out the pale ribs.
You can use this same treatment on fresh chiles. Try it on poblanos and jalapeños to preserve their fresh, grassy flavor with less heat. You can also keep the chiles whole from start to finish, which locks in most of the capsaicin. My chili recipe, which packs in lots of chile flavor but not that much heat, calls for a habanero or two floated in the pot—they add a lovely tropical lilt to the chile without their blistering fire.
Stick to Relishes and Hot Sauces
Harissa: fiery, but flavorful in small doses.
There's nothing worse than summoning the bravery to cook a spicy recipe, only to realize it's too hot for you to eat. On the same note, every once in a while you find a freak chile that's way hotter than it should be. Short of adding more mass or burying your plate in sour cream, there's not much you can do to lessen the pain of a too-spicy dish.
That's why I recommend that spice newbies looking to increase their tolerance avoid adding much chile to a dish, and opt instead for fiery, pungent hot sauces, relishes, and chile pastes. Harissa is one of my favorites for this; it packs plenty of heat but also tons of flavor, with verves of cumin, garlic, and lemon. It's the perfect thing to spice up everything from workaday chicken breasts to more ambitiously (but gently) spiced Middle Eastern fare. Also look to fruity hot sauces that temper heat with sweet, bold flavors. Add these in small doses to build up your tolerance. Meat and starch are great starters, as they can absorb a good dose of heat before becoming unmanageable.
Balance with Acids, Sugar, and Fat
Serious larb from Kin Shop in New York. The perfect balance of spice, acid, fat, and sweet. [Photograph: J. Kenji Lopez Alt]
Look to most of the world's hottest cuisines and you'll see that spice is kept in careful balance with acidity, sweetness, and fat. Acids add sharpness that stands up well to chile heat. When tasted together, acids and chiles convey bright flavor over pure fire. Sugar and fat do the opposite—they round out flavors and mellow chiles out. Fats are especially effective at washing out some of the heat from fat-soluble capsaicin.
The best example of this I know is larb, one of my favorite salads, which is built on a platform of ground meat. It's hot—really hot when done right, but is rendered palatable by a bright, tart dressing, moderate amounts of rendered animal fat, and sweet toasted rice powder. When you have so many flavors going on at once, chiles really start to make sense. They become, in their own way, refreshing, like a big spoonful of sinus-clearing horseradish.
And Whatever You Do...
Water is not your friend. All it will do is spread the pain. Fat and casein, a protein found in milk, are. If you overdo the spice, have a lassi, some Thai iced tea, or a glass of kefir by your side and drink through the pain.
About the author: Max Falkowitz is a proud native of Queens, New York. He'll do just about anything for a good cup of tea and enjoys long walks down the aisles of Chinese groceries. He is also known to make ice cream on occasion. You can follow him on Twitter at @maxfalkowitz.
Art History Through Sci Fi-Colored Glasses: John Mattos took on Marcel Duchamp’s mechanically abstracted Nude Descending a Staircase and brilliantly reset it with C3PO. Then took Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians to the Star Wars’ Cantina. Usually this kind of pastiche doesn't work that well, but these are great.
The Super Bowl XLVI Ticker Tape Parade
Just in case you didn’t hear, the New York Giants won Super Bowl XLVI this past weekend. The city celebrated in grand fashion with a ticker tape parade on the stretch of lower Broadway known as the Canyon of Heroes.
Thousands upon thousands of fans showed up to cheer for the G-Men during the gorgeous unseasonably warm February morning. By contrast, the 2008 victory parade was chilly, rainy and not nearly as enjoyable.
Although the parade wasn’t scheduled until 11 a.m., many fans camped out overnight to ensure they had a front row view of their favorite players. I arrived around 9 a.m. and found myself immediately lost in a sea of people.
Confetti rained down from the office buildings above as the floats passed by, with each float garnering more and more applause from the crowd.
The biggest cheers came from the last float, as quarterback Eli Manning hoisted up the Lombardi Trophy alongside Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo.
The parade was followed by a ceremony at City Hall, where the Giants received a key to the city from the mayor. Meanwhile, the real heroes of the day began the giant task of cleaning up the mess as soon as the festivities ended.
- Ryan
P.S. Our Daily Dinners will return next week!
Pin It©2012 Smith & Ratliff. All Rights Reserved.
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Let's All Make...
...vintage comic book high heels! Or flats. Or boots? If you scroll a bunch she will reveal she used "Liquitex Gloss Medium and Varnish" to stick the cut out comics on, but admits Mod Podge would work well too, as long as you spray with a sealant when you're all finished. Or, move somewhere that snow, puddles, and mud never happen. Take that, Fashion Week.
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See more posts by Jane Marie
Your Friend Wanted Me to Tell You
Which is your favorite personalized Channing Tatum video greeting? I like "Mean a Lot," but "Cheer Up" does it for Hairpin pal Abe Sauer. [Thanks, Abe!]
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See more posts by Edith Zimmerman
February 8, 2012
OOOOH YEAH! MISTER LOIS!
What a giant! I just spended some time with George Lois in his stylish apartment in the Union Square neighboorhood. I'm all smiles! We talked about NBA basketball, european soccer and magazine design off course. Cause he was part of the Coverjunkie Magazine i gave him some copies and he signed my collected Esquire's from the 60's. After an hour the doorbell rang and he came back with a great package... his new book arrived: "Damn good advice. For people with talent", order here....
Adobe DPS Magazines Don’t Play Well with Newsstand
The big promise of Newsstand was that new issues would be downloaded in the background, ready to be read when you turn your iPad on. Lots of titles are now included as part of Newsstand, but so far, I’ve yet to ever see any magazine that is built on the Adobe DPS tools automatically download — even worse, I never get an alert that a new issue is out, even though that setting is definitely turned on.
Newsstand is not broken. Every single issue of my weekly Bloomberg Businessweek subscription is downloaded in the background, and every Friday morning I wake up to a notice on my iPad telling me that the new issue is out, and downloaded. So what’s the problem with the Adobe DPS magazines? And it’s not just Conde Nast, since I’m experienceing the same thing with the new Newsweek app. Sure, I know that on Mondays I can go and download my new issue of The New Yorker (and now Newsweek too), but for monthlies (Wired, Wired UK, GQ, etc.) I don’t get them unless I go in the app and check, which means I have to remember to check — and so I’m usually not getting it as soon as it’s available.
I will say that this problem is not limited to Adobe DPS magazines (but since the majority of the titles I subscribe to are built on the Adobe system, I notice it more), I also never get an alert or an automatic download for the SPIN Play app.
iOS Address Book access should prompt the user for permission
The popular Path app was caught uploading and permanently storing people’s entire address books on Path’s servers. People were upset, but what’s scarier is the bigger issue: apparently, this is a very common practice among popular apps.
It’s easy to set Path on fire for this, but accessing the iOS Address Book is essential to most “Find my friends on this service” features. Indeed, I use the Address Book for a similar feature in Instapaper as well. But there’s a big implementation difference between my method and Path’s.
The two Instapaper features that access the Address BookInstapaper accesses the Address Book for two features:
- The “Add ‘Read Later’ by Email” option in Settings, which creates a new Address Book contact with the customer’s special email-in address. This feature operates only on the device and does not send any information to the Instapaper servers. And the only reason it even reads the Address Book at all, rather than just writing to it, is to check for an existing copy of the “Read Later” contact so it doesn’t make a duplicate.
- When searching for new friends in the Friends section, I offer a “Search Contacts” option. This sends (over SSL) a list of email addresses to an Instapaper server, which issues a single
SELECTstatement on the user database to find any matches. That’s it. The list of email addresses isn’t stored (the query isn’t even logged), and only email addresses are sent, not anybody’s name, phone number, address, or other information.When implementing these features, I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty. Even though I was only accessing the data when a customer explicitly asked me to, I wanted to look at only what I needed to and get out of there as quickly as possible. I never even considered storing the data server-side or looking at more than I needed to.
This, apparently, is not a common implementation courtesy.
We can’t prevent services with poor judgment or low ethical standards from doing creepy things with the data once it’s sent to them. We can’t even realistically use App Review to only permit access to the Address Book fields (email, name, phone, etc.) that are justifiable for any given app to access, because there are too many gray areas.
But Apple can, and should, assure users that no app can read their contact data without their knowledge and explicit permission. I don’t know why this hasn’t always been required, but it probably isn’t a good enough reason to justify the erosion of user trust in iOS apps that this could cause.
Apple needs to change the Address Book API to require user permission first, like Core Location and Push Notifications do. I don’t care how many applications break as a result. Not requiring user permission to date should be treated as a security hole and patched promptly.
Sherlock, season one.
My annual ranking of the 30 MLB farm systems is up for Insiders. The top 100 follows tomorrow, with chats at noon ET (Spanish) and 1 pm ET (English).
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I admit to some reluctance to watch the BBC series Sherlock
, which takes the famed detective character and reimagines him in the present day, solving crimes loosely based on some of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t expect to like a series that so dramatically alters the setting of the original, and inevitably changes the character as well, but it’s surprisingly well done and engaging despite the occasional bit of TV-friendly drama to keep the hoi polloi interested. (The first season just aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery last month.)
Rather than directly adapt Conan Doyle’s stories into individual episodes, series creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss chose to write new stories based on one or more of the originals, stretching them out to about 88 minutes apiece, with three episodes per season. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played a significant supporting role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, plays the title character, a “consulting detective” who solves crimes the police can’t and keeps a blog on his exploits, infusing Holmes with substantial charisma despite his incredible aloofness and professed disinterest in human connections. Martin Freeman (of the UK version of The Office
and the middling film adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide
) plays Dr. John Watson, an Afghan war veteran paired up with Holmes by chance, forming an uneasy working relationship that’s more balanced than the partnership in Conan Doyle’s works, with Watson actually standing up for himself when he thinks Holmes is merely trying to humiliate him. (It doesn’t work, but at least he tried.)
The first season comprises three episodes, with the final one the tightest all around as the characters had become more developed and the crime (and its solution) was more clever and intricate. The first episode, “A Study in Pink,” has to get the two main characters together and define all manner of relationships within the show, and then has a drawn-out standoff between Sherlock and the killer because the BBC asked the producers to add another 30 minutes to the original hourlong show; the second episode was more focused on the crime, but the denouement was also over the top and involved a character who threatens to throw off the show’s equilibrium. The series does put Sherlock in danger a bit too often – while he did die in one of the original short stories, only to be resurrected by a recalcitrant Conan Doyle due to reader demand – even though we know he has to live till the next episode, making the drama from those scenes seem a little false, although I suppose it would be just as absurd to have the main character never find himself in any jeopardy at all.
Comparing Cumberbatch’s Holmes to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories is an exercise in frustration; I view the new Sherlock as inspired by the original character, rather than a mere adaptation. The series puts Sherlock in more situations that explore his lack of social skills, and Watson is more than just a foil for Holmes’ genius, providing commentary on Holmes’ bizarre behavior and personality. I did find myself regularly comparing this Sherlock Holmes to another TV character inspired by the literary one, Dr. Gregory House.
House is an unlikely protagonist for an American TV series, an antihero who aims for perfect rationality in his life and behavior, who solves cases for their puzzle aspects rather than any human elements, who abhors religion and other forms of authority, an unpleasant character you like because he’s clever, not because you love to hate him. Yet despite his claims of rational thought, he shows a malicious streak under the guise of flouting authority or establishing how much his superiors need him, whereas neither the literary Holmes nor the new BBC version exhibit any such behavior. Cumberbatch’s Holmes can be insulting – his line to Watson and a police officers, “Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring,” is brilliantly dismissive – but there’s no malice involved.
In just three episodes so far, we see subtle hints that Sherlock is aware he doesn’t quite fit in and might even be a little sad or ashamed about it, such as the time he lies to a potential client about how he knew the latter had recently traveled around the world. He’s arrogant, while House is misanthropic; Sherlock calls himself a sociopath (in response to the accusation that he’s a psychopath), but despite their shared focus on solving the puzzle for its own sake, Sherlock shows more glimmers of humanity in three episodes than House has in eight seasons. House has to rely on humor to make the show watchable, and with the show becoming less funny and its lead character more spiteful, the show’s quality has declined noticeably. Sherlock has some humor, but the stories and the two lead characters can drive the show on their own because there’s more to see and understand in the title character than there is in Dr. House.
Finally, it wouldn’t be a Klaw review of a British series without a mention of Foyle’s War, tied to Sherlock by (at least) a significant guest-starring role by Andrew Scott (who also appeared in The Hour). DCS Foyle is nothing like Holmes, of course; he has a normal range of emotions, but keeps them inside, producing a brooding, melancholy exterior that has become sharper with age. But what the two detectives do share is an attention to detail that characterizes most great literary detectives as well – crimes are solved when the investigator identifies some tiny inconsistency that exposes a wider range of evidence against the guilty party. Holmes solves his crimes through research, Foyle through interrogation, but both solve via deduction. The shows particularly differ in pacing, however – the London-based Sherlock moves quickly, not just in editing, but in dialogue and action, while Foyle’s War is almost leisurely and methodical, reflecting its bucolic setting and the illusion of peace while a war rages mere miles away. So if you’re a Sherlock fan looking for another British mystery series while you wait for season two to arrive here, give Foyle’s War a try.
Copper Pots as Kitchen Decor
Copper pots are a staple of the French kitchen; here are some images that inspire us to hang them en masse in our kitchens as well.
Above: A rustic tableau from the portfolio of photographer Simon Watson.
Above: Copper pots decorating a contemporary Shaker-style kitchen by Plain English.
Above: A gleaming lineup at the chateau Vaux le Vicomte in Maincy, France. Image via Divine Distractions.
Above: A grouping of copper pots (and copper cake pans) hang over a traditional range. Image via Inspired Interiors.
Above: A kitchen in France by photographer Simon Watson.
Above: Julia Child hung her copper pots on a pale blue pegboard. Image via the Smithsonian.
Where's the social networking on Star Trek?
Cat Valente remarks on the old-fashionedness on display in Star Trek DS9, particularly in regard to what the characters do and don't do with their free time, infinite bandwidth, extreme connectedness, and lack of scarcity.
Tags: Cat Valente Star Trek TVNobody sits around and plays Farmville. Nobody gets embroiled in a flame war concerning the portrayal of Klingons in human vids or just sits and watches vids with their feet up. Nope. The brave men and women of the future read (super old) books, talk to each other face to face, and even in their VR fantasies practice for things they will have to do in real life or, admittedly quite realistically, have space holosex. There is no WoW. There are no video games at all unless they are evil ones from Risa that will suck out your brains.
Because of this, and because of the lack of a social network, it is possible to be alone in the Star Trek world in a way which I would have to deliberately take action to achieve in my world. Even when we are alone, most of us check a number of communication vectors and leave them live--Twitter, email, text messages, Facebook, our blogs, Reddit, news feeds. We are a baby hivemind spinning our training wheels. To be alone as profoundly (to me) as Sisko, Kira, and the rest often are, I would have to make a decision to shut down all of those streams.
Getting your app to support Web Intents on Chrome
Chrome just got Web Intents support in Dev and Canary builds (18 onwards). This is a huge milestone and I am very excited by this first step along the path of building a more connected web of apps.
A lot of developers have asked me how to get started as it seems some of the demos on http://demos.webintents.org don't register correctly. I have a good answer for that - in short: Chrome doesn't yet detect the intent tag, instead applications currently can only register their support for an action such as "share" via the Chrome apps manifest.The longer version is a little more complex:
- Consensus over the introduction of a new tag in to the spec has not yet been reached.
- Working with members of the DAP in the intents task force, it is clear that discovery of applications and services shouldn't only take place by detecting a tag on a web page. What happens if the service you want to "Share" a video too is a TV connected to your local network? Or an external native application wants to be able to support a "Save" action. To enable this important use case the User Agent should be able to determine the services it presents to users, and this is why this is allowed in the specification (3rd paragraph).
Bringing this closer to home, because the discovery and presentation of an app's capabilities can be managed by the User Agent, and Chrome has the concept of extensions and installed apps we can quickly enable the intents feature by letting developers declare their support for actions in the manifest.So what does the declaration in the Chrome apps/extension system look like? It is pretty easy, it is an entry into the manifest called "intents". It looks like:{
"name": "Share to Gmail™",
"version": "0.0.0.2",
"icons" : {
"16" : "favicon.ico"
},
"intents" : {
"http://webintents.org/share" : {
"type" : ["text/uri-list"],
"title" : "Share to Gmail",
"path" : "/launch.html"
}
}
}It is that simple. The intent section includes a dictionary of supported action (http://webintents.org/share) and in each action object there is an array of data types that the application or extension can handle, the friendly name to appear in the picker and a path to what should be opened when the user selects your app. The client-side code remains exactly the same as it would in a normal web app.In the long term we want applications to be able to declare their capabilities and services directly through their html and this will be done with the Intent tag. However whilst the standardisation work continues we want to make sure that developers today can start building apps that can take advantage of the Web Intent system.A lot more examples can be found on the Web Intents Github repository.Expect a lot more posts about how to build applications that love each other with Web Intents.
Ease of Use is User Respect
@cieslak People seem to think that making stuff easy to use is only for the benefit of stupid users. Expertise comes in different flavors.
@bradlarson The same “stupid users” who fix your car, or perform surgery on you, or teach your kid a foreign language. Drives me nuts.
The US temporarily regains relevance for Apple’s iPhone
Sprint reported its first iPhone quarter sales at 1.8 million. You may recall my analysis of Sprint’s “gamble” where I estimated that Sprint will easily sell the 31 million iPhone which they committed to buy from Apple. I had estimated that they could sell an average of 7 million units a year but perhaps conservatively they could ramp at 4, 6, 9 and 12 over the four year period rumored to be in the contract.
Given the pent-up demand I also estimated that the first quarter could reach 2 million units. They managed 1.8 and that’s a solid start. Overall the US carriers activated 13.7 million iPhones. Here are the iPhone activations by US Operator:
That’s 37% of the total market in Q4, shown in area and bar charts below:
Note that the percent of total activations outside the US has dropped but that is due to the limited distribution of the iPhone 4S outside the US in the launch quarter. The long-term trend is for the US to decrease as a percent of total iPhones even with the additional US distribution.
By comparing the net adds to US install base from comScore survey data, we can estimate that about 63% of US purchases of iPhones were replacements and that 8.7 million iPhones were put out of use in the US last quarter.
bobby neel adams: agemaps
this collection of photographs overlays two images of the same person at two points within their life, demonstrating the effects of the aging process over time.
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Play Ottoneu And Punch Cancer In The Face
As many of you know, last July I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. I spent a good chunk of the summer in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy, and most of the end of 2011 was spent either getting treatment or recovering from said treatment. It wasn’t much fun — but after four rounds of chemo and an overwhelming amount of support from friends and the amazing online baseball community — I was given a clean bill of health in January and am now happily living in remission. We’re only a month out from my last biopsy, but the leukemia has yet to return, and my odds of beating this thing get better every day.
So, now that I’m back to living something that resembles a normal life, my wife and I have decided to fight back against the scourge of blood cancers. She’s a physician assistant in oncology and sees the effects of these diseases are on a daily basis, and so we’ve teamed up with four of her co-workers (and one husband of a co-worker) and are running in The Flying Pig half-marathon in Cincinnati on May 6th.
Our group is part of a larger organization under the umbrella of Team In Training, a fundraising arm of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. LLS is the leading organization in the fight against blood cancers, and it provides support (financial, informational and emotional) to patients and families of these diseases, as well as funding critical research that is on the cutting edge of the fight against leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s Disease and myeloma. The advances made in these fields are one of the reasons I’m not dead, and the LLS is a vital organization for those who have been touched by these types of cancer.
The seven of us have an official team fundraising goal of just over $16,000. I fully expect to blow that mark out of the water. This is where you guys come in.
If you’d like to donate to the LLS through our team page, you can simply follow this link and use the donate button on the right hand side to give directly to the group. All donations are tax deductible, and you will get a receipt from LLS for your contribution. Plus, you’ll know that you did something awesome, and those who fight these diseases in the future may very well beat death because of your support.
Additionally, I’ve decided to unretire from fantasy baseball to help raise money for the cause. As an incentive to donate, we’re going to be giving away 11 spots in an Ottoneu League to the highest donors who want to take their shot at embarrassing me on a national stage. I haven’t played any kind of roto baseball in quite some time, but I still have my pride, and I’ll be doing my best to retain some dignity against the 11 heroes who gave generously given to help stamp out the curse of blood cancers.
If you want to be part of this “Cancer Sucks” Ottoneu League, simply go to our group page and make a (large) donation using your real name. Then, send an email to dave.cameron@fangraphs.com stating that you’re interested in being part of the Ottoneu League. At the end of February, we’ll go through the donation logs and find the 10 people who gave the most money and expressed interest, and they’ll be offered a team in the league. As an incentive to not wait until the last minute, we’ll be giving away the first spot in the league to the person who donates the most money by this Friday. If you give more than anyone else in the next three days, you’re in.
The LLS is rated as a three-star charity and is a fantastic organization that is more than worthy of your support. Only 8% of the money raised goes to administrative costs, and they’ve given more than $600 million to cancer research since being founded. Help us raise money for this great organization and simultaneously tell cancer that it can go pound sand.
Thanks to each of you for your support over the past six months. You guys are great, and I’m honored to be part of such a fantastic community.
Respect my authoritah
“...I think there should be some more respect for capital.”
Janice Hester-Amey, CalSTRS Corporate Governance portfolio manager, lectures Mark Zuckerberg how to treat his new set of friends
Jeremy Lin, the Surprising Knickerbocker
The Knicks have had some trouble at point guard. They were also coming up quickly on a deadline where they had to make a decision about players with non-guaranteed contracts. Enter, Jeremy Lin. He led the Harvard basketball team, but was not drafted by an NBA team. After floating around the team for a year, the Knicks picked him up.
In the first 23 games, he averaged 2.3 minutes and 1.4 points a game. In the last two he has averaged 40.5 minutes and 26.5 points. He’s now the starting point guard for the Knicks and the talk of the city and American Chinese/Taiwanese community. It’s pretty amazing.
His contract, potentially worth nearly $800,000, was not even guaranteed until Tuesday afternoon. So for the past six weeks, Lin, 23, has been sleeping in his brother Josh’s living room, waiting for clarity and career security.
“He has his own couch,” Josh Lin, a New York University dental student, said cheerfully.
And to make it even more interesting:
Dwyane Wade per 48 minutes: 29.4 PTS, 6.2 REB, 7.6 AST, 2.8 STL. Jeremy Lin per 48 minutes: 30.2 PTS, 6.0 REB, 11.4 AST, 2.5 STL.
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) February 7, 2012Woh.
Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2012/02/jeremy_lin_the_surprising_knickerbocker.php
No framework needed
It goes without saying that we use Rails a lot here at 37signals. Often times, when we look at a problem, we turn to Rails or something similar, because when you have a high-performance precision screwdriver, everything starts to look like a finely engineered screw. Sometimes, what you really need is a big hammer, because what you’re looking at is a nail.
Our public sites – sites like 37signals.com and basecamphq.com – are a perfect example of this.
Let me tell you about our journey with these sites over the years, and how we’ve landed on a simple solution that boosted conversion rate by about 5%.
Good enough
There’s nothing particularly dynamic about these sites; we might throw a “Happy Monday” in there, or we might make some tweaks based on a URL parameter, and we A/B test them extensively, but there’s no database or background services involved.
Stretching back to the pre-Basecamp days, the 37signals.com site was written with PHP. There was no Rails back then, Ruby wasn’t commonly used for web development, and DHH and others worked in PHP, so it was the logical choice. As we added sites, they continued to use PHP since it was fast and easy. This worked well for years and years—our public sites were relatively performant and rock-stable, and we didn’t really have many problems. The biggest pain was in setting up for local development, which ended up being quite the pain to get set up in OS X in a way that behaved well with Pow, Passenger, etc.
Getting better
A few years ago, Sam Stephenson and Josh Peek wrote Brochure as a way to translate our marketing sites to Rack apps. This solved the local development challenges, and let us use a language we were all generally more comfortable with. It was a little slower than PHP, and meant dealing with Passenger on deployment, but it was a fair compromise at the time. We moved one site to brochure, and then ran out of steam to move the rest – work on our applications took a higher priority.
A few months ago I took a serious look at our public sites’ performance. They were making a lot of requests for individual assets and page load times were pretty poor – Basecamp itself loaded much faster than the essentially static signup page for it. Local setup problems with the PHP sites also meant that it was harder to work on the sites, and so we were less productive and less inclined to work on them.
Back to the basics for fun and profit
Our solution to this (in addition to spriting images and cleaning up unused styles and Javascript) was to switch to using totally static HTML pages. We’re using the stasis gem to compile
.html.erbfiles locally and on deploy, along with Sprockets to pre-process and concatenate stylesheets and Javascript. Our web server ends up serving plain old HTML and a single CSS and Javascript file, with no interpretation.This makes local development easy, and what you see locally is always what will be deployed. This also makes it trivial to distribute the marketing site to multiple datacenters or distribution networks around the world—just upload the compiled files, rather than worrying about dependencies for running an interpreted site.
While we haven’t done that yet, just from some mild spriting and cleanup and moving to static HTML, we shaved about half a second off the total load time for basecamphq.com, and saw about a 5% improvement in conversion rate result from that (the link between page speed and conversion rate has been studied more rigorously as well by the likes of Google, Amazon, etc.).
The Maps We Wandered Into as Kids
If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction—doesn't matter. Every work would have an appendix filled with diagrams, background information, digressions and anecdata. And of course, maps. Lots and lots of maps. This predilection probably sprang from the books I read as a kid—books like The Phantom Tollbooth, The Hobbit and The Princesss Bride—all of which feature engaging maps that serve as gateways to imaginary lands. Here, say these maps, you're in this other world now. Read the full story at The Awl
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patrick partouche: maison container lille
eight poppy red shipping containers have been stacked and combined to generate 208 square meters of usable living space, overlooking the french countryside through a transparent enclosure.
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February 7, 2012
Designs of the Year 2012
This year’s Designs of the Year show has opened at the Design Museum, with the usual eclectic mix of exhibits ranging from architecture to miniature vacuum cleaners via a wedding dress, an ambulance and some websites. Plus, of course, a few editorial projects. Here they are.
The front covers of Bloomberg Businessweek have become news events in their own right, and the brief slection from the last year demonstrate the variety Richard Turley and team rustle up weekly.
The Guardian’s excellent iPad app is one of two publishing apps in the show. It’s becoming ever more relavent now the printed edition consists of fewer sections and sharing the days edition is more difficult.
French fashion magazine Self Service makes a surprise appearance. I say surprise not because it isn’t worth inclusion, but because it’s been around for some time and as far as I’m aware hasn’t done anything particularly new in the past year. But it’s good to see it again – great typography.
And lastly, Tim Moore’s Letter to Jane app. A couple of years ago this exhibition included the then all-new Wired app; last year Flipboard won the interactive category. It’s good to see LtJ and The Guardian representing the latest iPad editorial developments.
As ever, the exhibition as a whole works like all ‘best-of’ lists. You’ll argue with what’s there and question things that are missing, and you’ll have the ‘how can you compare that dress with this wind-powered animated screen’ conversation along the way. It’s a highly subjective set of exhibits. But it’s always worth a look for that very reason.
(Disclosure: I was one of the people nominating work for the show).
104. José Méndez: Beating The Reds Black & Blue
Before I start off this week's story, please let me thank ESPN's Jim Caple for the beautiful article he wrote about my cards. I don't think I could have envisioned a nicer write-up on my work and Jim was a really great guy to talk to, which I discovered while being interviewed for the article. Anyway, here's this week's ballplayer, a guy I've gotten quite a few requests for - José Méndez.
When the Cincinnati Reds disembarked in Havana in early November, 1908, they expected a nice, leisurely vacation and nice, easy exhibition games against the locals. Baseball was an American game and hell, they were The Cincinnati Reds of the National League. Though they finished in 5th place, the Reds were tried and true professionals - Hans Lobert’s .293 average was 6th best in the league and he finished in the top five in hits, triples, games played, total bases, singles and stolen bases. No, they weren’t a great team, but they were National Leaguers, surely more than a match for the island competition they were going to face in the 11 exhibition games over the next 2 weeks.
The first game they played was on November 12th against the Havana Reds. Luis Padrón gave up seven hits to the Reds and lost 3-1. Three days later they were slated to meet the Havana Reds’ rival club, the Almandares Blues.
12,000 fans packed into Almandares Stadium to watch the Americanos play their Azules. No one recorded what the Cincinnati players thought when the Blues’ pitcher took his warm-up pitches before the game, but it must have made them lick their lips. The skinny fella that stood on the mound that day was barely 5’-8” tall, black as coal and his own teammates called him by the unflattering nickname “Congo”. Surely this was going to be an easy win.
The only problem was this skinny kid was José Méndez, perhaps one of the top 5 greatest pitchers of all time.
Raised on the sugar cane plantations in Cardenas, Méndez became a skilled carpenter as well as talented clarinet and guitar player. Some say he had quite a voice as well. He was discovered playing semi-pro ball and the Almandares club signed him in 1906 where he promptly went 9-0 and was the top pitcher in the Cuban Winter League. Méndez had a blinding fast rising fastball, and if that wasn’t good enough, he also threw a wicked curve. Both these pitches were helped out with Méndez’s unique physical traits - he had extra long arms and attached to them were equally long fingers - these gave him an extra spin on the ball as he released it.
Méndez followed up his rookie season with a 15-6 record and this is where he stood as he faced the Cincinnati Reds that day.
To start off the game Méndez retired the side in order. Facing Cincinnati rookie Jean Dubuc, who would go on to a successful 9 year career in the majors, Almandares scored a quick run to make it 1-0. For the next 8 innings Méndez and Dubuc dueled each other, matching zeros on the scoreboard. But unlike Dubuc, Méndez hadn’t allowed a hit - he was pitching a no-hitter.
As the ninth inning commenced, Méndez got two out when Reds second baseman Miller Huggins, the future Yankees manager, hit a weak grounder between first and second. Méndez and first baseman Regino García went for the ball but neither could make the play. It was a cheap single but Huggins made it to first and the no-hitter was busted. Méndez bore down and got the next batter to end the game.
It wasn’t a no-hitter, but heck, a 1-hitting a major league team wasn’t something to sniff at!
Smarting from the embarrassing loss to an unknown black Cuban, the Reds won their next exhibition game 8-0 against the Havana Reds. Cuban sports pages at the time opined that the Havana club didn’t field their best players that day, but a win is a win and the big leaguers needed it. On November 19th Cincinnati faced Almandares again and lost 2-1 as Andrés Ortega held them to just 3 hits.
The following afternoon the Reds took a break from the Cubans and took on some of their countrymen, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, a Negro league team. If they thought they would be any easier than the Cubans, they were sorely mistaken as Brooklyn beat the heck out of them 9 to 1. The Reds were only able to get 6 hits off the Royal Giants and the great Pete Hill hit a home run, a rare feat in the cavernous baseball stadiums they played in down in Cuba.
After a day off, a desperate Cincinnati Reds team jumped all over the Havana team and won 11-4.
The next afternoon, November 23rd, brought the Americans back to Almandares Stadium and they were defeated by the Blues for the third strait time, 4-3.
Then on the 25th Cincinnati got by Havana again 5 to 1. The Americans now had 3 days off to regroup. So far their record stood at 4 and 4 against 2 Cuban League teams and 1 Negro league squad. In the past, visiting major league ball clubs could usually sleepwalk their way through an exhibition series in the islands, but now, something was different.
I’m sure the Reds weren’t all that excited to arrive at Almandares Stadium again on the afternoon of the 29th, but things started off well for them because by the 3rd inning they were up 3-0 over the Blues. Then that damn little Cuban kid came walking out of the bullpen.
José Méndez took the ball and proceeded to throw 6 shut-out innings against Cincinnati. Although the Reds won the game, Méndez had now racked up 16 innings without the big leagues being able to score. The Cuban public went bananas. The local sports writers predicted before the series that the home teams would hold their own against the Americans, but what was unfolding before their eyes was beyond their wildest dreams.
The next day Cincinnati was to face the Havana Reds again but before the game began the Americans protested about the umpiring of the games thus far. The Cuban newspapers took note of this and called it what it was - a cheap excuse. Havana proceeded to best the Reds 6-4.
There was another break in the series and the Americanos had a few days to pick up the broken pieces of what was supposed to be their playing-holiday in the sun. And it was going to get worse. Almandares was next on the schedule.
In what was beginning to seem like deja-vu all over again, Jose Mendez shut out the Reds 3 zip and now had an incredible 25 CONSECUTIVE scoreless innings of work against a major league team!
The next day Cincinnati finally found an opponent they could trounce - the amateur Vedado Tennis Club - and slapped them around 13-3.
Inspired by this easy win the Reds defeated Havana 4-1, but now they had to head over to Almandares Stadium again. There the Reds were wrapping up a win going into the bottom of the ninth ahead 6 to 3 when the Blues tied it up. Mercifully for the Reds, the game was called due to darkness the following inning.
The last game of the series was against the Blues again and of course, José Méndez got the ball for Almandares. In the first he had his scoreless inning streak ended but he held the Reds to 9 harmless hits and won again 6-2.
The Reds slinked home and José Méndez traded in the nickname “Congo” for the much more regal moniker of “El Diamante Negro” or “The Black Diamond”. His Cuban fame preceded him to the U.S. where he pitched splendidly for the Cuban Stars, All Nations, Chicago American Giants and Kansas City Monarchs for over 20 years. New York Giants manager John McGraw famously said he would be worth $30,000 to his team, if only he were white. Among the other marquee big league talent he bested was Christy Mathewson, Eddie Plank and Chief Bender. Towards the end of his career he was made manager of Kansas City and led the Monarchs to Negro National League pennants in 1924, 1925 and 1926 as well as the Colored World Championship in 1924.
Much of the Cincinnati Reds series highlights were gleaned from Gary Ashwill's great baseball research blog, Agate Type. Ever the groundbreaking baseball archaeologist, Gary uncovered all the games played by the Reds down in Cuba in 1908 and their results. As far as I know, until his research no one ever published a full account of that trip.
Must Get Book! Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons
Every blue moon a truly exceptional book on art and activism is released. The latest one is Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons edited by Therese Quinn, John Ploof, and Lisa Hochtritt. I am still making my way through it, so this post is not a definitive review, simply a first impression. For starters, the text, unlike so many Routledge books is relatively affordable (around $40 for the paperback). Yes, that is high for a paper book, but many Routledge books are over $100 and out-of-reach to just about everyone besides the University libraries who purchased them.
So, why should one purchase this book. Simple. The text is written in clear prose, it synthesizes a vast range of activist art being produced NOW, and provides an excellent balance between short biographical essays on activist artists and critical essays in defense of the public sphere (including public education) during an era of right-wing privatization. In short, the text acts as a useful "first text" to those just learning about activist art, while also operating as a text that adds much critical discussion to those already versed in the practice and the theory.
The lists of artists profiled is impressive and includes the ToroLab, Emily Jacir, Xu Bing, Edgar Heap of Birds, Bernard Williams, and the Future Farmers, to name just a few. (the full table of contents is after the break) And on a side note, the very first essay is by David Darts and profiles Justseeds and the Cut and Paint zine project! Yours truly penned an essay on Rafael Trelles - the Puerto Rican artist whose reverse stencil images rail out at US imperialism and militarism, i.e. the bombing of Vieques.
To learn more about the book, check out the companion website here.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Foreword Bill Ayers and Maxine Greene, illustrated by Ryan Alexander-Tanner Editors Introduction Therese Quinn, John Ploof, and Lisa Hochtritt
I. The Commons: Redistribution of Resources and Power Introduction Section One Therese Quinn 1. Justseeds: An Artists' Cooperative David Darts 2. Heidi Cody: Letters to the World and the ABCs of Visual Culture Kevin Tavin 3. Kutiman: It's the Mother of All Funk Chords K. Wayne Yang 4. ToroLab: Border Research Gone Molecular Nato Thompson 5. Mequitta Ahuja: Afro-Galaxy Romi Crawford 6. Emily Jacir: The Intersection of Art and Politics Edie Pistolesi 7. Paula Nicho Cúmez: Crossing Borders Kryssi Staikidis 8. Rafael Trelles: Cleaning Up the Stain of Militarism Nicolas Lampert 9. Experience, Discover, Interpret, and Communicate: Material Culture Studies and Social Justice in Art Education Doug Blandy 10. Educational Crisis: An Artistic Intervention Dipti Desai and Elizabeth Koch 11. Social Media/Social Justice: The (Creative) Commons and K-12 Art Education Robert W. Sweeny and Hannah Johnston
II. Our Cultures: Recognition and Representation Introduction to Section Two John Ploof 12. Kaisa Leka: Confusing the Disability/Ability Divide Carrie Sandahl 13. Darrel Morris: Men Don’t Sew in Public Dónal O’Donoghue 14. Nicholas Galanin: Imaginary Indian and the Indigenous Gaze Anne-Marie Tupuola 15. Kimsooja: The Performance of Universality Dalida María Benfield 16. Xu Bing: Words of Art Buzz Spector 17. Bernard Williams: Art as Reinterpretation, Identity as Art James Haywood Rolling, Jr. 18. Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Beyond the Chief Elizabeth Delacruz 19. Samuel Fosso: Queering Performances of Realness G. E. Washington 20. Cultural Conversations in Spiral Curriculum Olivia Gude 21. Arts Making as an Act of Theory Miia Collanus and Tiina Heinonen 22. Pedagogy, Collaboration, and Transformation: A Conversation with Brett Cook Korina Jocson and Brett Cook
III. Toward Futures: Social and Personal Transformation Introduction to Section Three Lisa Hochtritt 23. Harrell Fletcher: Shaping a New Social Juan Carlos Castro 24. Pinky & Bunny: Critical Pedagogy 2.0 Steven Ciampaglia 25. La Pocha Nostra: Practicing Mere Life Jorge Lucero 26. Future Farmers: Leaping Over the Impossible Present A. Laurie Palmer 27. Appalshop: Learning from Rural Youth Media Maritza Bautista 28. Navjot Altaf: What Public, Whose Art? Manisha Sharma 29. The Chiapas Photography Project: You Can’t Unsee It Lisa Yun Lee 30. Dilomprizulike: Art as Political Agency Raimundo Martins 31. In Search of Clean Water and Critical Environmental Justice: Collaborative Artistic Responses Through the Possibilities of Sustainability and Appropriate Technologies B. Stephen Carpenter, II and Marissa Muñoz 32. Opening Spaces for Subjectivity in an Urban Middle-School Art Classroom: A Dialogue between Theory and Practice Carol Culp and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández 33. Story Drawings: Revisiting Personal Struggles, Empathizing with ‘Others’ Sharif Bey
IV. Voices of Teachers Introduction Section Four Graeme Sullivan, Art Matters 34. Holding the Camera Maura Nugent 35. The Streets Are Our Canvas: Skateboarding, Hip-Hop, and School Keith (K-Dub) Williams 36. The Zine Teacher's Dilemma Jesse Senechal 37. Miracle on 79th Street: Using Community as Curriculum Delaney Gersten Susie 38. Public School, Public Failure, Public Art? Bert Stabler 39. Animating The Bill of Rights William Estrada 40. Think Twice, Make Once Anne Thulson 41. Art History and Social Justice in the Middle School Classroom Kimberly Lane 42. Whatever Comes Next will be Made and Named by Us Vanessa López-Sparaco About the Contributors Figure Credits and Permissions Index
Liz Phair on Why Lana Del Rey Scares Rock's Boys Club
Liz Phair on Why Lana Del Rey Scares Rock's Boys Club: Let me break it down for you: she’s writing herself into existence. She’s giving herself a part to play because, God knows, no one else will and she wants to matter in this life. As far as I can tell, it’s working. I went straight to iTunes and bought her new release ‘Born To Die’ in toto (how often do I do that??) because it was more than a collection of songs or a performance, it was a phenomenon. Maybe all the more so because she’s not overwhelmingly talented. The minute I hear the whisperings of ‘how dare she,’ I’m interested. I don’t have to like it, it doesn’t have to be worthy. … So how does Liz Phair feel about Lana Del Rey? Well, as a recording artist, I’ve been hated, I’ve been ridiculed, and conversely, hailed as the second coming. All that matters in the end is that I’ve been heard. Via Emily Gould of Emily Books.
A deeper look at Chrome for Android
Today, we introduced Chrome for Android Beta, which brings Chrome’s capabilities to phones and tablets running Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. This is made possible by a range of innovative features and by building a mobile browser from the ground up that makes full use of the underlying architecture built into Android 4.0.
Chrome for Android brings support for many of the latest HTML5 features to the Android platform. With hardware-accelerated canvas, overflow scroll support, strong HTML5 video support, and new capabilities such as Indexed DB, WebWorkers and Web Sockets, Chrome for Android is a solid platform for developing web content on mobile devices.
In addition to support for the latest web technologies, we hope to make interactive web content super easy to develop. Chrome for Android introduces remote debugging through Chrome Developer Tools to make it simple for developers to debug web sites running live on their mobile devices.
Much of the code for Chrome for Android is already shared with Chromium and over the coming weeks, the Chromium team will be upstreaming many new components developed for Chrome for Android to Chromium, WebKit and other projects.
We’ve got a lot more planned to make Chrome as feature-rich on mobile devices as it is on the desktop. We encourage you to follow any of the ongoing development via the issue tracker or join in on chromium-dev@chromium.org.
Posted by Arnaud Weber, Engineering Manager, Chrome
Happy Birthday to one of my favorite authors
At its source, the map is interactive, offering references to the relevant novels and links to an 1859 map, Google Maps, and Wikipedia.
How to Make Heart-Shaped Pizza and Heart-Shaped Pepperoni
Valentine's Day is around the corner, so it's about time we pulled these guides from the archives for you ...
Video: How to Make a Heart-Shaped Pizza ̱
Make Heart-Shaped Pepperoni »Happy VDay, pizza-lovers!
It's Time for Something New
I have a (very delayed) announcement to make. After 5 years, depending on how you count, I have left SAY Media (aka Six Apart aka Apperceptive) to join OKCupid. Also, this happened about 3 months ago. What can I say, I’ve been busy.
I am in their office in Times Square, but not working on the product directly. Instead, I’m working with a small team (about 8 people) to build new social products. You could call it a startup incubator or a research and development lab, but it’s just a few smart people building web products. And so far, I’m having a blast.
For a little catharsis, I’ll share a bit about why I’m making this move. During my last year at SAY, I transitioned completely to a product management role. There was a lot to like about it, as I had almost complete control over my product and there were a ton of really smart people (not to mention the company is doing quite well). I also learned that I’m far more excited and effective when I’ve got my hands in the code or design than when I’m just poring over Gantt charts and JIRA tickets. In fact, I think it’s pretty difficult to effectively lead a product without getting your hands dirty. I didn’t do that nearly enough at SAY, but it’s a part of my daily routine now. When I have an idea, I build it, we play with it, and we move forward. It’s been a great way to work and I’m feeling a lot more productive.
I’ve also confirmed a long-held suspicion — I work best in the early stages of a project. Conceiving, prototyping, building, and shipping a new product is what I do best. It’s why I liked working in client services with Appercetive and it’s why I took this new gig. The ridiculously smart people in this office is just icing on the cake.
While we don’t have any projects ready for the public yet, I can guarantee I’ll write about them here. I’ll also work on improving my event to blog post latency. Either that or I’ll start trumpeting the hot new thing, Slow Blogging.
The lessons of Steve Jobs
At the end of this month Jeff Atwood is leaving Stack Exchange, a company he cofounded with Joel Spolsky. In a post on his blog, he explains why:
Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn't sustainible for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, highlighted the risks for a lot of folks. [...] Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
In his post, Jeff points to a similar post by another entrepreneur, Brad Wardell.
In the last several years, the company has been successful enough to generate a substantial amount of capital. And with it, I have been fortunate to bring in people with great talent. And so I started thinking of all the amazing things we would do. I would put in crazy hours to do it, of course, but we would go and do amazing things.
Then Steve Jobs died.
And suddenly I realized something. What is the objective here? My oldest child just turned 15. My other two are no longer little either. And I have been missing out on them.
And another from Eric Karjaluoto:
For a long time, work was my only thing. I worked evenings, weekends, and Christmas. At those rare times when I wasn't at work in body, I was there in spirit, unable to speak or think of much else. I wanted so badly to climb the mountain that I stopped asking why I was doing it.
I admire [Jobs] for the mountains he climbed. At the same time, I wonder if he missed the whole point, becoming the John Henry of our time. He won the race, but at what cost?
Me? I may turn out to be a failure in business, but I refuse to fail my kids.
This mirrors my main reaction to Jobs' death and Isaacson's book as well. I wasn't working 80 hours a week or leading a growing company or even spending very little time with my kids but I was pushing pretty hard on Stellar, pushing it towards a potential future of insane working hours, intense stress, and a whole lot less time with my family (and selfishly, less time for myself). Since Jobs died, I've been pushing a little less hard in that direction.
Four is hardly a trend but it is interesting that the death and biography of the greatest businessman of our generation -- someone who was responsible for so many world-changing products and ideas, who shaped our world through sheer force of will & imagination, etc. etc. -- is inspiring some people to turn away from the lifestyle & choices that made Jobs so successful & inspiring in the public sphere and to attempt the path that Jobs did not.
Tags: Jeff Atwood parenting Steve Jobs working
If You Like Buster Posey, Try Miguel Montero
Ever notice that sometimes the Aldi brand tastes just as good as the name brand, at a fraction of the price? In my new "If you like..." series, we're looking for that kind of value in fantasy drafts. Today, I suggest that if you like Buster Posey, try Miguel Montero at catcher.
Posey currently has a 59.55 average draft position at Mock Draft Central, while Montero is at 102.42. Think of the players you could take instead of Posey in the fifth or sixth round -- Matt Cain, Stephen Strasburg, James Shields, Pablo Sandoval, Mat Latos, and Madison Bumgarner, to name a few.
Posey, of course, unfortunately took a big hit at home plate in late May last year from the Marlins' Scott Cousins. He endured a broken fibula and severely strained ligaments in his left ankle, and the surgery ended his 2011 season. The latest word is that he's on track to be the Giants' Opening Day catcher, and will play first base at least once a week. But with a 24-year-old potential superstar who is under team control through 2016, the Giants have every reason to be cautious with Posey in 2012. First base appearances will help keep his ABs up, but he's probably going to need more days off. Projection systems, which generally assume no dropoff in performance after an injury like this, call for around .280-16-65-60-3 if Posey is to get 475 ABs. Are you comfortable projecting more ABs than that and assuming no rust from the injury and time off?
Then there's Montero, who had a big year for the 2011 Diamondbacks. He set a career high with 140 games, and entering a contract year has every reason to push himself for a repeat. But if we cautiously reduce his 493 AB total to, say, 460, we get something like .277-17-70-59-1. Aside from Posey's potential first base eligibility, it's entirely possible the two players are very similar in value in 2012. Even if Montero brings 75% of Posey's value, isn't that worth taking him 43 picks later?
Words, Words, Words
It’s Nice That has taken over a number of windows in Selfridges for part of the department store’s Words Words Words season, an initiative promoting the creative power of words and literature. Collaborating with the (wonderfully named) interactive designer Stewdio, It’s Nice That has created ‘The Word-A-Coaster’, a fortune telling machine that will distribute 30,000 unique fortunes to Selfridges visitors. I.N.T. has also collaborated with Ben Long, Chrissie Macdonald, and Giles Miller on additional word-themed windows in the shop. Beyond these displays, Selfridges is featuring a host of related events now through the 1st of March, including a number of talks curated by It’s Nice That.
Cartographies of Time: A Visual History of the Timeline
A chronology of one of our most inescapable metaphors, or what Macbeth has to do with Galileo.
I was recently asked to select my all-time favorite books for the lovely Ideal Bookshelf project by The Paris Review’s Thessaly la Force. Despite the near-impossible task of shrinking my boundless bibliophilia to a modest list of dozen or so titles, I was eventually able to do it, and the selection included Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton — among both my 7 favorite books on maps and my 7 favorite books on time, this lavish collection of illustrated timelines traces the history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present, featuring everything from medieval manuscripts to websites to a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain.
The first chapter, Time in Print, begins with a context for these images:
While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored. This is no small matter: graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.* Yet, little has been written about historical charts and diagrams. And, for all of the excellent work that has been recently published on the history and theory of cartography, we have few examples of work in the area Eviatar Zerubavel has called time maps. This book is an attempt to address that gap.”
* Cue in Visual Storytelling and graphic designer Francesco Franchi on representation vs. interpretation.
The Morning News has a wonderful slideshow of images from the book this week. A few favorites:
The Histomap by John Sparks,1931.
In this universal history Johannes Buno, 1672, each millennium before the birth of Christ is depicted by an image of a large allegorical being. This dragon represents the fourth millennium B.C.
In the 1860s, French engineer Charles Joseph Minard pioneered several new infographic techniques. Published in 1869, this endures as his most famous graphic, featuring two diagrams that depict the size and attrition of the armies of Hannibal in his expedition across the Alps during the Punic wars and of Napoleon during his assault on Russia. The faded-red color band indicates the army’s strength of numbers, with one millimeter in thickness representing ten thousand men. The chart of Napoleon's march also includes a measure of temperature.
While mapping the body, the mind, and the heavens might be traced back to antiquity, mapping time, Rosenberg and Grafton remind us, is a fairly nascent enterprise:
The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have. And yet, in its modern form, with a single axis and a regular, measured distribution of dates, it is a relatively recent invention. Understood in this strict sense, the timeline is not even 250 years old. How this could be possible, what alternatives existed before, and what competing possibilities for representing historical chronology are still with us, is the subject of this book.”
A 'synchronous chart' from Meteorographica (1863) by Francis Galton, pioneer of the study and mapping of weather. The chart represents weather conditions, barometric pressure, and wind direction at a single moment in time across the geographic space of Europe.
Discus chronologicus by German engraver Christoph Weigel, published in the early 1720s, is a paper chart with a pivoting central arm. Rings represent kingdoms, radial wedges represent centuries, and the names of kingdoms are printed on the moveable arm.
From literature to art history to technology, Cartographies of Time offers a fascinating and dimensional lens on what it means to peer from a single moment of time outward into all other moments that came before and will come after, and inward into our own palpable yet subjective perception of permanence and its opposite.
Images courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press / The Morning News
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Vegan: Braised Eggplant with Tofu in Garlic Sauce
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Note: For the four weeks between January 14th and February 11th, I'm adopting a completely vegan lifestyle. Every weekday I'll be updating my progress with a diary entry and a recipe. For past posts, check here!
Woks are generally associated with super high heat, rapid cooking, and smoking hot oil, but there are other, gentler methods of cooking in one. Braising (or simmering) in a wok is about the simplest thing you can do with it. It doesn't require the crazy high heat you need for stir-frying (at least, no much of it) and it doesn't require mad flipping skills. In fact, it doesn't even require a lot of time, particularly when working with a tender vegetable like eggplant.
Wok-simmering is my go-to method for cooking eggplant. I like how the spongy flesh absorbs sauce and gets a tender, lightly chewy texture almost like soft braised meat. Many folks like to purge their eggplants by salting them and letting them rest before cooking them. I don't bother with this step, particularly not when using thing Chinese or Japanese eggplants, which basically have no bitterness whatsoever and thus don't need to be purged (even modern cultivars of globe eggplants have very little bitterness).
What I do do to them is par-cook them either by steaming in a bamboo steamer set over my wok, or (as is more frequently the case these days), but microwaving them until completely softened. Par-cooking not only gets them to cook more evenly, but it also speeds up the whole process. Rather than having to simmer for half an hour in the sauce until tender, with par-cooked eggplant the whole thing comes together in just a few minutes (even counting the 10 to 15 minutes it takes to par-cook, you're well in the green). This means less time standing and stirring, less time waiting for dinner, and more time to move on to bigger and better concerns like what you're going to be eating the next day.
Braised Eggplant with Garlic Sauce is a classic Sichuan dish that combines soft simmered eggplant, fermented soy beans, and a sweet, garlicky sauce. For this version, I like to add a few tablespoons of chopped up preserved mustard root (you can find this canned or jarred in any good Chinese market—if not, you can omit it. Its role is largely textural) and incorporate the garlic in a couple of ways: first, by cooking whole smashed cloves in oil to infuse it with flavor (I discard the cooked whole cloves), as well as sliced thin and sauteed along with the other aromatics.
The sauce is a simple mix of Chinese wine, soy sauce, sugar, and fermented soybean paste (also available in Chinese markets). You can go with 100% eggplant if you'd like, but I like to add cubes of firm silken tofu (my tofu of choice for braising) to transform this into a one-pot-meal.
Get The Recipe!
Braised Eggplant with Tofu in Garlic Sauce »
About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.
Get the Recipe!
February 6, 2012
nike prosthetic running sole
developed in collaboration with amputee triathlete sarah reinersten and össur orthopedic innovators, the 'nike sole' is one of the first commercial removable outsoles, designed for use with össur's 'flex-run' prosthetic foot.
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Popular Mechanics (US)
Again an ace cover Popular Mechanics: "whether its practical DIY home tips, gadget news, test drives of new cars or science breakthroughs, Popular Mechanics is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle." Design Director Michael Lawton explains this one: "PopMech is celebrating its 110th anniversary (110!!!) This is a close collaboration with Jordan Metcalf. A very talented type designer I found in Cape Town South Africa. We also ran with a double matt and gloss finish.&...
mono.position #04
It’s not often that I get to cover something that is happening in Tokyo, and here’s an event/exhibition by mono.kultur that recently kicked off (running until February 17) — I unfortunately couldn’t make it to the opening due to a flu outbreak at home.
Our first project in 2012 is kind of an unusual one for us, but then again, we feel it’s about time – all too often we get asked about all these ‘other mono’s’: What is mono.graphie? And really, you run a fashion label? Well yes, kind of. Truth is: Our publisher, Kai von Rabenau, is a photographer in his other life, and has been running his studio under the name of mono.graphie since 2001. And mono.gramm is our ‘joint venture’ womenswear label since 2009 and specialized in dresses, that we help with the art direction and organization and special projects and general advice and hand-holding. What all these projects have in common is a shared philosophy and approach – hence the mono in all our names – applied to different media.
Anyway, when we were invited by the lovely Palette Gallery in Tokyo for an exhibition, we thought it’s a good opportunity to bring together these different activities and present them all in one space, since they come from the same studio as well. It’s kind of an experiment for us, which makes it all the more exciting of course, and anyway, like we said, it’s about time.
And thus, we will be showing an overview of mono.graphie’s photography practice, showcasing a selection of editorial, fashion and personal work, extracting a palette of colour and atmosphere from daily life; whereas our womenswear imprint mono.gramm will give a sneak peek into its playful light-handed approach to fashion design, and mono.kultur, of course, will display the first 30 issues of our uniquely popular interview format.
And here are the rest of the details:
mono.position #04
Kai von Rabenau / Diaries
mono.graphie / mono.gramm / mono.kultur03 – 17 February 2012
Opening / 03 February 2012 / 18 – 20 h
Talk / 18 h 30 / Kai von Rabenau & Hiroshi Eguchi / UtrechtColorworks Palette Bldg
1-14-2 Higashi-Kanda
Chiyoda-Ku
Tokyo
→ Jeff Atwood leaves Stack Exchange
On the difficulties of running a booming startup while trying to maintain a family life:
Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
Whatever startup you’re working on right now probably won’t exist in ten years. Probably not even in five. It’s important to maintain a perspective of what’s really going to matter, long-term, in your life.
Instapaper is one person and no funding. I work completely from home. I don’t even put an unhealthy amount of hours into it, and it’s very low-needs (and therefore, low-stress) to keep the service running. This is a lifestyle that I’m not willing to give up for the promise of taking VC money, hiring a bunch of people, making everything free, and hoping to cash out after a few years of nonstop “crunch mode” by selling it to a big company so they can ruin and “sunset” it a year later.
Most people can always point to a reason why it’s not a convenient time to have children, but my wife and I couldn’t think of a single one. We know that we will never have a better time than right now. So our first child is due in April.
I hope to maintain as healthy of a perspective as Jeff has.
Great work, Jeff, and best wishes.
How I bootstrapped importlib
If you have been reading this blog over the past five years I am sure you have read a post or five about my desire to bootstrap importlib into Python as the implementation of __import__. Well, as of today I'm willing to say that the difficult technological hurdles have been scaled! At this point the only thing holding me back from taking my code from https://hg.python.org/sandbox/bcannon#bootstrap_importlib and making importlib drive import statements are some small compatibility issues, integrating into the build process better, a code review, and python-dev sign-off. In other words all of the interesting problems have been solved, so I'm finally ready to write a blog post discussing how I pulled off what I have.
So how exactly do you import __import__? To begin, as with any bootstrap challenge, you need to figure out what is available to you so you know what your design parameters are. In my case I knew I couldn't import anything that required filesystem access since half of import is handling the search for a module (the other half is the actual importing); if I wanted to import a file I would need to essentially write half of import in C to work properly. This restriction also has unexpected side-effects, e.g. you can't rely on open() because that is part of the io module which is a Python module.
That meant I could only rely on built-in modules. If you run sys.builtin_module_names you will discover what is available directly within the CPython binary. The question then becomes if that is enough? It turns out that yes, those built-in modules are enough to perform an import. OK, so you know you have the bare minimum modules required to do an import, but how the heck do you get the built-in modules into the global scope of the module that imports module since you can't use an import statements?
This is when Python's dynamism comes in handy. Since the import statement doesn't do much more than pull in the module object and assign it to a variable at the global scope of the module, I just needed to get the module object for importlib and assign to its __dict__ the built-in modules I needed. Turns out that sys and imp are enough to allow importlib to handle the import of the rest of the built-in modules needed for import to work, so that kept this bit of code short.
But this brings up the next quandry: how do I create a module object of importlib? If I end up searching for importlib on sys.modules then I would have ended up implementing a decent chunk of import itself. So how could I get the module object? This is when frozen modules comes into play.
A frozen module is just a C array containing the marshaled code for a module (which is what a .pyc file is sans magic number, timestamp, and now file size of the source). Since marshal is a built-in module then frozen modules can be loaded without issue. That means you can load a frozen module without using import (much like importing built-in modules).
And that is all of the parts needed to import importlib w/o import. =) To summarize, you get importlib set as __import__ by doing the following:
- Import the frozen module (i.e. read in a C array of a marshaled module object and unmarshal it)
- Import sys and imp (built-in modules, so done in C code by calling key C functions which return module objects) and set it on the module object
- Call Python code to import the rest of the built-in modules using sys and imp
- Set Python-based __import__ on the builtins module
And voila! __import__ ends up implemented in pure Python code. Now I just need to clean up the code, fix the compatibility issues, rip out the old C code, and get python-dev to sign off. =) Hopefully I will get far enough I will have a lightning talk at PyCon with benchmark numbers to show this is actually all a good thing (including ripping out a ton of C code, especially if I can re-implement chunks of imp in pure Python =).
Announcing Percona Toolkit Release 2.0.3
We’ve released Percona Toolkit 2.0.3, with a couple of major improvements and many minor ones. You can download it, read the documentation, and get support for it.
What’s new? You can read the changelog for the details, but here are the highlights:
Brand new pt-diskstats, thanks to Brian Fraser. This tool is completely rewritten, and it’s finally the iostat replacement I always wanted. Not only does it have the functionality I want (interactive, slice and dice, smart defaults) but it has the detailed statistics on I/O, so you can see whether your reads are slow versus your writes, and whether things are waiting on the disk or waiting on the queue scheduler (cfq, hint hint). Finally, it has transparency, so you can read the documentation and understand, really, what it’s doing at the low level and what that means for your server. We really need specific, precise information on exactly how the I/O is behaving so we can make good decisions when there are problems or when doing things like capacity planning.
Brand new pt-stalk, courtesy of Daniel Nichter. This tool is also completely rewritten. Instead of a Bash script that you have to configure with environment variables and run in a screen session, this is now a first-class fault detection daemon. Everyone needs post-mortem forensic data when there is a problem, and pt-stalk aims to be a core part of your infrastructure that fills this gap. It now supports things a “real” Percona Toolkit tool ought to have, such as command-line options and a configuration file. In addition, we merged pt-collect into it, so as of Percona Toolkit 2.0.3, there isn’t a separate pt-collect tool anymore.
There’s a lot more to this release, but those are the major points. Download it and let us know how it works, please! If you find bugs, file them on Launchpad, and if you need support, you know where to get it.
Perlbuzz news roundup for 2012-02-06
These links are collected from the Perlbuzz Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@perlbuzz.com.
- Which module should I use to define constants? (neilb.org)
- Why @chromatic_x runs tests on install, and I do, too (modernperlbooks.com)
- Peteris Krumins' series "Perl One-Liners Explained" is now an ebook (catonmat.net)
- Why I'm finally leaving GoDaddy (petdance.com)
- Don't assume that a true value is 1 (blogs.perl.org)
A Week in Provence
Good friends of mine in London recently invited me to spend a week with them at their French mas, or farmhouse, near the Alpilles, a small mountain range in Provence.
My friends are Greek but live in London; they bought this house at the beginning of the millennium as a meeting place for friends and family scattered all over the world. I'd been to the house before on family holidays, but this trip was different, as it was the first time I observed the place through the lens of my camera. I found myself appreciating anew the interiors of this rambling stone farmhouse, which is filled with an eclectic array of objects, each with their own meaningful and interesting story.
Above: The entrance to the mas features a stone door frame, typical of the farmhouses in this region; the exterior light fixture is a converted lantern.
Above: The painted wood chair is from a local garden shop which specialized in products from India (it's since closed).
Above: A paper-cutting of the Bernese Oberland region of Switzerland sits on the mantel of the traditional stone fireplace. The Bohemian glassware marks each year the couple have been in the house, and the wicker baskets are from local markets.
Above L: A portrait of an imaginary person by local artist Alexandre Peutin, purchased from a local gallery called Le Grand Magasin. Above R: A Greek icon, a treasured wedding present from a relative.
Above: The exposed stone construction of the farmhouse would typically be covered by plaster.
Above: Around the house are small tables displaying objects from interest around the world, including a collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century Greek cigarette boxes made in Dresden and shipped to countries in the Mideast, foreshadowing today's global marketplace.
Above: The kitchen is practical and functional. On the counter, bay leaves from the garden are laid out to dry on a tea towel.
Above: Linen aprons from the local markets adorn the back of the kitchen door.
Above: The terracotta tiles on the floor and stairs are part of the original farmhouse.
Above: The Provencal quilt was purchased in a local shop; the print is of a wall in Yemen by an unknown photographer.
Above: The homeowners asked local artist Emmanuel Sayagh to add decorative touches on various walls throughout the house. In the guest bathroom, the toilet-paper holder, originally designed to hold hand towels and soap, was found in the local brocante, or flea market.
Above: The walls in the master bedroom were also painted by Emmanuel Sayagh. The wardrobe is an old French kitchen cupboard with French linen covering the cabinet openings, and the colorful baskets are from the local market.
Above: Red accents on a Swiss cross-stitch pillowcase and Provencal quilt complement the gray walls.
Null Objects, Error Handling, and Robustness
A Practical Use for Macros in Perl generated several thoughtful comments. While Aristotle Pagaltzis identified the real semantic difficulty with the code I wanted to write (and mentioned the Null Object pattern, which I always keep in mind), Chas. Owens asked perhaps the best philosophical question:
Why not modify add_txn to reject undefs?The code in review is:
while (my $stock = $stock_rs->next) { my $pe_update = $self->analyze_pe( $stock ); $stock_txn->add( $pe_update ) if $pe_update; my $cash_yield_update = $self->analyze_cash_yield( $stock ); $analysis_txn->add( $cash_yield_update ) if $cash_yield_update; }... and the near duplication obscures (to me) the point of the code. Both Aristotle and Chas. are right—perhaps it's clearer to allow
$transaction->addto do nothing when it receives nothing. I write "perhaps" because I see the appeal of that change, but I'm not sure I like it.As usual with my software, the system has a fundamental design principle: either succeed in full or do nothing. It's fine to skip half of the analysis steps if the data just isn't there. (The project as a whole can succeed if it's only 60% correct; the joy of a margin of error. It's a lot more accurate than that.)
I take this principle to mean that robustness is more important than completeness. Skipping bad data and moving on is perfectly fine. The next run may improve transient errors, and catastrophic errors will require human intervention anyhow.
When these principles translate into design, I prefer to handle errors at the point of detection and not spread error handling throughout the system. All of these analysis methods should return something. When they succeed, they return a hash reference mapping column names to values in a database table. When these methods fail—whether the existing data isn't sufficient to calculate updated values or something else went wrong—they
return;. As you well know, that's an empty list in list context andundefin the scalar context of the example code.Why add nothing to a transaction when I know there's nothing to add? Yes,
add()could check that it has nothing to do and do nothing, and that's fine, but it seems like that expands the behavior ofadd()'s API to include caller errors. Then again, theadd()method must check that each hash reference contains a value for the transaction's bound primary key, or it will generate buggy output.I suspect that both Aristotle and Chas. have in mind Postel's Law:
Be generous in what you accept and picky about what you emit.The result might look something like:
while (my $stock = $stock_rs->next) { $stock_txn->add( $self->analyze_pe( $stock ) ); $analysis_txn->add( $self->analyze_cash_yield( $stock ) ); }This change has an advantage: it only necessitates a change in the
add()method. All of theanalyze_*()methods can continue to work as implemented.Of course, there's a slight performance penalty to doing this. In my case, it's immaterial, but it wouldn't be present with macros. This is an IO-bound application anyhow, and the transaction manager exists to avoid very real, very measured bottlenecks.
Finally, Aristotle's mention of the null object pattern was about real objects, and not methods which return empty lists or hash references. If that's your style, good for you—but it's not mine in this case. While it's not obvious from the small snippets I've posted so far, the responsibility of the analysis methods is smaller in scope than the responsibility of the transaction objects. Coupling transaction management to the analysis methods—in as much that they have to know about transactions to return the right objects—would turn the design of the system inside out. The result would very likely not be an improvement.
What we talk about when we talk about sketching.
I want to take a moment to have a deeper, more reflective conversation about the role that sketching plays in my professional work, and how it has evolved it over time. A lot of sketching advice tends to be too general ("You should sketch!"), too superficial ("You need to buy these pens!"), or too self-congratulatory ("Look at the sketches I made!") to be useful for those of us who have already incorporated sketching into our everyday design practice. For me, sketching tends to be a surprisingly philosophical endeavor, and I'm curious to hear how other designers think about their own sketching.
Of explorations and free associations. One mind's descent.
A few years ago my approach to sketching coalesced around a technique that helps me explore a problem space by using a combination of words and sketches to flesh out my understanding of potential ideas, concepts or solutions. It's sketchnoting, in the purest sense of the term, but instead of sketching notes from a talk or presentation, I'm capturing ideas as they spill out of my head. It's like attending my own personal TED conference, but there's only one speaker, and he's kind of nuts, and he just chained the doors shut and now there's a fire and we're never going to get out of here alive.
The sketching is highly generative, best done in a focused session under the influence of caffeine and noise-canceling headphones. My brain has a tendency to free associate and sometimes these sessions spiral out of control, but they are useful activities to conduct at the beginning of a project, as I begin identifying (and blowing past) the tacit boundaries of a space.
As it turns out, this technique is a great personal activity that gives me a huge jumpstart when it comes to exploration. The act of externalizing an idea, whether I'm writing it down or sketching it out, frees up valuable mental space that can be occupied by the next idea; the next free association. Indeed, as design is more an act of choosing from alternatives than it is an act of spontaneous genius, I find that the more options (especially outlandish ones) my brain can get out in front of itself, the better.
This is something that's better shown than described. Here's a video from a project at Adaptive Path that I worked on a few years ago, where I talk about my process for coming up with the in-game experience for a mobile learning application:
Outside In: A case study in explorination through sketchination.
During my graduate program I pursued a project that looked into how one can bring a sense of the outdoors into an indoor space. Through sketching I started by exploring the miscellaneous techniques people use to stay connected with the world around them:
I then sketched potential concepts that would address this challenge, ranging from digital windows to Lifescapes albums, Harry Potter enchanted ceilings to office squirrels, real-time snow globes to chainsaws:
Some of my explorations were light on sketching, but heavy on notes. Again, my goal is to externalize ideas in whatever form my brain deems necessary, be it visual or written:
As I honed in on trying to represent the outdoors in the workplace, I explored the various artifacts of that environment as opportunities for intervention:
And as I studied light as a medium for design, I brainstormed various ways to prototype in it:
On the topics of color and reflection (a type of color).
Color plays a huge role when I sketch like this, and while the aesthetic results can be delightful, I have discovered there are deeper implications in how the act of coloring changes how I think about my sketches.
When I'm laying down ink (typically with a Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine, not that I'm particular or anything) my brain is in a purely generative mode, and my hand is simply doing everything it can to keep up with the stream of consciousness. In a productive session I will typically fill a few pages of my sketchbook with ink (a steady supply of 9" x 12" spiral-bound Strathmore drawing pads keep me well-fed and hydrated) before actually switching over to colored pencils.
Laying down ink is a generative act, but going back over my work and coloring it in allows me an opportunity to reflect on the ideas I've already created. As I choose colors and fill in shapes I begin thinking more deeply about my concepts; their volume, the materials they're comprised of, how they could be improved, etc. Laying in color, then, triggers ideas that drive the next round of inking, which I in turn color, triggering more ideas.
Physically going over my sketches in color and reembodying their forms forces me to engage with them, consider the connections between them, at a depth that is impossible to achieve by simply looking them over.
Getting out of my head.
At Adaptive Path we work on small, tightly collaborative teams of 3-5 designers. A common activity in our project work involves concept generation, where all the designers of the team come together and sketch potential approaches to the product or service we're designing. In response to a prompt each designer sketches as many ideas as possible, fueling inspiration within the team by sharing out concepts as we go along. In a typical project we often come up with hundreds of concepts, which we then cluster, prioritize and re-concept as we hone in on the best solution to carry forward.
I quickly found that I needed to adapt my sketching style to work more effectively within these fast-paced group contexts. My inking/coloring, generating/reflecting cycle is extremely effective at facilitating an internal conversation (or a reflective conversation between me and my sketching materials, if you want to get all Donald Schön and reflective practice about it) but it doesn't produce outputs that play well with others. While noisy pages and colorful sketches may attract comments on Flickr and retweets on Twitter, it's a radically different context when I need to quickly connect with clients and teammates whose work depends on me being able to clearly articulate my ideas. In this case, my sketches need to be as much a communication tool as they are a generation tool.
The CMYK sea change.
And so, over the last few months I've worked to adapt my sketching technique to better fit the contexts in which I'm sketching. Since most of my work is super-duper top secret, here are some example sketches depicting concepts around... bees. Because really, bees are pretty darn amazing, and I don't think they're the target of nearly enough design work.
While I still use my sketchbook for meeting notes, personal reflections and other creative endeavors, I now favor half-sheets of copy paper for project work. I've ditched the pens and colored pencils for sharpies and highlighters, and have limited my color palette to blue, pink, yellow and black (or CMYK, as I prefer to call it). I'm now conducting my work with materials that are readily available, and I can quickly produce concepts that are readily disposable.
Clear. Bold. Atomic. Disposable.
Each concept is described by a sketch, a short description, and a name. Over time I've established my own color-coding system to lend a kind of visual hierarchy to these elements. Since I'm not barfing everything onto the page at once, as I do with my personal sketching explorations, each concept takes a bit more planning as to how I want to communicate it. That said, if I've spent more than a few minutes on a sketch, I've probably spent too long on it. Best crumple it up and start over.
Working in sharpie keeps me from getting too absorbed into the details, and the limited color palette keeps me focused on highlighting key areas, not producing works of art. Each concept is clear, bold, and can generally be recognized from across the project room.
Since a concept sketch is, essentially, the atomic unit of design, and this approach produces only one concept per half-sheet of paper, it makes them pretty easy for other people to grok at the atomic level. Plus, armed with a roll of drafting dots it's easy to post concepts on the wall and begin clustering them... combining them into little design molecules, if you will.
Finally, when it comes time to package our work, the half-sheets feed nicely into a document scanner. Or a shredder. Depending on the filing system we've chosen.
Yes! And...
This has been my personal journey in sketching, shifting from a highly personal, highly specialized technique that helps my mind break open and explore new ideas, to a technique that is more adapted for collaboration on a small design team. That said, concept generation is just one small part of the design process that can benefit from a thoughtful approach to sketching. And sketching on paper is just one form of sketching.
To that end, I'd be curious to know in comments how you have evolved your own sketching practice over time, or how you find yourself adapting it to be more effective in different contexts.
Thanks, and happy sketching!
Etched effects in Photoshop
My previous Photoshop tutorial on using noise for subtle texture was well received, so I’ve decided to write more. This time, we’re creating an etched effect (in this case, for text on a metallic background, but it’ll work for any background and is equally applicable to icons and other shapes, as well as text).
It’s exceptionally easy to create an etched effect, since we only need to replicate two aspects of how shapes look in the real world when they’re cut into a surface:
- The natural shadows inside the cut-out part.
- The subtle pools of light falling onto the front edges of the cut-out part.
To start, create a new document and fill it with a suitable background. I chose a simple gradient layer with a grey gradient, to give a basically metallic appearance. I then added some text, and made it a bit darker than the darkest colour used in the gradient.
Some text, with a gradient in the background.
We only need to apply two effects to create the etched effect; one for each of the visual factors I mentioned previously. First, we create the interior shadow using the Inner Shadow layer effect.
Inner Shadow settings.
You can tweak the settings to adjust the apparent visual depth of the etching, but I find that a Distance of 2 pixels and a Size of 4 pixels works well for a believable effect. Make sure you set the light angle to 90 degrees if you’re designing for iOS, or whatever global light angle your particular target platform simulates.
Next, we need to replicate the effect of light spilling a little way into the carved-out shapes. Interestingly, we can do this by making unconventional use of the Drop Shadow layer effect.
Drop Shadow settings.
By changing the shadow to pure white, with a Normal blending mode, and making it only 1 pixel in Size and 1 pixel in Distance from the layer’s contents, we can create the impression of some light reflecting along the bottom edge of whatever is in the layer (the text, in our case).
Both those styles put together create a pretty decent etched effect for the text, as shown below.
The final etched effect.
The same Layer Style can be copied and pasted onto any other shape or icon you like - it’s great for titlebars and similar interfaces. You can download the finished etched effect as a zipped PSD here.
If you’re interested in more beginners’ UI effects tutorials for Photoshop, follow me on Twitter and let me know.
Consistency is a Virtue
It's impressive to see a writer's work evolve and improve over time.
One year ago:
I have nothing nonobvious to say about the Super Bowl. But sweet Jesus I miss baseball.
— Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) February 7, 2011Yesterday:
I miss baseball.
— Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) February 6, 2012
Craftster Crush: noooitaremybirthday
This month, our Craftster Crush is noooitaremybirthday! Not only is Nooo’s name hard to forget (except for the number of “o”‘s!), but her work is, too. Her drawing style and even her whole crafting style is fun, vibrant, and hard to overlook, as evidenced by her three Best of 2011 projects! Take a look at [...]
Design Sleuth: Bill Cunningham's French Work Jacket
Last year's documentary Bill Cunningham New York had us entranced with the New York Times' iconic street-fashion photographer.
Cunningham can be spotted out and about wearing a classic French work jacket, worn for decades by the country's laborers; Cunningham buys his at the Bazaar Hotel de Ville in Paris. Mimic his look by acquiring your own version (we especially like the jacket in black) at the following sources.
Above: Bill Cunningham at work; photograph by Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist.
Above: Original Bleu de Travail French Work Jacket from Le Laboureur in Burgundy; $150 at Hickoree's.
Above: The jacket sports a multitude of utilitarian pockets.
Above: The Bleu de Travail French Work Jacket in black is $150 at Hickoree's.
Above: An interpretation of the Le Laboureur jacket from Tokyo-based fashion label Beams: The 100-percent cotton Beams+ French Work Jacket in cobalt blue is $505 at Unionmade.
Francesco Franchi on Visual Storytelling and Representation vs. Interpretation
On the design as journalism and how to navigate the spectrum between art and information.
The shape of journalism in the age of data continues to evolve and shift as we hone new ways of framing what matters in the world. In this wonderful teaser for Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language, one of the 11 best art and design books of 2011, Italian art director and information designer Francesco Franchi discusses the role of the designer as a translator of journalism. Franchi cites 1930s pictogram pioneer Otto Neurath and modern-day life-visualizer Nicholas Felton as his inspiration, and zooms in on the relationship between form and content on the spectrum between art and information.
Visual journalism means a combination between graphic and narrative. So, it is at the same time representation but also an interpretation of reality to develop an idea.”
Visual Storytelling features a fantastic full interview with Franchi.
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February 5, 2012
Tracking the grizzly bear in emotional interactive documentary
In a blend of data and storytelling, Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison dig into surveillance logs generated by a monitored grizzly bear between 2001 and 2009. The final work is a moving interactive documentary, Bear 71.
She lived her life under near-constant surveillance and was continually stressed by interactions with the human world. She was tracked and logged as data, reflecting the way we have come to see the world around us through Tron and Matrix-like filters, qualifying and quantifying everything, rather than experiencing and interacting.
Leanne Allison sifted through thousands of photos from motion-triggered trail cameras for this project. The grainy images gathered over the past 10 years by various scientists reveal the hidden life of the forest, played out by the animals and humans — including Bear 71 — captured covertly on film.
It begins with the capture of a grizzly, its tagging, and then release, as a first-person narrative tells a story through the eyes of the bear. You, the observer, are allowed to follow the bear and explore its environment on an abstract map, and somewhere along the way digital and the physical world melt together.
[Bear 71 via @wiederkehr]
Making Planning Popular
[Image: Making Planning Popular on display at the RCA in London].
For those of you near London, you have one more day to see David Knight's Making Planning Popular on display in a group show called GRIST at the Royal College of Art. I'm a huge fan of Knight's work—an ongoing research project on the strange terrains both encouraged and required by local planning ordinances—and he's thus become a regular referent here on the blog.
[Image: The manifesto from Making Planning Popular].
Specifically, Making Planning Popular "aims to encourage greater popular knowledge of how the built environment is, or could be, produced." Accordingly, "David is showing a manifesto, recent articles and essays, and a series of case studies chosen from his growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices. This work will in time form a popular history of planning"—publishers, take note!—"one in which such practises are brought back to life to explore their relevance to today’s environment, in the belief that putting planning knowledge back into popular culture will lead to a more democratic built environment."[Images: Excerpts from David Knight's "growing database of arcane, marginalized, or forgotten planning practices," part of Making Planning Popular].
Above are some examples of these case studies; but stop by the RCA before the end of the day on Monday, February 6, to see more. Here's a map.
SICP 2.52: Levels of Language for Robust Design
From SICP section 2.2.4 Example: A Picture Language
Just as we did in previous exercises, we can use the PLT Scheme SICP Picture Language package to run the solutions to the following exercises. You can load the picture package by putting the following(require...)expression at the beginning of your Scheme file.(require (planet "sicp.ss" ("soegaard" "sicp.plt" 2 1)))
Exercise 2.52 asks us to make changes to the square limit ofwaveshown in figure 2.9 by working at the appropriate level of abstraction for the required change. (We'll need all the code we wrote in exercises 2.44 and 2.49 to start out with, so copy those into a new Scheme file.)
2.52a. Add some segments to the primitivewavepainter of exercise 2.49 (to add a smile, for example).
This change requires that we make a change at a low level of abstraction, in adding segments to thewavepainter itself. Let's add an eye and a smiling mouth on the left side of the head so it looks like the person inwaveis looking in that direction.; The wave painter (2.49d).
; Add some segments to form a smile (2.52a)
(define wave-segments
(list
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.006 0.840)
(make-vect 0.155 0.591))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.006 0.635)
(make-vect 0.155 0.392))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.304 0.646)
(make-vect 0.155 0.591))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.298 0.591)
(make-vect 0.155 0.392))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.304 0.646)
(make-vect 0.403 0.646))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.298 0.591)
(make-vect 0.354 0.492))
(make-segment ; left face
(make-vect 0.403 0.646)
(make-vect 0.348 0.845))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.354 0.492)
(make-vect 0.249 0.000))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.403 0.000)
(make-vect 0.502 0.293))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.502 0.293)
(make-vect 0.602 0.000))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.348 0.845)
(make-vect 0.403 0.999))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.602 0.999)
(make-vect 0.652 0.845))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.652 0.845)
(make-vect 0.602 0.646))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.602 0.646)
(make-vect 0.751 0.646))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.751 0.646)
(make-vect 0.999 0.343))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.751 0.000)
(make-vect 0.597 0.442))
(make-segment
(make-vect 0.597 0.442)
(make-vect 0.999 0.144))
(make-segment ; eye
(make-vect 0.395 0.916)
(make-vect 0.410 0.916))
(make-segment ; smile
(make-vect 0.376 0.746)
(make-vect 0.460 0.790))))
2.52b. Change the pattern constructed bycorner-split(for example, by using only one copy of theup-splitandright-splitimages instead of two).
For this requirement we need to work in the middle layer of abstraction. To use only one copy of theup-splitandright-splitimages instead of two, we can simply remove the references totop-leftandbottom-rightthat appear in the original implementation ofcorner-split.(define (corner-split painter n)
(if (= n 0)
painter
(let ((up (up-split painter (- n 1)))
(right (right-split painter (- n 1)))
(corner (corner-split painter (- n 1))))
(beside (below painter up)
(below right corner)))))
2.52c. Modify the version ofsquare-limitthat usessquare-of-fourso as to assemble the corners in a different pattern. (For example, you might make the big Mr. Rogers look outward from each corner of the square.)
We're not using the Mr. Rogers painter from the text, but we can still rearrange thesquare-limitpainter so that the largestwaveimage is drawn in the four corners by simply rotating thecorner-splitpainter by 180 degrees.(define (square-limit painter n)
(let ((quarter (rotate180 (corner-split painter n))))
(let ((half (beside (flip-horiz quarter) quarter)))
(below (flip-vert half) half))))
Related:
For links to all of the SICP lecture notes and exercises that I've done so far, see The SICP Challenge.
DP Review previews the Fujifilm X-Pro1
This new piece of kit was made available for pre-order just a few days ago, and I signed up right away. I also pre-ordered the 35mm f/1.4 to go along with it.
If interested, check out the official site, a video walkthrough of the menuing system and the three official videos from Fujifilm (40 minutes total). Also, Hugo Poon has put up some shots he’s taken with the X-Pro1, including some incredible high-ISO snaps, like this ISO3200 shot.
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