It's time to welcome @ruthbourdain—a Twitter account that combines the haiku-like ridiculousness of Ruth Reichl's tweets with the pessimism and bad jokes of Tony Bourdain—to the dancefloor. The avatar alone is worthy of praise.
· @RuthBourdain [Twitter]
But it’s not absolute, and it’s not always the best idea. My favorite counterexample is the typical calculator app:
Nearly everything about a real calculator is faithfully reproduced, but with the good comes the bad: nearly every limitation and frustration has also been reproduced. There’s very little reason to use the software facsimile over its real-world equivalent, and in some ways, the physical object is better.
Despite being faithfully designed to look and work like a real-world object, the Calculator app hasn’t made any progress. It hasn’t advanced technology. It hasn’t made anything more useful or created new interaction models.
My preferred calculator, which I will keep blogging about until it’s ubiquitous, wasn’t designed against any physical objects because there’s no physical equivalent to what it does.
Please ignore the two glaring errors I made while cobbling this together for the picture.
Functionally, it’s almost a calculator. But it’s also almost a spreadsheet and almost a list pad. By not constraining its design to that of a common physical object, it’s able to be and do much more than anything in the physical world ever could.
It does a much better job of a number of critical features than the Calculator app, such as multipart calculations, parentheses, editing existing values, and dynamic value references. Even trivial operations are so much nicer that Soulver converts rarely even open Calculator (or use one), preferring instead to keep a Soulver window open somewhere as a scratch pad.
The interface paradigm of mimicking real-world objects shouldn’t, therefore, be applied universally.
So last week, when good writers (1 2 3 4) started discussing the merits of emulating page-turning, I took notice. Especially since I added pagination to Instapaper Pro 2.2 and had to make some difficult decisions in the process. There was no question in my mind that it was better for reading than scrolling — even better than my semi-automated, low-effort tilt scrolling.
But I didn’t implement it because books have pages and lack scrolling. Books aren’t even the right physical-object equivalent for Instapaper. Not all reading happens in books.
Instapaper is more like a magazine than anything else, but I’m not about to try to reproduce the soggy, wrinkled covers from being shoved in the mailbox, the perfume samples, the ten-page “continued on” jumps in the middle of articles, or the subscription cards falling out as you’re trying to read.
(The iPad version of Instapaper that I’ve made so far, incidentally, doesn’t resemble any physical objects. I haven’t shoved huge newspaper or book graphics in there in a misguided effort to win an ADA. Just as Soulver looks like nothing but Soulver, Instapaper on iPad just looks like Instapaper.)
I implemented pagination because it improves reading, not because a related physical item separates text into pages.
Improving the product, not faithfully reproducing the physical object, always gets priority. I passed on a long, complex page-turning animation because it didn’t make sense (you’re paging up/down, not left/right) and it would have been distracting. And I opted for an extremely brief cross-fade, rather than a slide, because slides take longer and are more visually jarring.
DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD.
It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore.
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I hadn't much followed Heidegger Nazi controversy, however the author of this book, Emmanuel Faye, believes that "the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after the explosion - a grey cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds", and that the vast literature on Heidegger continues to spread "the fundamental tenets of Nazism on a worldwide scale".
That seems hyperbolic, but OK. I'd always been entertained by the very thing that seems to most frustrate philosophers about Heidegger, such as when he writes things such as "the Nothing noths", but now it seems that was not as harmless an entertainment as I had thought.
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Player of the Day: Jose Reyes, shortstop, NY Mets
Of course, different people have different ideas about what makes an exciting baseball player. But, in general, the blueprint would look an awful lot like Jose Reyes.
In fact, not that long ago, Bill James and I plotted out formula (admittedly the formula is a lot more me than Bill — he just offered suggestions) to try and determine the most exciting players in baseball. I lost that original formula, but I tried to recreate it, taking into account triples (the most exciting play in baseball!), stolen bases, batting average, defensive excitement (subjective) and a couple of other things. I’m pretty sure I created the most wildly flawed formula to appear on the Internet today.
Here then, according to this wildly flawed formula, are the 11 most exciting seasons of the last 25 years:
1. Jose Reyes, 2006.
2. Jose Reyes, 2008
3. Jimmy Rollins, 2007
4. Ichiro Suzuki, 2001
5. Carl Crawford, 2004
6. Jose Reyes, 2007
7. Chuck Knoblauch, 1996.
8. Hanley Ramirez, 2006
9. Tony Gwynn, 1987
10. Tim Raines, 1985
11. Carlos Beltran, 2001.
Obviously, you can create your own formula — and I hope you will — but the point is that at least according to one fairly standard view, Reyes defined exciting baseball. He hit lots of triples. He also hit doubles and a few home runs. He led the league in stolen bases three years in a row. He made dazzling plays at shortstop. Sure, there were always people who thought Reyes needed to get on base more and could have been a touch steadier defensively. But that stuff would come! The point with Reyes was excitement. He was exciting. The Mets were exciting.
Anyway, that’s how it was in 2006, when Reyes was 23 years old and the Mets won 97 games. That’s also how it was in 2007, when Reyes stole 78 bases — most in 20 years — and the Mets led the National League East by seven games in mid-September, you know, before losing 12 of their last 17 and blowing it to the Phillies.
Oh well, there was excitement even then. The Mets signed the best pitcher in baseball, Johan Santana. Reyes has probably his best season — led the league with 204 hits and 19 triples, stole 56 bases. And the Mets led the National League East by 3 1/2 games in mid-September, you know, before losing four of their next five and never again getting back into first place.
Sure, the late season fadeouts hurt. They hurt a lot. But — and it’s easy to forget this — the Mets still looked to be in awfully good shape. Reyes was exciting. Santana was dazzling. Third baseman David Wright was one of the best players in baseball. Center fielder Carlos Beltran was one of the best players in baseball. Carlos Delgado had hit 38 home runs — the 11th time in 12 years he hit 30-plus homers. Francisco Rodriguez came to New York after he had set the single-season save record in Anaheim — finally, the Mets had their answer for the Great Rivera.
So, how did it all go so wrong? Just look at the Mets now. They are now arguing over Jose Reyes thyroid. That’s the big story at Mets camp these days. The Mets seem to believe — based on what they’re hearing from doctors — that Reyes has an overactive thyroid. Reyes seems to believe — based on what he’s hearing from doctors — that his thyroid is fine. Everybody is waiting for the results from the latest tests. These days, Jose Reyes’ thyroid has the third highest Q-Rating in New York, behind only David Paterson and David Letterman. It could get its own show by the weekend.
Of course, the thyroid talk is just an emblem of the Mets issues — of Carlos Beltran’s knee surgery, of David Wright’s power outage, of Carlos Delgado’s hip injury, of the surgery Johan Santana had to remove bone chips, of the Mets abominable 70-92 record last year*
*The Mets became the first team in baseball history to spend $140 million (well, $149 million and some change) and have a losing record. Here is a list of all the teams to spend $140 million on payroll in a season and their win total:
2009 Mets: 70 wins
2009 Yankees: 103 wins
2008 Yankees: 89 wins
2007 Yankees: 94 wins
2007 Red Sox: 96 wins
2006 Yankees: 97 wins
2005 Yankees: 95 wins
2004 Yankees: 101 wins
2003 Yankees: 101 wins
In other words, the thyroid talk is just the latest in a whole bunch of really weird things to happen to the Mets. Of course, Mets fans — at least the ones I hear from all the time — seem to think this is all just part of being … Mets fans. The It’s all part of the tradition. The Mets have a proud history of “The Mets Being The Mets” that, of course, goes back to the 1962 team that most people would agree was the worst baseball team of the last 100 years.
The teams that followed were not much better — until the 1969 Miracle Mets and the 1973 Ya Gotta Believe Mets. Then, the late 1970s, another dreadful lull, that time when Joe Torre came to understand that it’s hard to be a genius with Lenny Randle at third, Doug Flynn at second and Craig Swan as your Opening Day starter.
Then, came the great mid-80s Mets that didn’t win quite as much as they should have won. Then came the dreadful early 1990s Mets, the good-but-not-good enough late 1990s Mets, the dreadful early 2000s Mets, and finally this team dealing with a spotty lineup, a spotty rotation and a thyroid problem.
The thing is, that if they could stop the bad momentum … this Mets team has talent. Johan Santana, if he’s healthy, is as good as anybody. Beltran appears to be on the mend after knee surgery — he says that he’s feeling better about his knee than he has in years. You would like to believe that David Wright, having worked out whatever swing problems he had last year, will return to being a terrific player. Jason Bay gives the Mets a strong middle-of-the lineup bat. The rotation — with 20-somethings Mike Pelfrey, John Maine and Oliver Perez — could be OK, and K-Rod is still a top closer no matter what Goose Gossage may have said about him.*
*I guess Gossage called K-Rod a “clown” because of his theatrics on the field, and K-Rod responded by saying he had never heard of Gossage. So, that went well. Gossage also suggested that while Mariano Rivera is the best “modern reliever,” he prefers himself and the 52 saves he got where he got at least seven outs. Rivera, he points out, only has two of those. Case closed.
And while this is off-topic, it should be pointed out that Gossage does not have the most 7-out saves in baseball history, and he doesn’t have the second most, and he doesn’t have the third, fourth, fifth or sixth-most either. One of his teammates, Sparky Lyle, had more.
The list of most saves, 7-or-more outs:
1. Rollie Fingers, 74 saves
2. Dan Quisenberry, 65 saves
3. Gene Garber, 64 saves
4. Hoyt Wilhelm, 61 saves
5. Mike Marshall, 57 saves
6. Sparky Lyle, 56 saves
7. Goose Gossage, 52 saves
8. Lindy McDaniel, 51 saves
9. Bill Campbell, 49 saves
10. Bob Stanley, 48 saves.
And then there’s Jose Reyes. He was hurt for almost all of the 2009 season. He has had a rough camp with his thyroid issues and with the FBI questioning him about his connection to Canadian doctor Tony Galea, who has been charged with conspiring to smuggle HgH into the U.S. But here’s the thing. He’s only 26 years old. He says that he feels healthy. He still has the talent to be one of the most exciting players in the game. And he and the Mets are due for something good … it has to happen one of these days.
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Don’t forget, tomorrow night is the opening of the Eames Century Modern show at the Eames Office. 7pm to 11pm. Free and open to all, live music from The Mattson 2, screen printing on site with David Dodde and Fresh Pressed, and meet and greet with the Eames family, House Industries designers and Erik van Blokland.
]]>Since I've been working on Google Reader, I've told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to announce an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.
In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you've read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.
Reader Play adapts to your tastes -- as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you more items we think you'll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and we'll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don't even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, we'll ask you to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.
You might be wondering where we find all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you’re following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you’ve previously liked, starred, or shared.
Since Reader Play is an experiment, it’s launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn't intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It's designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you've read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking "View in Reader Play" from the feed settings menu.
Try Reader Play today and let us know what you think. Send us feedback in our forum or on Twitter, and check out our help article for more info.
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Perhaps the simplest solution would be to ban marriage outright. Or, better yet, to declare everybody as married to everybody else. But then what would the database engineers do all day?
via qntm.org
This is probably the best commentary I've read on (gay) marriage in a long time. The data modeling is just an added bonus.
(Note to my wife. I'd never agree to ban our marriage or be married to anyone else)
]]>The news that Issue #60 ("Append file support") in the Quick Search Box for the Mac bug tracker has been marked as "fixed" by Dave MacLachlan will make a vanishingly small number of people exceedingly happy.
And since the other 99.99% of you have no idea what I'm talking about you can move right along. There's nothing to see here.
]]>Exploratory learning can be engineered into repeatable systems: Moments of delight and skill acquisition are highly reproducible. All you need is a well designed and balanced system of interconnected feedback loops that helps guide and encourage the formation of new skills.
Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2010/03/ribbon_hero_turns_learning_office_into_a.php
]]>Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2010/03/where_to_eat_at_sxsw_2010.php
]]>When coolhunting launched their fabulous redesign they used courier as the text font. I loved that but was in the minority. Other readers have spoken and they've switched to georgia. It does read well but I miss the retro.
(disclaimer ((if I actually need one)) - six apart services where I work helped with the redesign but I actually DO think it is fabulous.)
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Unit testing refers to a software validation methodology that allows programmers to test individual program units for correctness. It's been an ongoing question in the iPhone developer community as to whether the iPhone's view controller class is testable or not.TUAWiPhone devsugar: Unit testing for iPhone view controllers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Science Daily recently reported that researchers have recommended the use of surcharges (taxes and fees) on unhealthy food items like pizza and soda to help offset the nearly $150 billion a year the U.S. government spends on health care issues related to obesity.
Doctors Mitchell H. Katz and Rajiv Bhatia published an article titled "Food Surcharges and Subsidies: Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is" on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The two suggest that raising the cost of or specially taxing food items that are high in saturated fats and sugar will have consumers thinking twice before making unhealthy meal choices. Their recommendation is an 18% tax on such items.
On a $2.75 slice (an average price point for slices in NYC), that would translate to a 50¢ surcharge. On a large pepperoni pizza from Domino's ($13.05), that's an extra $2.35.
This tax would be similar to the cigarette tax that some states have in place in an attempt to reduce smoking. For example, New York State places a tax of $2.75 on a pack of smokes, whereas homes of Big Tobacco charges far less. Virginia only taxes 30¢ a pack; South Carolina, 7¢. I wonder if pizza-producing states like New York would similarly tax less for pies if some such bill goes through.
But the bigger question is whether states should tax "unhealthy" foods to reduce obesity-related medical expenses or just mind their own beeswax. Shouldn't it be up to individuals to decide how they want to consume their ideal (or even not-so-ideal) daily caloric intake? And what about the inclusion of pizza in public school and other government institutions' cafeterias?
Should pizza be generalized as an "unhealthy food" when there are endless possibilities and variations?
We want to read your thoughts on this. What do you think?
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Dear Emily,
I’m sorry for wearing sweat pants to our first dinner date and for getting stoned before meeting your parents for the first time.
This was in 1999, before we were married. We’d been friends for a couple years at that point, and had recently started seeing each romantically—the result of a particularly drunken night at the WXOU Bar on Hudson Street, near where we lived in the West Village. I’d asked you out for a first proper dinner date, to Hangawi, a fancy Korean restaurant on 32nd Street.
It’s funny now to think about what I was thinking as I got ready to meet you. It was a Saturday, and I had been wearing a pair of green sweatpants that I used to wear on weekends. They were the kind that George Costanza used to wear on Seinfeld, the kind that Jerry once said announced to the world, “I give up. I can’t compete in normal society.” It occurred to me that I might change into something else, but I stood in my bedroom and thought for a minute and decided against it. I put on a white polo shirt and my Converse All-stars and walked out the door.
It wasn’t that I was trying to feign ambivalence, to give the impression I didn’t care enough to put on pants with buttons and belt-loops. I had made it very clear, in fact, that I wanted us to be girlfriend and boyfriend. If anything, you were the one who took some convincing. (Glaringly easy, in hindsight, to see why.) My thinking, as best I can explain it, was more along the lines of "take me as I am." I was a guy who wore green sweat pants on a Saturday. I wanted to make a good impression, but changing pants for that reason felt wrong. Like I’d be faking it, presenting myself as someone I was not. This type of thinking makes very little sense to me now and is derailed by something as simple as the fact that I certainly didn’t wear those sweat pants exclusively. I had lots of other pants, many of which I often changed into before dinner without much thought at all. But that day, I felt myself in the hands of fate: These were the pants you put on this morning, these are the pants you shall wear tonight.
I don’t know. I used to be really superstitious, too. And that’s just a terrible way to live. I was smoking too much pot those days, I suppose.
Which brings me to the second part of this apology. A couple months later, our relationship having miraculously survived my sweat pants, you’d arranged for us to go to dinner with your parents—my first time meeting them. Bored, sitting around my apartment that afternoon, I came to the same kind of question as before: Here was a situation in which, on any other day, I would be smoking pot. Should the fact that I was soon to be meeting these important people, the parents of the woman I was falling in love with, should I let that change my routine? I knew that I’d be brighter-eyed and clearer in conversation if I refrained, and I definitely wanted your parents to like me.
But then I thought, well, the way things are going, chances are I’ll be spending a lot of time around these people in the future. There would be lots of days like this. I wasn’t planning on making any major changes to my personal lifestyle. They might as well get to know me half-lidded and cloudy-headed. I packed a bowl.
Dinner went fine. Your parents turned out to be groovy 60s-types anyway. Towards the end of the evening, after I recognized a reference one of them made to the Steve Martin-Lily Tomlin movie All of Me, and mentioned that it was as a favorite of mine, your dad said, “Anyone who appreciates All of Me is all right by me,” and my heart felt warm in my chest. I’d lucked out.
Still, thinking back, it seems pretty stupid. There’s a reason most people would choose not to get stoned before meeting their girlfriend’s parents. Just like there’s a reason to change out of sweatpants before going on a date to a fancy restaurant. Making decisions based on principle rather than pragmatism is a prescription for failure. Even more so when the principle is so confused and self-defeating.
Was all this a test for you? I guess in a way it was, odd as that sounds. Not that I’d meant it that way. But I remember the expression on your face when we met at the restaurant for that first dinner date. You looked down at my sweat pants, and then back up to me, and gave a bemused little sigh. “So this is how it’s going to be, huh?” You thought for a second more and said, “All right.”
Again, I lucked out.
]]>He tells how the job came about: "I was a well-known advertising agency guy, and the former editor of Esquire, Harold Hayes, he called me up. We met at The Four Seasons, and he said, 'Could you help me try to do better covers?' I got this Bronx accent, and he had this southern drawl, and it must have been a funny discussion. 'You have to go outside and find a designer, a guy who's talented at graphic design, but understands politics, culture, and movies,' I told him, and he said, 'Do me a favor, could you do me just one cover?' I said, 'Okay, I'll do you one.'"
Here's one I'd never seen before, featuring Chief John Big Tree, the supposed model for the Indian Head nickel.
Before I start, let me make three things clear: 1) I am not trying to minimize the seriousness of mental health issues; 2) I don’t have any special “inside” information; and 3) I am not a doctor, psychologist, or any other sort of expert or mental health professional; this is a lay opinion of a baseball blogger writing from the “outside.”
I’ve read comparisons of pitcher value going forward in which Greinke’s past mental health issues that caused him to leave baseball for a time in 2006 are given as a reason to grade him down. I disagree; if it’s a worry at all, it’s a relatively insignificant one. This isn’t meant as an “inspirational” piece about the power to overcome obstacles, either — there’s a place for that, but frankly, I’m not sure professional athletics is the arena to which we should look… that’s a rant for another time and place. This is more cold-blodded, it’s about how this should (not) factor in to valuations of Greinke.
First of all, despite the way many of the bandwagon-jumping pieces that came out during Greinke’s 2009 Cy Young campaign made it sound, it’s not as if Greinke was out of baseball until right before his historically great 2009. Greinke’s problem actually came to a head four years ago, in 2006. His ‘comeback‘ to the major leagues full-time was three years ago, in 2007. He pitched well in 2007 and 2008 already — he’s been back for a while, and has been fine.
Second, the time off in 2006 as well as the lighter 2007 workload means that Greinke (who has never had a significant injury in his professional career, as far as I know) has fewer miles on his arm — another important factor for his value. So that at least partially (and in my mind, more than fully) offsets whatever risk Greinke’s condition involes.
Third, think for a moment about how many people you know that have struggled or have ongoing struggles with mental health that requires some sort of ongoing treatment (and again, I don’t know any specifics regarding Greinke’s treatment). It seems quite likely that a fair number of baseball players (including very good ones) are dealing with this sort of stuff, and we simply haven’t heard about it (some we have, as with Khalil Greene’s difficulties) because they’ve managed to keep it private. Do you really think professional baseball players are that much different from the rest of us?* If they can deal with it, so can Greinke, who has been dealing with for a few years now.
* And no, I’m not including the ‘shocking‘ increase in the number of players who needed AdderAll prescriptions after baseball banned greenies (which, unlike steroids, definitely didn’t help players’ performance in the past, even if they did do them, which they totally didn’t.).
Fourth, again without minimizing the seriousness of mental health issues, keep in mind that in February 2006, Greinke was just 22. Undoubtedly, social anxiety was the primary factor in Greinke’s difficulties at the time, but it’s also an age at which many people are at a crossroads. In The New Bill James Historical Abstract, James recounts the 1978 tale of the 22-year old Robin Yount, who, like Greinke, had been brought up at a very young age and was going through something of a career crisis, as the Brewers were considering moving him off of shortstop. Like Greinke, Yount thought about leaving baseball entirely (in Yount’s case, to take up professional golf). Some saw this as immaturity, but, as James writes after he returned to baseball
…Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn’t see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball… What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision… In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in the mask of failure (p. 594)
Greinke’s case (aside from the obvious) is obviously different than Yount’s, but there are similarities. Greinke, too, wanted to leave baseball behind for good. But that’s clearly not the case now. Contrary the “Zack’s just so goofy!” stereotype sometimes projected onto him (due to some memorable quotes), the main picture one gets is of a guy who is super-competitive (in everything — Brian Bannister has called Greinke “the most competitive peson I’ve ever met in my life.”) and driven.
Moreover, given baseball’s relative unconcern with its drinking problem, why would teams be concerned about a guy who got help for a treatable problem four years ago when they don’t seem to care all that much about players hitting the town every night while on the road? I’m not moralizing, I’m just “wondering” which is more detrimental to high-level athletic performance. Who knows?.*
* It’s hard to imagine, but maybe Greinke also hits the town with a world-historically awesome entourage of Kyle Farnsworth (Drama), Brian Bannister (“E”), and Billy Butler (Turtle). Um, not that I watch that stupid show.
But I digress. There are many reasons why someone might (wrongly, in my opinion) prefer one pitcher or another to Zack Greinke. Relative to all the various factors, Greinke’s issues with social anxiety shouldn’t be one of them.
Welcome to Try Redis, a demonstration of the Redis database!Please type TUTORIAL to begin a brief tutorial, HELP to see a list of supported commands, or any valid Redis command to play with the database.
via try.redis-db.com
Redis has been getting lots of press lately, because it's a more structured memcache, which (not-)surprisingly is needed sometimes.
It's stupidly easy to get going with redis, but even if "stupidly easy" was too much for you, you have now have no excuse to try it out.
]]>Finally, Cope's program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach's spirit -- and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he'd begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would've taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.
Gosh it's going to get interesting when machines can do some real fundamental "human" things 10,000x faster and better than humans can.
Tags: ai classical music David Cope music]]>
We have a pretty exciting year planned for prospect analysis here at FanGraphs and RotoGraphs… so be sure to keep us bookmarked. It’s going to be an exciting year.
The Top 10 AL Prospects
1. Desmond Jennings, OF, Tampa Bay Rays
2. Neftali Feliz, RHP, Texas Rangers
3. Carlos Santana, C, Cleveland Indians
4. Jesus Montero, C/1B, New York Yankees
5. Dustin Ackley, 2B/OF, Seattle Mariners
6. Brian Matusz, LHP, Baltimore Orioles
7. Jeremy Hellickson, RHP, Tampa Bay Rays
8. Justin Smoak, 1B, Texas Rangers
9. Chris Carter, 1B, Oakland Athletics
10. Martin Perez, LHP, Texas Rangers
Just Missed the Top 10
11. Casey Kelly, RHP, Boston Red Sox
12. Aaron Hicks, OF, Minnesota Twins
13. Tim Beckham, SS, Tampa Bay Rays
14. Wade Davis, RHP, Tampa Bay Rays
15. Michael Montgomery, LHP, Kansas City Royals
16. Brett Wallace, 3B/1B, Toronto Blue Jays
17. Kyle Drabek, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays
18. Ryan Westmoreland, OF, Boston Red Sox
19. Josh Bell, 3B, Baltimore Orioles
20. Tyler Flowers, C, Chicago White Sox
The Middle of the Pack
21. Hank Conger, C, Los Angeles Angels
22. Mike Moustakas, 3B, Kansas City Royals
23. Wilson Ramos, C, Minnesota Twins
24. Casey Crosby, LHP, Detroit Tigers
25. Eric Hosmer, 1B, Kansas City Royals
26. Austin Romine, C, New York Yankees
27. Michael Taylor, OF, Oakland Athletics
28. Austin Jackson, OF, Detroit Tigers
29. Matthew Moore, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays
30. Lonnie Chisenhall, 3B, Cleveland Indians
31. Zach McAllister, RHP, New York Yankees
32. Zach Stewart, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays
33. Daniel Hudson, RHP, Chicago White Sox
34. Tanner Scheppers, RHP, Texas Rangers
35. Jacob Turner, RHP, Detroit Tigers
36. Brandon Erbe, RHP, Baltimore Orioles
37. Jordan Walden, RHP, Los Angeles Angels
38. Junichi Tazawa, RHP, Boston Red Sox
39. Jake Arrieta, RHP, Baltimore Orioles
40. Alex White, RHP, Cleveland Indians
The Final 10 AL Prospects
41. Kyle Gibson, RHP, Minnesota Twins
42. Zach Britton, LHP, Baltimore Orioles
43. Mike Trout, OF, Los Angeles Angels
44. Michael Saunders, OF, Seattle Mariners
45. Nick Hagadone, LHP, Cleveland Indians
46. J.P. Arencibia, C, Toronto Blue Jays
47. Trevor Reckling, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
48. Nick Barnese, RHP, Tampa Bay Rays
49. Hector Rondon, RHP, Cleveland Indians
50. Danny Duffy, LHP, Kansas City Royals
So there you have it… Keep in mind that these lists – regardless of who does them – are subjective and I would probably create a slightly different list if I were to do it next week. There are certainly some players that I could rank a little lower or a little higher and still feel pretty good about it.
Nick pointed me to a comment he left at Lifehacker saying that “this was a commercial decision”, and also this one:
Gawker Media is an ad-supported company. RSS ads have never realized their potential. At the same time we sell plenty of ads on our website. So, yes, it is in our interest for people to click through if enticed by an excerpt.
(He also published the address of Gawker's full VIP feed, which was nice of him, and which put paid to any theories that the truncation was due to worries about people stealing his content.)
In theory, I understand where Nick is coming from here. If people click through from RSS to the website, that generates more revenue for the company, especially since no one ever got rich selling ads in RSS feeds. But in practice, there's no evidence at all that truncating your RSS feeds results in higher traffic, and indeed there's quite a strong case to be made that it works the other way around, and that switching from truncated feeds to full feeds is the thing which results in higher traffic.
Not all the arguments I made back in 2007 are quite as strong today: back then, RSS was used largely by people who had their own sites and could drive traffic, while now, in the age of Google Reader, it's moved a tiny bit downmarket, even as the key people you want linking to you use RSS less and Twitter more.
But the fact is that pretty much the only time I read Gawker blog entries is when they turn up in a search of my RSS feeds, and they're much more likely to do that if the full blog entry is there than if there's only an excerpt.
At heart, my argument for full RSS feeds is similar to my argument against a NYT paywall, and neither argument has anything to do with a sense of entitlement on my part. Instead, both are simply bad business decisions. If you truncate your RSS feeds, you'll get less traffic than you had with full feeds, and you'll alienate an important minority of your audience. And if you implement a paywall, the increase in subscription revenues will fail to offset the decrease in ad revenues, even as you'll alienate lots of your audience. So neither makes commercial sense.
I suspect that Nick's move to truncate his RSS feeds was not in fact “a commercial decision” at all — even if traffic does increase a little, it won't be by enough to move the needle. Instead, I think it's connected to his recent reshuffle at the top of the Gawker masthead, when he replace Gabriel Snyder with Remy Stern. That move was largely an attempt to move Gawker away from being a big blog and towards competing directly with the likes of nytimes.com for serious online traffic. And while it's pretty standard for blogs of all sizes to have full RSS feeds, it's also very uncommon for big news sites to have full RSS feeds.
There might be a reason for that fact, although if there is I don't really understand it. But I do see this move as a signal that Denton is exiting the blogosphere and that he has his sights set on higher ambitions. Expect his next move to be to rejigger the home pages of Gawker and his other blogs so that the big featured stories at the top get bigger, and the amount of real estate devoted to a simple reverse-chronological listing of all blog entries gets ever smaller. The NYT has Times Wire, if you want a reverse-chronological bloggish content stream, but it's buried within the site and is something of an afterthought. Gawker is likely to be moving in a similar direction: towards an edited home page and away from an automatically-generated blog page. It's the beginning of the end of an era.
With the impending launch of the Apple iPad, the Cupertino-based company's shunning of Adobe Flash technology has been brought to the forefront of technological discussions. While it was one thing to forgo Flash on a small, mobile device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, some are questioning whether lack of Flash support is going to be a make-it-or-break it feature for the new slate devices arriving next month - devices which, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs - are "better than netbooks."
On the flip side, Apple supporters echo the company's sentiments that "Flash is a CPU hog" and including support for the technology in Apple's mobile line-up would negatively impact battery life.
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However, recent tests have put Flash up against HTML5, the new web markup language that eliminates the need for the Adobe plugin. The results of these tests show that this is not a simple black-and-white issue. Is Flash really a CPU hog? Yes, in some cases. But, surprisingly, not all the time. In fact, sometimes HTML5 actually performed worse.
Jan Ozer is an expert in video encoding technologies, has worked in digital video since 1990 and is the author of 13 books related to the subject. Recently, he put HTML5 up against Flash in a series of tests that pitted the two technologies against each other on both the Mac and PC and in different web browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.
The results of the tests in their entirety are published here on StreamingLearningCenter.com. The summary in a nutshell? Flash isn't always a CPU hog, sometimes that honor goes to HTML5.
Some of the highlights of Ozer's findings are below, broken up into both Mac and Windows test results.
In analyzing the results of the tests, Ozer determined that the key to better Flash performance was dependent upon whether or not it could access hardware acceleration. This feature, launched in Flash 10.1, allows the plugin to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) on some computers to decode video. Depending on the video card and drivers, (NVIDIA, AMD/ATI and Intel offer products that support this), the video decoding process in Flash 10.1 can now work for all video playback, not just full-screen playback as was available in Flash 10.0.
According to Adobe, hardware acceleration is not supported under either Linux or Mac OS X, the latter because Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. Adobe goes on to say "The Flash Player team will continue to evaluate adding hardware acceleration to Linux and Mac OS X in future releases."
Here's what this all means in layman's terms: Apple isn't allowing Flash to become more efficient on their Mac OS X/Safari platform (or their iPod/iPhone/iPad one, either) by not providing the access to the hardware it needs to reduce its CPU load. Adobe is waiting and watching to see if they do, but, as Ozer says "the ball is in Apple's court."
Will Apple budge? At this point, it's unlikely. In blocking Flash on Apple devices, the company can easily claim that it's simply not an efficient technology...and that's true for now, considering how it's set up. But if the company wanted to allow it and make it work, it seems reasonable to believe that they could. This is what leads some insiders to believe that the decision to block Flash is less of a technological one and more of a business-minded one. After all, if you could easily visit Hulu.com (or, overseas, the BBC iPlayer, for example) to stream TV shows and movies, then why would you need to buy them from the iTunes Store?
So while Flash's "CPU hogging" may be a contributing factor in Apple's decision to not support the technology on their mobile devices, that's probably not the only reason behind the block.
Thank you to Dan Rayburn, who pointed us to Jan Ozer's article featured here on StreamingMedia.com.
Discuss
By Dan Hillier
Why is this one of my favorite cards? Well, surely by now you have seen the other Topps team cards that pepper the Series 1 checklist. The most popular of these is card #1 of Prince Fielder and the Brewers. Other teams have the usual home plate celebration conglomeration demonstrated here by my beloved Cincinnati Reds:
Hopefully we’ll see a lot more of that this year, and I may have to bring it out each time the Reds win a game. Don’t worry, even if I do, you probably won’t see it that often. But you’d see it more than that Royals card if I agreed to do the same thing for them. That’s how confident I am this year. We are definitely better than Kansas City.
Back to the Royals team card. While other teams get their on card celebrations, the Royals get players shaking hands. Royals fans get their team lined up like it’s the end of a little league baseball game and everyone has to show what a good sport they are before hitting mom up for a dollar or two to raid the snack bar. There’s no excitement there. No smiles. Just the team in rows, no doubt telling each other, “Good game.”
Everyone knows the Royals fans haven’t had much to cheer about in the last fifteen years. The promise of 2003 and 2008 was met with more failure in 2004 and 2009. 2010 doesn’t look very promising either, with the exception of Zack Greinke’s starts. Most are predicting around 70 wins, which means they’ll be flirting once more with 100 losses. It should be another long season in Kansas City.
But at least they are good sports about it. And they continue to play and continue to try for something, whether it’s that magical 63rd win or a Cy Young award for the league’s best pitcher. It’s why the Royals end up being a team most of us root for even though they aren’t our own. It’s hard to find someone who really hates the Royals anymore. They are like the lovable loser you want to see win big.
I wonder if Topps was going for a gentle poke at the Royals and their fans, but I prefer to think of it as celebration instead. While there hasn’t been much cause for cheering in Kansas City since 1995, no one has accused the Royals of not trying. No one has accused the players of throwing in the towel.
There are better times ahead for all who enter Kauffman stadium. It may just be a few more years before those days come, since most of their prospects still inhabit the lower rungs of the minors.
Until then, at least they tried to make it a good game.
]]>
I loved this little bit from The March 1 New Yorker profile of Paul Krugman: "Once, he and [his wife] Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics -- two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed up as a column."
That's right: two Asian tigers. Imagine the awkwardness.
]]>| Year | Tm | G | PA | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | SB | CS | BB | SO | BA | OBP | SLG | OPS | OPS+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1996-2003 | BOS | 928 | 4176 | 3812 | 685 | 1231 | 272 | 47 | 173 | 669 | 82 | 28 | 271 | 390 | 0.323 | 0.370 | 0.555 | 0.925 | 134 |
Using the Play Index's Batting Season Finder, here are the players who met or exceeded Garciaparra's output (.323 AVG, 1231 H, 173 HR, 669 RBI) through age 29:
| Rk | BA | H | HR | RBI | From | To | Age | G | PA | AB | R | 2B | 3B | BB | SO | SB | CS | OBP | SLG | OPS | Pos | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Joe DiMaggio | .339 | 1349 | 219 | 930 | 1936 | 1942 | 21-27 | 979 | 4417 | 3978 | 858 | 243 | 82 | 404 | 196 | 25 | 7 | .403 | .607 | 1.010 | *8/79 |
| 2 | Jimmie Foxx | .334 | 1852 | 379 | 1345 | 1925 | 1937 | 17-29 | 1561 | 6605 | 5551 | 1216 | 313 | 93 | 985 | 859 | 71 | 54 | .435 | .628 | 1.063 | *35/2796 |
| 3 | Nomar Garciaparra | .323 | 1231 | 173 | 669 | 1996 | 2003 | 22-29 | 928 | 4176 | 3812 | 685 | 272 | 47 | 271 | 390 | 82 | 28 | .370 | .555 | .925 | *6/4D |
| 4 | Lou Gehrig | .343 | 1558 | 267 | 1146 | 1923 | 1932 | 20-29 | 1232 | 5470 | 4542 | 1075 | 321 | 113 | 806 | 508 | 63 | 67 | .444 | .640 | 1.084 | *3/97 |
| 5 | Hank Greenberg | .326 | 1281 | 247 | 1003 | 1930 | 1940 | 19-29 | 1030 | 4587 | 3931 | 830 | 312 | 61 | 610 | 631 | 49 | 24 | .418 | .625 | 1.043 | *37 |
| 6 | Vladimir Guerrero | .325 | 1421 | 273 | 828 | 1996 | 2004 | 21-29 | 1160 | 4900 | 4375 | 765 | 265 | 36 | 433 | 558 | 138 | 74 | .390 | .589 | .979 | *9/D8 |
| 7 | Rogers Hornsby | .363 | 1916 | 180 | 958 | 1915 | 1925 | 19-29 | 1400 | 6013 | 5271 | 984 | 327 | 138 | 587 | 435 | 114 | 64 | .431 | .580 | 1.011 | *465/3798 |
| 8 | Chuck Klein | .352 | 1340 | 211 | 807 | 1928 | 1934 | 23-29 | 938 | 4192 | 3802 | 777 | 273 | 52 | 344 | 305 | 54 | 0 | .408 | .618 | 1.026 | *97/8 |
| 9 | Joe Medwick | .332 | 1838 | 180 | 1047 | 1932 | 1941 | 20-29 | 1360 | 5901 | 5539 | 954 | 416 | 103 | 311 | 447 | 32 | 0 | .370 | .542 | .911 | *7/89 |
| 10 | Stan Musial | .346 | 1624 | 174 | 815 | 1941 | 1950 | 20-29 | 1218 | 5392 | 4688 | 920 | 343 | 115 | 652 | 235 | 49 | 0 | .429 | .580 | 1.009 | 9378 |
| 11 | Albert Pujols | .334 | 1717 | 366 | 1112 | 2001 | 2009 | 21-29 | 1399 | 6082 | 5146 | 1071 | 387 | 14 | 811 | 570 | 61 | 30 | .427 | .628 | 1.055 | *37/59D64 |
| 12 | Babe Ruth | .351 | 1251 | 284 | 889 | 1914 | 1924 | 19-29 | 1100 | 4511 | 3565 | 925 | 270 | 83 | 881 | 599 | 72 | 66 | .482 | .712 | 1.195 | 791/83 |
| 13 | Al Simmons | .363 | 1580 | 173 | 1005 | 1924 | 1931 | 22-29 | 1086 | 4752 | 4349 | 816 | 315 | 89 | 292 | 327 | 61 | 46 | .405 | .596 | 1.001 | *78/9 |
| 14 | Frank Thomas | .330 | 1261 | 257 | 854 | 1990 | 1997 | 22-29 | 1076 | 4789 | 3821 | 785 | 246 | 8 | 879 | 582 | 18 | 15 | .452 | .600 | 1.053 | *3D |
| 15 | Ted Williams | .354 | 1294 | 222 | 879 | 1939 | 1948 | 20-29 | 1029 | 4618 | 3655 | 932 | 275 | 53 | 939 | 328 | 15 | 12 | .488 | .640 | 1.129 | *79/1 |
Here are the players meeting those same criteria, but through their first 8 MLB seasons:
| Rk | BA | H | HR | RBI | From | To | Age | G | PA | AB | R | 2B | 3B | BB | SO | SB | CS | OBP | SLG | OPS | Pos | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Earl Averill | .325 | 1547 | 190 | 892 | 1929 | 1936 | 27-34 | 1195 | 5378 | 4763 | 924 | 309 | 95 | 550 | 345 | 56 | 49 | .398 | .549 | .947 | *8/9 |
| 2 | Joe DiMaggio | .334 | 1495 | 244 | 1025 | 1936 | 1946 | 21-31 | 1111 | 4984 | 4481 | 939 | 263 | 90 | 463 | 220 | 26 | 7 | .399 | .596 | .995 | *8/79 |
| 3 | Nomar Garciaparra | .323 | 1231 | 173 | 669 | 1996 | 2003 | 22-29 | 928 | 4176 | 3812 | 685 | 272 | 47 | 271 | 390 | 82 | 28 | .370 | .555 | .925 | *6/4D |
| 4 | Todd Helton | .339 | 1372 | 251 | 836 | 1997 | 2004 | 23-30 | 1135 | 4798 | 4051 | 832 | 328 | 22 | 667 | 542 | 30 | 23 | .432 | .616 | 1.048 | *3/79 |
| 5 | Chuck Klein | .346 | 1467 | 232 | 880 | 1928 | 1935 | 23-30 | 1057 | 4677 | 4236 | 848 | 287 | 56 | 385 | 347 | 58 | 0 | .402 | .605 | 1.007 | *97/8 |
| 6 | Johnny Mize | .332 | 1340 | 206 | 833 | 1936 | 1946 | 23-33 | 1097 | 4634 | 4039 | 713 | 261 | 76 | 546 | 344 | 20 | 0 | .415 | .587 | 1.002 | *3/9 |
| 7 | Albert Pujols | .334 | 1531 | 319 | 977 | 2001 | 2008 | 21-28 | 1239 | 5382 | 4578 | 947 | 342 | 13 | 696 | 506 | 45 | 26 | .425 | .624 | 1.049 | *37/59D64 |
| 8 | Al Simmons | .363 | 1580 | 173 | 1005 | 1924 | 1931 | 22-29 | 1086 | 4752 | 4349 | 816 | 315 | 89 | 292 | 327 | 61 | 46 | .405 | .596 | 1.001 | *78/9 |
| 9 | Frank Thomas | .330 | 1261 | 257 | 854 | 1990 | 1997 | 22-29 | 1076 | 4789 | 3821 | 785 | 246 | 8 | 879 | 582 | 18 | 15 | .452 | .600 | 1.053 | *3D |
| 10 | Ted Williams | .353 | 1488 | 265 | 1038 | 1939 | 1949 | 20-30 | 1184 | 5348 | 4221 | 1082 | 314 | 56 | 1101 | 376 | 16 | 13 | .488 | .642 | 1.130 | *79/1 |
Through age 29, here were his most similar players:
Sim Player From To Yrs G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG SB CS OPS+
+---++-------------------+---------+--+----+-----+----+----+---+---+---+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+----+---+----+
Nomar Garciaparra 1996-2003 8 928 3812 685 1231 272 47 173 669 271 390 .323 .370 .555 82 28 134
862* Ernie Banks 1953-1960 8 1078 4159 676 1213 188 55 269 778 398 502 .292 .354 .557 36 37 140
829 Joe Torre 1960-1970 11 1357 4926 631 1464 210 36 181 753 470 694 .297 .362 .465 12 23 130
826* Yogi Berra 1946-1954 9 1053 3964 646 1175 177 37 181 790 332 179 .296 .354 .497 16 18 130
824 Miguel Tejada 1997-2003 7 936 3584 574 968 191 11 156 604 287 542 .270 .331 .460 49 20 106
823* Travis Jackson 1922-1933 12 1265 4587 643 1367 237 66 103 695 328 374 .298 .346 .446 67 13 106
820 Derek Jeter 1995-2003 9 1212 4870 926 1546 239 41 127 615 513 873 .317 .389 .462 178 48 121
811* Chick Hafey 1924-1932 9 895 3206 576 1050 261 49 129 654 253 323 .328 .381 .560 60 7 138
811* Tony Lazzeri 1926-1933 8 1130 4196 683 1274 235 94 114 825 528 541 .304 .383 .486 110 67 129
810 Chipper Jones 1993-2001 8 1094 4041 773 1240 237 23 227 737 652 609 .307 .400 .545 106 36 141
810* Charlie Gehringer 1924-1932 9 985 3846 739 1209 237 94 63 548 383 182 .314 .380 .474 110 63 118
+---++-------------------+---------+--+----+-----+----+----+---+---+---+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+----+---+----+
(I think we can assume that Jeter and Jones will also be enshrined in the HoF someday, which means 8 of Nomar's 10 most similar comps through age 29 were eventual Hall of Famers.)
Sometimes it can be hard to remember an athlete's glory days when they're still playing as a broken-down shell of what they used to be. In fact, some kids may not even be old enough to remember Garciaparra as anything but the oft-injured Cub, Dodger, and Athletic he was late in his career. But today, we should recognize that at one point less than a decade ago, Nomar Garciaparra seemed like a pretty good bet to make the Hall of Fame.
]]>The track was recorded and InfoQ will publish the presentations in the upcoming month. As an example of what I’m talking about you can watch ☞ Facebook’s Petabyte Scale Data Warehouse using Hive and Hadoop.
Hone your skills. You're now the worlds only Mechanic, Electrician, Farmer, Hunter, Gatherer and Doctor. Books are a remarkable resource.
As previously noted, I love this kind of thing.
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