Remains of the Day

Photosynth

Photosynth, a new technology from Microsoft Live Labs, looks very cool. It's a bit difficult to explain, but it can take multiple photos of a place and build a 3-d model of that location using the photos. Then it places those photos back into the 3-d model so you can explore the scene using the photos. This video does a better job of explaining the technology.

At Eric and Christina's wedding, they printed out flash cards with vector art cartoon pics of each of them for a game we played during the reception. They used a technology from Microsoft Research that can create vector art from still photos. Also very cool, and hopefully something that will be released as consumer software in the near future.

More Landis test result rumors

Someone at the International Cycling Union who has seen the results of tests on Landis's A Sample says that some of the testosterone was synthetic, not produced by his body. If true, it's another tragic setback for cycling in trying to regain its reputation as a sport with a level playing field, though in a practical sense that may be years and years away.

[That's not to excuse this French lab, which always seems to leak results through the press. That lab's inability to release information according to official procedures contributes to cycling's tarnished reputation.]

Knowing some of what professional cyclists go through to reach the pinnacle of their sport, though, the sport seems a long way from natural to me, even without banned substances. Cyclists sleep in altitude tents, test the aerodynamic qualities of their bodies and bikes in wind tunnels, tap the latest advances in material science to increase the stiffness and shave the weight of their bike frames, monitor their power output and heart rates with computers, and consume all sorts of strange supplements whose chemistry requires a PhD to understand.

We're a long way from the days of Jacque Anquetil, pulling an all-nighter the night before a race to drink whiskey and play cards. Anquetil, though, was up front about the fact that he took drugs. He was also a fantastic talent, a courageous cyclist. Landis, whether he took illegal substances or not, is a talented, hard-working cyclist. But we want heroes and villains, cloaked entirely in white or black, rather than people exhibiting shades of gray.

Sidenote: The phrasing of the positive drug tests for Gatlin and Landis should be changed. Saying that a male athlete tested positive for testosterone sounds odd.

Two sides

James Surowiecki decries massive and inefficient Department of Defense spending.

One more study supporting the idea that experts are made more often than they're born.

The black box that is the Netflix similarity score

Note: I'm no statistics major, so if I'm completely missing the boat here, I hope some of you stats geeks will correct me.

Netflix's Friends page changed sometime in the past few days, perhaps over the weekend. I noticed it yesterday. The most curious new feature is that all of my friends are given a % similarity score relative to me. For example, under Robert's name, I see: 86% similarity to you.

My inclination was at once to believe that Robert had pretty decent taste, but perusing the similarity scores of my friends, I found some of them to be somewhat odd. Of all my friends, Eleanor ranked lowest in similarity to me, at 54%. I may not be a fan of Grey's Anatomy, but anecdotally, that seemed low to me.

I searched the site to see if there was an explanation of how this similarity score was calculated, but I couldn't find anything, not even an explanation of how to interpret the score. If the score is 54%, does that mean that if we both watched a movie, there's a 54% chance we'd both rate the movie exactly the same? Or does that mean that 46% of the time, one of us would like the movie and the other person would dislike the movie? Or something else entirely?

If you click on the similarity score, the site displays a list of all movies you've seen in common with that friend and how you each rated the movie. Thankfully, the overlapping data between Eleanor and I was only 38 movies, so I put our ratings into a spreadsheet. Of those 38, Eleanor hadn't rated 8 of the movies yet, so I dumped those out of the data and looked at the remaining 30.

Of those, we had the exact same rating for 19 of the movies. So of the 30 movies we'd both seen, we had the same rating for 63.3% of them (Netflix allows you to rate a movie on a 5 point scale, from 1 through 5 stars). Of all the movies we'd seen in common, including those Eleanor had not yet rated, we had the exact same score for 50% of them.

Of the 11 movies we differed on, Eleanor gave 1 additional star on 8 of them, I gave 1 additional star on 2 movies and 2 additional stars on 1 movie. At any rate, that information didn't help me to understand the 54% similarity score. On the 30 movies we'd both rated, Eleanor's mean rating was 3.53 stars, mine was 3.40 stars, and the mean of the difference between our ratings on the movies was .13.

Netflix assigns a textual description to each of its 5 star rankings:

• 1 star equals "You hated it"
• 2 stars equals "You didn't like it"
• 3 stars equals "You liked it"
• 4 stars equals "You really liked it"
• 5 stars equals "You loved it"

By that system, a rating of 1 or 2 stars was a negative review, and 3 stars up equated to a positive review. If Eleanor and I differed on our ratings but both assigned a movie a negative or positive review, then in my mind our ratings were not as different as if one of us had assigned the movie a negative review while the other assigned it a positive review.

Of the 11 movies we differed on, in only 3 cases did one of us assign a positive review when the other assigned a negative review. So of 30 movies we'd seen, we had both given the movie a thumbs up or thumbs down in 27 of them, or 90% of the movies we'd both rated. This rendered the 54% similarity score even more peculiar to me.

I looked up some collaborative filtering papers online, and it seemed that the Pearson linear correlation coefficient and cosine similarity were two popular methods for calculating user or item similarity in collaborative filtering online. I couldn't do cosine similarity in Excel (at least not easily), but Excel did offer a formula for calculating the Pearson coefficient of two arrays, so I calculated that for Eleanor and my ratings. Our Pearson coefficient was .564 (correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1). Close, but it didn't match up to the 54% similarity score.

I decided to look at relative similarity scores to see if they meant more. Audrey had a 75% similarity score to me according to Netflix, so by any number of measures, we should be more similar in our movie tastes than Eleanor. But a quick look at the facts didn't support that.

Of the 103 movies Audrey and I both rated, we had the same rating on 38 of them, or 36.9%. Audrey's average rating was 3.75, while mine was 3.36, and the average of the difference of our ratings was .39. Our Pearson coefficient was .454, or lower than the Pearson coefficient between Eleanor and me.

I don't expect Netflix to reveal its methodology for calculating similarity scores. Most companies are protective of their personalization algorithms. Even if I knew how Netflix calculated its similarity scores, I'm not sure it's much more than a minor curiosity. If you knew some people were similar to me in our film ratings, the way that would help me on a movie site is to use those people's ratings to predict which other movies I'd rate highly. Netflix probably already does that. If Netflix explained how the figure was calculated, or even how to interpret the figure, it might be more meaningful.

Having used the personalization features of lots of sites, I find the most useful personalization feature to be item similarities, e.g. Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also bought" feature. Attempts to use similar people to predict my tastes has always yielded mediocre results. I haven't encountered any sites that have really cracked that nut, and that's not surprising. There's no accounting for taste, especially those of creatures as complex as human beings.

Still, if someone out there can explain the similarity scores, drop me an e-mail (commenting doesn't work right now; my e-mail address is on my homepage). I'm curious.

UPDATE: Eleanor wrote to tell me that I show up as 85% similar to her in her Friends page, even though she's only 54% similar to me in my Friends page. Audrey says I show up as 80% similar to her on her end, or 5% lower than she shows up on my end. I'm guessing that even movies we haven't rated must factor into the similarity equation.

SeisMac

SeisMac is a freeware application that allows you to use your Sudden Motion Sensor-equipped MacBook, MacBook Pro, iBook, or PowerBook as a seismograph. I'm not sure why this would be of interest to anyone, but it struck me as cool, and since I'm moving to Los Angeles, maybe it will come in handy.

Okay, one more trailer, for The Departed

The Departed is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Infernal Affairs, the first chapter in my favorite Hong Kong cops and robbers trilogy. Here's the trailer for the American remake, here's the trailer for the original.

The Hong Kong original included a star-studded cast, and Scorsese's version is no less loaded. Here's the key, as far as I can tell from the trailer:
Andy Lau --> Matt Damon
Tony Leung (Chiu Wai) --> Leonardo DiCaprio
Eric Tsang --> Jack Nicholson
Anthony Wong --> Martin Sheen

That's not even mentioning Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, and Ray Winstone, who are in the cast, and Robert De Niro, who was in the cast but had to drop out. It's good to be Marty.

You can find the DVD box set for the original Hong Kong Infernal Affairs trilogy at various Asian DVD sites (you will likely need a region-free DVD player) and even eBay (which includes many non-region-encoded copies). I would urge caution on eBay DVDs that seem too cheap to be true. Many are just mass copies of low quality, and many of my old eBay DVDs of Asian movies no longer play properly. If you want what amounts to a disposable play-once copy, go to eBay. If you want a copy for your collection, spend a bit more for a high quality version.

One more trailer

The one for Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. If you use music by Sigur Ros in your trailer, you're cheating, but it's an effective one.

Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke will premiere in New Orleans. Tickets will be free and available via Ticketmaster.

Friday movie quiz, part III

The third in a series of movie quizzes is online. The other two were mentioned here previously. 28 frames, each from a different movie. As always, a mix of the really easy and the ridiculously obscure.

Thanks to some of my uber-movie-geek pals for the answers to 7, 8, 15, and 25. Answers below in white text (run your cursor across them to see them):
1. Cube
2. Citizen Kane
3. Casablanca
4. Casanova
5. Titan AE
6. Groundhog Day
7. Bloodrayne
8. The Street Fighter
9. Dogma
10. Raiders of the Lost Ark
11. To Kill a Mockingbird
12. Life of Brian
13. Platoon
14. Dog Day Afternoon
15. Taxi
16. Heat
17. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
18. The Insider
19. Total Recall
20. Tom Yum Goong
21. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
22. Wag the Dog
23. Bulletproof Monk
24. No Man’s Land
25. Kopps
26. Y Tu Mama Tambien
27. Phone Booth
28. Scary Movie 2
What really used to impress me was a feature on IMDb in which people would write in with the vaguest descriptions of some scene they had stuck in their head.

"I remember a man walking down a hall, the lights flickering, and then a drop of water lands on his head." Or something like that. 9 times out of 10, one of the IMDb'ers could identify the movie. Amazing recall.

Nowadays, I think that letter column has been retired, but it appears that users are helping each other out with such questions on the IMDb message board I Need to Know.

Trailer park

Black Dahlia, starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, and Mia Kirshner. I'm a big De Palma fan, so I'm looking forward to this.

Babel (in HD), starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Kôji Yakusho (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's leading man of choice), and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Interesting cast.

Pre-salting

Good article on Judy Rodgers of Zuni Cafe in San Francisco and her theories on pre-salting meat. Definitely something to try the next time I prepare roast chicken or pork chops or some other meat entree.

Wikipedia celebrates 750 years of American Independence

=).

The commemorative page is one of the most detailed on the site, rivaling entries for Firefly and the Treaty Of Algeron for sheer length. According to the entry, the American Revolution was in fact instigated by Chuck Norris, who incinerated the Stamp Act by looking at it, then roundhouse-kicked the entire British army into the Atlantic Ocean.

I'm a big fan of Wikipedia, which was profiled in the New Yorker this week. It may on occasion be inaccurate, but it can be corrected instantly, and it is far more current and broad than a paper encyclopedia. It is the reference that only the web could have created, and it is the one the web deserves. It takes an occasional beating for its misstatements, but consider IMDb, another user-content generated reference which most people treat as gospel. I think IMDb proves that user-generated content, if moderated by a small cadre of super-users, who may come from the broad base of users themselves rather than the company's employees, can be assembled into highly useful references in very short order.

Cycling's rough year continues

Yesterday I mentioned that one rider in the Tour had tested positive after stage 17. Pat McQuaid, president of the International Cycling Union (UCI) would only say, “I will say that I am extremely angry and feel very let down by this. The credibility of the sport is at stake. The rider, his federation and his team have been informed of the situation.”

The rider for whom a positive test would most damage the credibility of the sport was, well, obvious. I didn't state his name yesterday because it felt like saying it would make it so.

Then the rider in question failed to show up for a criterium event in the Netherlands, raising suspicions that he was the suspect in question.

"We've never experienced a situation that a 'topper' hasn't shown up without officially cancelling," said John van den Akker, who put together the start list for the Acht van Chaam, to ANP. "We've also learned nothing more from [Phonak team director] Lelangue. It's unbelievable, because Landis is one of the friendliest riders in the peloton. In the morning before the race, various people had breakfast with him and there was nothing wrong."

And today, Phonak and Floyd Landis confirmed that he was the one who had failed the test. Now his B-sample will be tested for confirmation. The World Anti-Doping Agency recently dropped the maximum testosterone to epitestosterone level from 6:1 to 4:1. The test is not conclusive in that some people have naturally high levels and can demonstrate that through a battery of endocrinological tests, and it's likely Landis will protest an adverse test result.

But no matter what, this test result will always leave doubts in people's minds. Another ex-Lance Armstrong lieutenant, Tyler Hamilton, also a universally acknowledged nice guy on the Tour, tested positive for blood doping a few years ago. He's still fighting the results. However, by now, most people have come to believe he was guilty, and it doesn't appear he'll ever make an impact on the pro cycling tour again.

Floyd's own mom seems ready to pronounce him guilty.

Arlene Landis, his mother, said Thursday that she wouldn't blame her son if he was taking medication to treat the pain in his injured hip, but "if it's something worse than that, then he doesn't deserve to win."

"I didn't talk to him since that hit the fan, but I'm keeping things even keel until I know what the facts are," she said in a phone interview from her home in Farmersville, Pennsylvania. "I know that this is a temptation to every rider but I'm not going to jump to conclusions ... It disappoints me."

"He is prominent and temptation is strong," she said. "He is still my wonderful son. If it has happened I love him as much as if he had won... (his) temptations are different than mine."

Scarlett Hearts Rbk

Scarlett Johansson has signed on with Reebok to design and model her own collection of shoes and clothing. The look is expected to be glamorous, taking cues from the 70's and 80's.

I have nothing to add. This was just an excuse to link to a ScarJo pic.

The prodigal son returns

Levi Leipheimer confirmed that he'll return to ride for the Discovery Channel Team next year. Free subscription required at that site, so here's the relevant portion of the article:

Levi Leipheimer will join fellow North Americans George Hincapie, Tom Danielson, Michael Barry and Jason McCartney as he returns to the Discovery Channel Team. Leipheimer stated, “I’m very excited about returning to the Discovery Channel Team, its family of sponsors and working with Johan Bruyneel once again. This team has a long history of success and I plan to work hard to continue their winning ways in 2007.”

Team Discovery also added Sergio Paulinho and Thomas Vaitkus. Rumor has it that Discovery Channel is also courting Jan Ullrich. If he signs, it will be really interesting to see who acts as team leader in next year's Tour. Perhaps after this Tour the management didn't feel they had a clear team leader who would be ready to step up next year. Yaroslav Popovych is 26 or 27, and I'd think he'd be groomed as team leader in 2008 or 2009, but he had a tough time this year. Ullrich and Leipheimer both have maybe one more Tour in their legs, so they'd serve as a bridge team leader until one of the young guys was ready to step up.

I'm curious to see how Tom Danielson rides in the Vuelta Espana. He finished eighth their last year, and he's a great climber. He's also 28, so it's not as if the team can wait for him for a few more years. On the other hand, he's a former mountain biker, like Floyd Landis, and perhaps they have a longer shelf life than lifelong road racers?

In other, darker news, the sport is awaiting the revelation of which "high-profile" Tour rider tested positive for doping after stage 17, in which Floyd Landis won that miraculous solo breakaway. Will the dark clouds over professional cycling ever part?

Comments not working

By the way, I am aware that commenting is erroring out on my site. Something to do with the MT-Blacklist plug-in. At any rate, I'll be upgrading to Movable Type 3.31 within a week, so commenting should return shortly.

Once upon a tongue, in a faraway place

I was in China last year, and I jotted a few notes about the food in my journal:

My first meal in China was at one of the best Sichuan (Szechwan) restaurant in Beijing, Yu Xin. Straight off the plane, Eric and Christina wasted no time in tossing my stomach into the fire, literally. The spiciness of real Sichuan cuisine comes from mala, a spicy sauce of Chinese chilies and assorted seasonings like sesame oil and Sichuan peppercorns. The word "ma" refers to numbness, the word "la" to the spiciness, so mala spells out its effect: it burns and numbs at the same time. The numbness actually allows you to eat more of it than you would otherwise.

The first dish that came out was a meat dish, but it was unclear from its appearance what the dish contained other than diced chilies. I had to send my chopsticks burrowing deep into the mountain of chilies to find a chunk of chicken. By the end of the meal I'd lost all feeling in my mouth, but that didn't wipe the big grin off my jetlagged face. The problem with eating lots of mala is that all other types of food taste bland in comparison.

The toughest restaurant to get a table at in all of China? Kentucky Fried Chicken (ken da ji). Far more popular than McDonald's. It's so popular that another chain of restaurants knocked off KFC's logo, colors, and mascot. Yes, there's another restaurant with a Chinese-looking colonel and the white lettering on red background, but that restaurant doesn't serve fried chicken at all. I didn't have time to walk into one to see what they served, but its existence seemed appropriate in a place where respect for copyrights is about as scarce as toilet paper in public bathrooms.

The hottest new American export to the Chinese dining scene since my last visit? Starbucks ("xing ba ke" in Chinese, xing meaning "star" and ba ke simply being a phonetic rendering of bucks). There's one in the Forbidden City. We stayed with Joannie's friend Arthur and his wife in Guangzhou. We asked him what he liked to do for fun, when he wasn't cranking out sneakers for Nike (he worked at a supplier to the Swoosh). He said his favorite event of the month was every other week, when he and his wife would drive 45 minutes to an hour into the heart of the city to get Starbucks.

In China people actually don't use soy sauce much. Soy sauce and egg rolls and General Tso's chicken, they're all largely staples of the Americanized version of Chinese food. In China, they prefer vinegar use it instead of soy sauce as seasoning, for example, for dumplings.

My visit two weeks ago to Beijing was another culinary adventure. Christina and Eric are among the more passionate foodies in my circle of friends, and the week's worth of activities they organized for everyone leading up to their wedding included visits to many of their favorite restaurants.

That was music to my mouth. I don't look forward to the cuisine in every country I visit (many of the stops on my E. European visit earlier this year left much to be desired from a dining perspective), but China is a culinary mecca. On my visits there, I look forward to eating as much as or more than sightseeing.

Some meals I remember from this trip...

Our first lunch was at Lei Garden, a fairly new restaurant to Beijing. I don't believe it was there last year when I visited, but it's the newest branch of a high-end Cantonese restaurant chain that first achieved renown in Singapore. For those who love Chinese food but don't possess the most adventurous of palates, this is the perfect restaurant. The restaurant, tucked away on the third floor of a somewhat sober business building, is elegant and polished, and the service is top-notch. As for the food, when I found out we were returning to Lei Garden for the rehearsal dinner, I delivered a celebratory chest bump to the next guy I saw in the street, sending him scampering away in fear.

For one of our dinners, we visited the Qianmen branch of Quan Ju De (English website), the famous Beijing (Peking) duck restaurant. Roasted over a fruitwood flame, the duck arrives with a crispy skin and tender, juicy meat. Carved tableside and served in a wrap with scallion and plum sauce, it's a dish I can never pass on. Quan Ju De has the reputation of being the top roast duck purveyor in Beijing, though there are whispers of declining quality and worthy challengers. If you're only in town for a quick vacation, though, it's the safe choice.

Our dinner the next night was at Qiao Jiang Nan. What I remember most about our meal here, in a private banquet room, was that all the waitresses were wearing one-piece tennis outfits, much like the one Nicole Vaidisova is sporting here. I realize this seems like an excuse to reuse this picture of Nicole, but this is honestly the first photo of this type of outfit I could find. At any rate, I felt like we were eating at the clubhouse at Wimbledon.

Perhaps my favorite meal of the trip was at Ding Ding Xiang, a Mongolian hotpot restaurant which bills itself as "Hotpot Paradise." It's not boasting if it's true. It instantly moves onto my list of restaurants and dishes that will haunt me forever. My second day back from China, I actually did have a dream about eating there again, and when I woke up I nearly cried at the cold slap of reality. At Ding Ding Xiang, everyone gets their own personal hotpot, set on top of a flame. Each diner can select one of several different broths to serve as the base of their hotpot. Christina helped Jed and I out and chose the mushroom stock.

I saw abalone on the menu and had to order it, despite it being the priciest of the dishes. I adore abalone. The waiter actually brought it out for our perusal, and it was still moving! I'd never seen one live before. We also ordered lamb, a whole slew of mushrooms, spinach and other greens, and a whole lot more. The presentation was gorgeous, and the hotpot was simply the most delicious I've ever had, and I've had more than my fair share over the years. I'll be dreaming about that meal for years to come, and it is unequivocally my top restaurant recommendation from this visit to Beijing. The next time I visit, it will be my first stop upon leaving the airport.

As for changes from my visit last year, the Starbucks in the Forbidden City is no longer there. Our guide told us the Congress over there gave it the boot. All the other branches of Starbucks remain a huge hit, however, and Kentucky Fried Chicken is still the king of the fast food restaurants in China. I did not eat there this trip, but I am also not one of those foodie or travel snobs who turns their nose up in disgust at the mere sight of a KFC or McDonald's.

I think it's somewhat of a waste to spend a meal at McDonald's or KFC when abroad, especially when most of what they serve is available back home. But, even as an American, I don't flog myself every time I spot a branch abroad, and I no longer recoil in horror if someone has to duck in under the Golden Arches for the taste of something familiar. The typical travel snob who holds everything foreign on a pedestal can't ignore that most American fast food franchises abroad stay in business primarily through the traffic from locals. I find it interesting to gauge foreign perceptions of American restaurants and culture, and fast food restaurants are an easy barometer.

It's also been many years since I've harbored any illusions that any popular travel destinations are hermetically sealed time machines, completely devoid of other tourists or influences from home. Wherever I go, I see American movies, travelers, books, music, and yes, more than a few frappuccinos and Big Macs. If a complete absence of anything American is the only way you'll be satisfied, then consider that your presence abroad is probably ruining some other travel snob's vacation.

One last food story. I've always been a fairly adventurous, open-minded eater. My mom forced me to clean my plate, to sample something from every dish. Whether it was innate or trained, my broad palate has been with me for as long as I remember. It's a high risk, high reward dining strategy. At times, as with drunken shrimp in Hong Kong, it ends with gustatory ecstasy. At other times, as with some bad (though tasty at the time of consumption) ceviche in Quito, it has sent me to the hospital.

Last year during my visit to Beijing, a bunch of us went for a stroll down a well-known food alley near the Wangfujing neighborhood of Beijing. There, we stumbled upon more than one street vendor hawking some creatures I'd never thought of as food before. They were impaled on kabobs. The mere sight of them was fearsome, but after an initial bout of revulsion, I tried to summon my stomach, so to speak. More than few people from our travel party were there, and an audience usually amplifies my dining bravado. I asked the vendor how much for a kabob, and he said they were 10RMB, or just over $1.

I took a deep breath. Okay, I'd eaten a fried grasshopper before, surely this was not much different. I could do this, and I'd have a story to share for years to come. After all, they were deep fried, right? The vendor reached out for one of the kabobs, for another customer, and that's when the true nature of what I'd be attempting became clear.

These creatures' legs started waving wildly, even as they were impaled on the kabobs.

"I thought they were fried!?" I gasped in Chinese.

"No!" said the vendor, recoiling in horror. "Much better alive. Fresh!"

I couldn't do it. We walked away, but not before I grabbed some video of these unique creatures, both pre and post skewering. These creatures should be familiar to most people (view either the 320 x 240 high quality or the 640 x 480 medium quality Quicktime clip, both about 3.5MB), though perhaps not as a snack.

I'll eat most things, but not everything. I don't know who has the unfortunate job of having to prepare these creatures nor how they do it. I don't know how they ensure you aren't injured or even poisoned when biting one of these while they're still alive. You can ask for them deep fried, but even on my return trip this year I couldn't pull the trigger.

After my initial encounter, just as we turned to leave, a young boy of perhaps 7 or 8 years old walked by with his father. The boy had a kabob of these and had chewed the head off of one.

His t-shirt read: "You are what you eat."

Accomplice

Accomplice New York is "part theater, part game and part tour." Interact with actors in trying to solve a criminal mystery in New York, and experience the city in the process. They suggest 8-person teams, which is tough to achieve with just out-of-town visitors, but for locals it might be a fun alternative weekend activity.

Annie Duke wins WSORPS (World Series of Rock, Paper, Scissors) bracelet

At a Freakonomics book signing about a month and a half ago, Steven Levitt mentioned that Phil Gordon would be throwing a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament so Levitt could study the play for some research he's conducting on people's ability to randomize. Annie Duke won this year, and Levitt mentions that she attributed her success to her new coach, Rafe Furst.

I would dismiss RSP strategy as ridiculous, but considering how many situations in my life have been arbitrated by RSP (who's buying this round of beers, who has to shovel the driveway, who has to sit in the middle, who's taking out the trash, e.g.), perhaps it's worth a bit of study. I don't think I could actually drop the name of one of these gambit plays with a straight face, though.

Preview Skype for Mac with video

Here.

To terrorize or not to terrorize

Two Tuesdays ago, I attended the NY premiere of the opera "Grendel." Elliot Goldenthal was the composer, and his partner Julie Taymor (seemingly most well-known for Broadway's musical "The Lion King" and for directing Titus and Frida and for her acclaimed production of Die Zauberflöte at the Met last year...my review of that here) was director, co-librettist, and puppet designer. George Tsypin, who collaborated with Taymor on Die Zauberflöte, reunited with her as set designer.

This was an adaptation of the novel by John Gardner that retells the story of Beowulf from the monster Grendel's perspective. I've not read the novel, but if the Goldenthal-Taymor adaptation was faithful, then both transform Grendel from a mindless beast into a Hamlet-esque brooder, an introverted philosopher wearied by the weight of his own thoughts. As with the revisionist musical Wicked, the opera traces his monstrous soul to mistreatment at the hands of cruel children in his youth because of his physical appearance.

I enjoy opera, but most are a bit long for me. It would be a lie to say I've survived all three hours of any German opera without my eyes and ears and mind wandering around the theater more than a few times. "Grendel," an English (of the new and Old variety) opera, is no exception, but a few things helped to focus my attention. Taymor/Tsypin always provide a dazzling palette for the eyes, and by the oohs and aahs of the opening night crowd, that might be enough in and of itself to earn a checkmark. Tsypin's main contribution is a gigantic, rotating wall with a pivoting cutout in the center that swings back and forth like a drawbridge. Taymor's puppets include those with her trademark geometric grandeur, including a massive dragon head. Constance Hoffman's costumes supply a pleasing contrast to the puppets, some of the other monsters in Grendel's cave looking like some first grader's terrifying crayon scrawls come to life.

I enjoy me some Taymor puppets dancing around Tsypin sets as much as the next guy, but the music is what stays with you. Goldenthal is most known to me for his film score work, and "Grendel" reminded me at moments of a Stravinsky-influenced film score. Much of the vocal line given to Grendel (hard-working bass Eric Owens, looking from my cheap seats like a man in a slate-colored body cast) reverberated past me, literally and figuratively, and I had to read the notes to the opera to catch all the nuances of the story.

At times, the opera includes a bit of welcome post-modern humor. I recall one scene, or perhaps it was the first act, ending with Grendel shouting, "Bullshit!" His first line upon appearing on stage: "And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war."

At the opera's conclusion, the crowd gave an enthusiastic ovation, and the snippets of conversation I heard in the mass exodus all concerned Taymor's puppets, Hoffman's costumes, and Tsypin's monolithic wall.

"Just beautiful, wasn't it?"

"Oh, it was just so gorgeous. Just wonderful to look at."

I won't go so far as to refer to "Grendel" as "The Lion King" for adults or with loftier aspirations, but sometimes I think you could set Taymor puppets on a Tsypin set to music from a CD and people would turn out eagerly, so visually starved are opera fans.

One benefit of attending opera (and theater) is that it's one of the few remaining social outings that makes me feel young, the average age of the audience at the Met skewing into another generation. One of the countless reasons I'm so depressed to be leaving NYC is that the Met's upcoming season includes more than one show I'd love to see: Anthony Minghella's interpretation of "Madame Butterfly," Tan Dun's "The First Emperor" starring Placido Domingo (with help on the libretto from novelist Ha Jin and some production assistance from Zhang Yimou), and Franco Zeffirelli's production of "La Boheme."

The Hobbit

Every time Dan spotted a poster for Lady in the Water this weekend (and this is NYC, so that would be every two blocks or so), he'd shout, "Frodo! Frodo!"

Gnotorious B.I.G.

Gnarls Biggie, the musical union of, well, you can guess. Up until the lawyers chase it into the shadows, where it will live forever because, you know, digitized content is like a cockroach in its survival capabilities.

Swiiiiiiing, golfa

Ken sent me a link to this Nike swing portrait for Tiger Woods. They shot this with the Phantom v5 military-grade digital camera, capable of capturing up to 4000 frames per second. By "they" I mean Academy Award winner and frequent Steve Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kaminski, one of my favorite cinematographers.

Ken was in awe of how still Tiger holds his head. At the center of his vicious vortex of a swing, his head is the eye of the hurricane, completely at peace. I love how wide and perfect his swing arc is. The arc traced by the head of Tiger's driver is the modern version of the Vitruvian Man. From the camera in front, you can see the tee jump up in the air and twirl like helicopter blades captured in slow motion.

He's competitive as hell, but more than that, his swing is fundamentally sound.

Floyd Lazarus

“I don't expect to win this Tour anymore. It's never easy to get back eight minutes but I'll keep fighting till the end and try.”

That was Floyd Landis, after yesterday's stage 16.

OLN's ratings for the Tour de France are down a lot this year, which is not surprising with Lance Armstrong's retirement. Fans of cycling who stuck with the sport and followed today's stage, though, witnessed one of the most incredible efforts in Tour history. I didn't arrive home from LA until 3am last night, and my Pacific-time-zoned body stayed up until 6am watching yesterday's stage off of my DVR. Then, my alarm woke me at 8am, and despite feeling like Landis looked on that final climb yesterday, I dragged myself out of bed just to see if anything interesting had happened in the stage.

I flipped on the TV, and within seconds I knew I wouldn't be sleeping again this day. Floyd was away already, on a desperate, near suicidal attempt to rescue his yellow jersey dreams. This is one time I wished I was in France (well, actually, that's lots of times) because OLN's coverage started too late to capture Floyd's attack as it came so early in the stage.

A day earlier, Floyd bonked on the final climb and lost a staggering 8 minutes plus and fell from first all the way to eleventh. Just about everyone wrote him off, me included. Only two stages remained for Landis to regain time: today's final mountain stage in the Alps, and Saturday's final time trial. Friday and Sunday's stages are flat, too difficult for a podium contender to get away from his competition. So today Landis had no choice but to attack. Everyone knew he had to attack, and everyone knew his team was not strong enough to support him. He'd have to do it on his own, and to make up serious time, he'd have to attack early.

Every other team knew it, and despite all that, when Floyd attacked on the very first climb in pursuit of an 11-man breakaway, none of his contenders could follow. He left all of them panting in the wake of a devastating acceleration.

He caught the 11-man breakaway, then sliced them up like a Santoku knife through chicken breast. Up and down over five climbs, Landis never let up. Many had noted that even after Landis gained the yellow jersey, he hadn't put his mark on this Tour, hadn't attacked. Without a strong team, he'd ridden conservatively, simply marking his key opponents.

The French press will have to find something else to complain about now. Landis's ride today was the type of bold, courageous, solo effort that recalled the greatest cyclist ever, Eddy Merckx. I had goosebumps for nearly the entire broadcast.

Now, Landis has to be the favorite again, especially as the strongest time trialist among the contenders. He sits third, 30 seconds behind race leader Pereiro, with Sastre sandwiched in between in second. I expect Landis to ride himself inside-out in Saturday's time trial, just in time to don the yellow jersey for the final ride into Paris.

Just awesome. Catch the replay of today's stage on OLN tonight. Hopefully they'll have more footage from Landis's initial attack.

Don't call it a comeback!

Sizzle, snap, crack

For Floyd Landis, today his Tour victory journey comes to an end. Cue Daniel Powter's "Bad Day."

Today was one of the two monster stages of the Tour de France, including two climbs I've ridden in the past, the Col du Galibier and the Col de la Croix de Fer. Both are HC (hors categorie) climbs, so difficult they are beyond categorization. And those were just climbs to set the stage for the two finishing climbs, the Col du Mollard and La Toussuire. In the punishing furnace of the French summer, Tour cyclists had to ride through a couple of circles of Hell today.

Floyd Landis found his limits today on that final climb. In cycling parlance, he cracked. First Dennis Menchov attacked, and Landis could not follow. Though T-Mobile paced Klöden and Landis back, the blood was in the water. Carlos Sastre attacked, and down went Landis. By the end of the stage, won by that albino praying mantis Michael Rasmussen, Landis had dropped to 11th overall, 8:08 behind Oscar Pereiro. In just over 13km, or the final 8 miles and change, Landis's Tour hopes evaporated as quickly as water off the pavement.

He's still probably the strongest time trialist of the podium contenders, and from day to day, one's legs can feel remarkably different, so Landis can still reach the podium. But he can't sit back and mark his opponents anymore. He has to attack.

The day I climbed the Col du Galibier, I also climbed the Col du Telegraphe first. They are companion climbs. I was riding with another guy on the bike tour, and up and over the Telegraphe, I felt decent despite near 100 degree temperatures and a stifling humidity. I had enough energy to stand up to accelerate through the switchbacks. But on the short descent down the other side, I did not have much time to recover. Before I could catch my breath, the road leaned back into me again on the way up the towering Col du Galibier. About halfway up, my speed dropped down to about 14 km/hr, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not push past that ceiling. I had redlined. My buddy waited for a bit, and then I waved him on. The rest of the climb was a long, lonely delirium of suffering. I spent much of that ride trying to detach my mind from my body so that I could displace my pain, compartmentalize it. I tried to think of my body as merely a machine to which I issued commands.

But despite many hours spent toiling up the Alps and Pyrenees of France, I've missed it these past few summers. Whenever July rolls around, I long to be on my bike, fighting gravity to ride uphill. There have been few times in my life I've felt more alive.

RELATED: An article in the NYTimes about how to run marathons in high heat and humidity.

iCal day

Today is iCal day, when the default icon for the Mac calendaring app iCal happens to show the correct date.

Screwing around with faces and heads

Every time I arrive in L.A., I think two things. First, as I exit the airport, I think, "Oh the weather here is unbeatable."

Then, as I pick up my rental car and merge directly into a never-ending queue of traffic, "Oh, *%&$@#!."

Two random reader contributions. From John, MyHeritage is facial recognition technology for photographs. Their conversation starter for now is a feature that matches uploaded faces to the celebrities they most resemble. As you can imagine, I rated as a high probability match for a composite of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, but then you didn't need such advanced technology to anticipate such a result.

From Mike:

The Amazing Screw-On Head, a humor comic from Mike Mignola (who
created Hellboy), is being made into an animated series on the Sci-Fi
channel. They have the pilot episode on their website:

http://www.scifi.com/amazingscrewonhead/

It's about this robot-type guy whose head can screw on to bodies. He
works for Abe Lincoln taking care of weird supernatural problems. It's
voiced by Paul Giamatti and the main bad guy is voiced by David Hyde
Pierce, so the acting is good.

Lovecraftian humor and steampunk adventure? I'm there.

Spooks Season 4

In what is now an annual ritual, I will sing the praises of the BBC television drama Spooks (aired in the U.S. as MI-5 on A&E) and note that season 4 will release on DVD in the UK on Sept 4. With the dollar as weak as it is versus the pound, I would usually recommend waiting for the show to air in the U.S., but Season 4 shows no signs of appearing on A&E anytime soon, and the show is just that good. So if you have a region-free DVD player, and you should, then pre-order this (or you can, of course, prowl the internets for a torrent).

MI5 is the UK's anti-terrorist security service, and the show dramatizes the campaigns among a core group at the agency. It's addictive adrenaline-pumping, and in my TiVo queue, it's in the top spot even if it shows no signs of re-appearing on this side of the Atlantic anytime soon. I can think of few other shows so willing to put its main characters in (SPOILER ALERT: don't click on the next link unless you've seen all the episodes, b/c the roster of deceased characters is a huge spoiler) bodybags on such a consistent basis, but that's part of what makes it so good. The show doesn't adhere to the usual rules.

Season 4 is brilliant, as always, and the season finale, in a proud tradition, is mind-blowing. As you'd expect from a British production, the acting is first-rate, filled with a roster of handsome faces. Peter Firth, in particular, is unforgettable as MI5 director Harry Pearce. One just feels safer when one's spies have a British accent, from Alec Guinness's George Smiley to the various incarnations of 007 (Scottish accents, too, if we include Connery, and we do, wholeheartedly). They sound smarter, and the accent confers a certain swagger and ruthlessness that is dangerously soothing in our intelligence personnel.

I'm a sucker for spy thrillers, and it's surprising that American television only has 24, which is good but has more of a pop sheen. Another show that I enjoy that has a similar feel to Spooks, though adapted to a Japanese futuristic sci-fi world, is Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex. It airs on the Cartoon Network and the two seasons are available on DVD in the U.S. Don't expect the production values or intense action sequences of the movie from which the TV show derives. The TV show has even more of a cerebral feel, but it's entertaining in its own right.

Random unrelated factoids from Sean Connery's IMDb Trivia:

"Said in an interview that during the filming of Never Say Never Again (1983), he was taking martial arts lessons and in the process angered the instructor who in turn broke his wrist. Connery stayed with the wrist broken for a number of years thinking it was only a minor pain... the instructor was Steven Seagal."

"Turned down the role of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings series (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)) because he didn't want to film down in New Zealand for 18 months, and could not understand the novels."

"Turned down the role of the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)."

Opening shots

Jim Emerson is compiling a list of the most famous opening shots in movies. You can read some reader and Emerson nominations on his blog. If you're a movie buff, you can try your hand at Emerson's opening shot quizzes one and two (the answers are here and here, respectively). The second quiz is much much easier than the first and is a good test of your classic movie familiarity quotient.

I look forward to the companion piece, Parting Shots. Famous pening and closing shots are like opening and closing lines in books. Good ones condense the essence of the entire work into very little.

Last year I saw Antonioni's The Passenger at the New York Film Festival, just prior to its re-release on DVD. It contains what would be one of the top 5 spots on my list of best parting shots. In one, long, unbroken shot of some seven minutes, Antonioni reprises the entire movie. The shot is mysterious from a literal perspective: what happens, and how did they shoot it?

But it is also symbolically elegant. As the camera escapes through the "prison" bars of the room, we revisit reporter David Locke's (Jack Nicholson) escape into another man's identity, that of a dead gun-runner. But as the camera glides towards freedom, it is pulled back around and re-enters the hotel, bringing us back into the room. Some things you just can't escape, and one can read that final shot in numerous ways. It is pregnant with meaning.

The new DVD release contains a 126 minute version of the film, longer than the 118 minute version on an earlier MGM cut. Antonioni has described an even longer cut of two hours and a half that he prefers, but that may never see the light of day.

Game theory and penalty kicks

Fresh off a World Cup Final decided by penalty kicks, here are a couple economic articles on game theory and penalty kicks. Because of the setup for penalty kicks, the goalkeeper has to guess which way the striker will kick the ball. Tim Harford writes about the application of Morgenstern and von Neumann's game theory to this problem and cites a study by an economist at Brown that found that individual strikers and keepers were acting according to game theory:

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an economist at Brown University, found that individual strikers and keepers were, in fact, master strategists. Out of 42 top players that Palacios-Huerta studied, only three departed from game theory recommendations. Professionals such as the Brazilian Rivaldo and Italy’s goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon are apparently superb economists: their strategies are absolutely unpredictable and, as the theory demands, they are equally successful no matter what they do, indicating that they have found the perfect balance between the different options.

At a book signing about a month ago, Steven Levitt cited similar research that he'd just completed. He and some colleagues published a paper (PDF) studying predictions of game theory using data on penalty kicks in football and discovered that football players were acting close to the theoretical ideal. The one exception, they found, was that players were not kicking it up the middle as often as they should, perhaps because of the embarrassment that might result from a failed kick if the keeper doesn't dive to one side or the other.

What he's been riding

Online before it hits physical print in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine this weekend: "What He's Been Pedaling," a profile of Floyd Landis and his effort to overcome a debilitating hip condition to win the Tour de France. Landis has avascular necrosis, the same condition that felled Bo Jackson, and a few weeks after the Tour de France he'll be having his hip replaced.

The article's written by Daniel Coyle, who wrote Lance Armstrong's War, which I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend. From the article:

The Tour de France’s status as the world’s most physiologically demanding event is largely unquestioned. The riders cover 2,272 miles at an average speed of 25 miles per hour, roughly the equivalent of running a marathon almost every day for almost three weeks. In the Pyrenees and the Alps, they climb a vertical distance equal to three Mount Everests. They take in up to 10,000 calories per day, the equivalent of 17 Big Macs, elevating their metabolic rates to a level that, according to a Dutch study, is exceeded by only four species on earth. All of which transforms Landis into the embodiment of an intriguing question: Is it possible for someone with a ruined hip to win the Tour de France?

It's interesting that Landis and his team have chosen to reveal this condition in the middle of the Tour. He doesn't seem to be the type to need a built-in excuse for failure, and no one in the Tour will take pity on him. Perhaps he just tried to break the news before it emerged in the NYTimes? But he was the one who revealed the info to the interviewer, so it's not as if this dropped out of the sky.

After Landis has hip replacement, he may be able to ride at the same level, but he may not. There's no precedent to refer to, and so I'm rooting for him to get on the podium this year. It might be his last chance, though I hope it's not.

Here, Floyd Landis demonstrates his time trial position, which he calls the Praying Mantis.
Having just returned from a week in Beijing, I'm also familiar with this position, which I like
to call "Sending a text message to a friend on a Blackberry while perched over a public squat
toilet in a narrow stall: 'Please bring toilet paper to stall number 3 right now! Godspeed.'"

Patently Silly

Patently Silly is a hilarious weblog devoted to exposing some of the more ridiculous patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Okay, I can maybe understand issuing a patent for the cordless jump rope (maybe), but the American Flag Bandage? This Sun Mask Towel?

Yes, this ingenious contraption is the Sun Mask Towel. I invented this
for Halloween in the second grade, actually, though I should have
secured the patent at that time. You may laugh, but try using a regular
towel as a sun mask, and you'll understand the utility of the cutouts
for your eyes, nose, and mouth.

Sure to restore your faith in American innovation, the nutcracker pictured below is the most stylish use of a female leg since the lamp in A Christmas Story. Surely the product of a male inventor?

Or, in the vein of expository titles like Snakes on a Plane, there is this patent: Amusement Device That Senses Odorous Gases in a Bathroom:

A novelty device that makes humorous statements when a person is having a bowel movement in a confined bathroom. Within the device is a gas sensor for detecting at least one gas emitted during a bowel movement. The device also includes a speaker for transmitting an audible message. When gases from a bowel movement are detected, audible statements are transmitted and synchronized movements are effected in the automated character.

The configuration of a canary in a birdcage was selected because canaries were often used by miners to detect the presence of gas in coal mines. Once activated, a humorous audible message is broadcast. The massage may say "What a stench! Somebody open the window! There are rules against cruelty to animals!" A countless number of messages can be used. The canary may drop over dead.

Chuck Klosterman on SOAP

Chuck Klosterman writes in Esquire about the potential downside to Snakes on a Plane. I don't think it's as tragic as he makes it out to be. Hollywood already cranks out cookie cutter movies all the time, chasing after past successes as if buying last week's winning lottery number will improve one's chance of winning the next lottery. If Snakes on a Plane is a commercial success, we'll probably get an awful sequel or two regardless of whether or not the first was any good, but that's no different than plenty of other film franchises. Hell, we're about to get another Rocky movie in which an aging Sylvester Stallone goes up against Antonio Tarver. Snakes on a Plane is just business as usual, albeit with a new trigger, that being the plain yet descriptive title.

Or perhaps it's more than the title. The novelty of that wore off for me a while ago. I think the magic ingredient here is the promised presence of the foul-mouthed, indignant Samuel L. Jackson persona. If, in SOAP, he suddenly screams, "Yes, they deserve to die and I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL!" then you'll see entire theaters erupt in applause.

It must be fantastic being able to entertain people by ranting and raving and cussing like a sailor. I wish I had that power. Then, when a waiter angered me, I could just scream at them and yet bring them some small measure of joy to them at the same time.

Pop quiz

A baseball history quiz at ESPN. I scored a 33 out of 50. Kevin Mench scored a 40; that huge melon on his shoulders is not just for show. All of the ESPN Analysts except Steve Phillips beat me. This is one area where I've regressed. I knew more baseball history when I was a kid, checking out books on baseball history from the library. I wonder how Bob Costas would've scored.

The header from the footer

The Daily Mail hires a lipreader to decipher what Materazzi said to Zidane to provoke the header heard round the world. It turns out Materazzi called Zidane the equivalent of n***** and then said "we all know you are the son of a terrorist whore." And then, "So just f*** off." Given Zidane's Algerian background and quick temper, the headbutt is not at all shocking. I'm none too fond of Materazzi; he's a well-known punk. Still, I think if you're Zidane, you hold off on retaliation until after the game. Then, at the exchange of handshakes, you pull Materazzi's jersey over his head and then pound his face into the turf. It's not like this is the first time someone has used truly offensive trash talk to take another team's best player out of the game. If they miked more players in sporting events, people would be shocked at the type of things you hear on the playing field. [from Kottke]

In New York Magazine this week, a quick and dirty guide to happiness, with lots drawn from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, which I've just about finished. Among the tips of interest:

• Those who seize the first option that meets their standards (which don’t have to be low, just defined) are happier than those who insist on finding the perfect solution.
• Don’t go to law school. Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other professions.
• Send the kids off to day care, summer camp, and boarding school. On a day-to-day basis, caring for children creates roughly the same level of satisfaction as washing the dishes.
• Take the local, and don’t wait for the express. Inaction gnaws away at the mind relentlessly.
• Order from the same takeout menu every time (as long as you're not ordering takeout every night of the week). Variety is the spice of life only for heavily repeated experiences.
• Take advantage of your exercise machine’s “cooldown period,” because adding a slightly less grueling epilogue to a grueling but valuable experience—like a workout—makes you more willing to repeat it in the future.

Bubblesnaps, a quick and dirty way to add speech or thought bubbles to your pics.

For Mac users, a way to play Quicktime videos in full screen without paying for Quicktime Pro.

An interesting dialogue at Slate between Jason Furman and Barbara Ehrenreich on the merits of Wal-Mart for the American working class. Decision goes to Furman, I think, though it's a bit of a mismatch as Ehrenreich acknowledges.

Ninja lessons [from Thrillist]

From Skype, for its US and Canadian users, 3 weekends of free SkypeOut calls to the UK, Mexico, and Japan.

Some nifty covers for download.

A more secure shoelace knot. I use another method that may be equivalent. I don't make two loops to tie my shoelaces. I make one loop and then tie the second lace around it once before pulling the second lace through to form the second loop. If I just swing the second lace around my thumb twice instead of once before pulling the second lace through, the knot never seems to come undone.

Parallels for Desktop for Mac is $49.99 through July 15, then its price goes up to $79.99. ArsTechnica gave it a positive review.

42, of course

Stephen Hawking asks Yahoo Answers: How can the human race survive the next hundred years? Sounds more interesting than it actually was. That's not really the type of question you toss out to the Internet. Maybe he just wanted a good laugh. For his next question, he should post some absurdly difficult quantum physics problem.

According to this Microsoft Labs adCenter predictive tech, my website should appeal primarily to <18 year olds, with the next largest demographic being 18-24 year olds. Having seen these results, you can expect increased coverage of Ashlee Simpson, Lindsey Lohan, and NSync here.

Useful guidelines for placement of punctuation vis-a-vis inverted commas, one of those grammar issues that always bedevils me.
UPDATE: Jenny was quite distraught that I'd consult the Brits for grammar. We Americans have our own rules for these situations.

I'm watching the World Cup final right now, but during halftime, I watched some Zidane videos on YouTube to maintain the mood. Smooth.
UPDATE: Hmm, I wonder if Zidane's OT headbutt will make it into any of these videos. Oh, those hot-tempered Frenchmen. Live by Zidane, die by Zidane.

Boy I will slap you silly

Is there fighting in pro cycling, not trash talking or the occasional jostling in the bunch sprint, but real fisticuffs? It's rare, but yes. Err, maybe no.

Maybe it's best that 120 pound climbers with arms like Nicole Richie don't put'em up more often.

A Scanner Darkly

[SPOILER ALERT: Contains a spoiler or two, especially if you have not read the book, though the movie isn't really plot-twist-driven. It's not as if I'm going to reveal that Rosebud was a sled or that he's a ghost or anything of that magnitude.]

Wednesday night, I attended a preview screening of A Scanner Darkly at the Lincoln Center. After the movie, Robert Downey Jr. and Richard Linklater were to host a discussion about the movie.

Lingering jetlag zonked me out in the afternoon, and by the time I awoke from a long, long nap and rushed up to Lincoln Center on the subway, I was late for the event. Fortunately, these things never start on time, and I found a decent seat on the aisle. Ethan Hawks was directly ahead of me, two rows up. While catching my breath, I felt someone hovering over me in the aisle. I looked up and it was Keanu Reeves, chatting with someone who knew Rory Cochrane, one of the other actors in the movie.

I've heard Keanu speak a handful of times in person now, and he is an enigma with that awed surfer voice wrapping itself around such a wide range of ideas. I caught snippets, "So he can read Proust and Goethe in the original languages? That's fantastic." Seems like a nice guy.

Linklater was caught on an airplane so he missed the introduction which Robert Downey Jr. and Reeves provided instead. Downey Jr. is a huge talent, with boundless supplies of charisma, and the two of them warmed up the crowd with some improvised comic banter.

I have read some Philip K. Dick, but not A Scanner Darkly, so I can't comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation, but some of the guests addressed the issue in Q&A.

Notes from the Q&A, with guests Richard Linklater, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves, Jonathan Lethem, and PKD's daughter Isa:

• The first PKD novel Linklater ever read was Valis.
• After Waking Life and post 9/11, Linklater was searching for another use for the rotoscoping, and this PKD novel just felt timely.
• Though they used the same software as for Waking Life, they were able to generate more detail this time. Linklater noted that what they did was not pure rotoscoping; he refers to their process as interpolated rotoscoping.
• They use style sheets to maintain some consistency. As Linklater put it, style sheets told the animators, "This is how you draw Keanu's beard. This is how you draw Winona's..." [when he paused here, the crowd laughed, because Winona is topless, albeit in animated form, in some of the movie] "...jaw."
• Keanu was the one person on the set who had his nose in the book the whole time (Downey Jr. did not read the novel).
• Linklater wrote and rewrote as they went along, always trying to maintain the spirit of the book. Someone, I think it was Lethem, mentioned that when PKD first saw Blade Runner, he said that the movie was okay, but he wished that someone would make a movie that honored the ideas in his books. Lethem felt that A Scanner Darkly is the most faithful PKD adaptation ever, the only movie that honors the ambiguity and indeterminacy of PKD's work.
• Jonathan Lethem, a PKD expert, was consulted upon before production to help the cast and crew to understand PKD's vision.
• A Scanner Darkly is the most autobiographical of PKD's novels, a cautionary tale. PKD was addicted to amphetamines and saw many loved ones submit to drug addictions of one form or another. "If it wasn't for drugs, our dad would still be writing," said Isa. She found the end dedications to be the most moving part of the film because she knew the people referenced.
• With an $8 million budget, Linklater had to get Isa and the rest of PKD's family to agree to a lower option fee.
• Linklater screened the movie for Radiohead, and they liked it, so they allowed some of their music to be used in the soundtrack, including a single from Thom Yorke's new solo album The Eraser to run over the end credits.
• Downey Jr., jokingly, I think, on Linklater, "He's a monster. I know you're thinking he's such a nice guy, softspoken, sitting here, but he works you like a rib. 'You want lunch?! This is for PKD! His daughter is sitting right there!'"
• The biggest change they made in the movie versus the book is a twist in which Winona Ryder emerges from the second scramble suit, worn by Fred's superior on the force. It was an added twist, but one Linklater and others felt was still faithful to the spirit of the novel.
• Where did the title A Scanner Darkly come from? Isa thought it was from Biblical scripture, while Linklater thought it might refer back to the Bergman film (I assume he meant Through a Glass Darkly.
• The look of the movie was intended to be that of a graphic novel.
• Linklater never thought to do a live action version of the movie. "Someone could pull that off," said Linklater, "but I couldn't."
• Lethem liked the use of animation because "animation gives a more seamless division between reality and hallucination." Prose can do that better than most any medium. Photography is too literal. Animation helps moving pictures to capture language's potential for metaphor.
• A lot of famous faces were used as models for images on the scramble suits, including PKD. Something to play around with once the DVD comes out.
• The advantage of rotoscoping was that they could stick things in the scene that could just be ignored during animation, like microphones. It allowed Linklater and crew to focus on the scene as a whole while ignoring random details about getting the shot perfect, things which often consume so much time on set.
• The shoot itself, a 25 day shoot, went smoothly. Once they shifted to animation, they hit some snags. It took longer than expected to finish.

This is about as far from a popcorn movie as you'll find in theaters this summer, a departure since most PKD novels have been transformed into sci-fi action flicks. The movie is challenging in a way that other PKD film adaptations have not been. In making the central character an addict whose personality has been splintered by drug use, and in nesting one conspiracy inside another in a Russian doll of dark forces (government, pharma, the police, among others), Linklater and company have left the movie bereft of any easy emotional handle for the audience, no one character to identify with. The dialogue-to-action ratio might frustrate the average filmgoer. On the other hand, this movie stands as a testament to the idea that Hollywood can turn out animation for adults, animation about ideas.

If you've ever sat around listening to the seemingly meaningless babble of a group of stoned buddies, you have a sense of what it feels like to listen to watch much of this movie. It's occasionally hilarious, especially the verbal parrying between Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson, but often maddening and obtuse. The rotoscoping is effective at heightening the sense of reality's dissolution. Every moment on screen looks the same, whether it's a hallucination, a flashback, video on a surveillance screen, or reality. You can't tell one from the other. On the other hand, I occasionally wished I could see Downey Jr.'s character in live action. His face operates on a frequency that rotoscoping can't capture.

So finally, a most faithful PKD adaptation to the silver screen. PKD fans will rejoice, but the studio, I'm guessing, may not when box office receipts come in. I, for one, am glad we don't have another PKD story pillaged for an action dud like Paycheck.

A gambler's sale

Delicious Monster is holding a Gambler's Sale on its popular app Delicious Library. Every week the price goes down $5 until they've sold a secret number of copies, or until 4 weeks have elapsed. You can buy now or wait for the price to go down and risk that the sale will end before you get your purchase in. It's a bit like a clearance sale in which a retail store keeps reducing the price on items until they get rid of everything in inventory. If you wait, there's a chance that snazzy shirt you want will go down in price even more, but there's also a chance some other shopper, one who's not quite as cheap as you are, will walk off with it.

Au revoir

Watching World Cup reminded me of this Nike soccer commercial from back in the day. Another winner from Wieden and Kennedy.

"Au revoir."

For those people who have been in a cave and haven't seen them, here's that current Nike commercial with Ronaldinho, the football equivalent of Tiger Woods bouncing the golf ball on his sand wedge:

And Ronaldo's response:

Swimmin' with Dylan

Download the instrumental version of "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley, as well as "Nel Cimitero di Tucson," the spaghetti western track Danger Mouse sampled for Crazy. Something to tide us over while we wait for Paris Hilton's cover.

True height measures the effective height of a basketball player. Good news! Tyrus Thomas measures out as nearly a 7-footer in true height. I'm pumped up for the Bulls upcoming season, though it will still be ugly on offense.

Shina Tsukamoto's horror film novella Haze on Region 2 DVD.

Soundtrack.net has a sneak preview of James Newton Howard's score for Lady in the Water. Oddly enough, the soundtrack includes a bunch of Bob Dylan covers.

Wired Magazine has a profile of banned Tour de France technology. Most are just bikes that fall under the UCI minimum weight limit, though, and for a recreational cyclist that's nothing to get excited about. A few ounces here or there isn't going to turn the average club cyclist into a champ, and trying to descend a long, steep mountain on a featherweight bike is terrifying.

A long-standing conspiracy theory holds that the moon landing was staged, perhaps by Stanley Kubrick. The moon hoax is so popular that NASA had to address it.

Our entire future lies behind us

World Hum's list of the top 30 travel books. I always try and read a book about the area I'm traveling to, or a book by an author from that region, but I've only read the Bryson and Twain off of this list (Bryson's next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, releases Oct. 17). The obvious cure, of course, is to pull out the passport and head back out into the world.

***

Speaking of travel books: download the 2000 through 2006 editions of the CIA World Factbook and Factbook on Intelligence for free as PDFs. Very cool reference.

***

Aymaran people of the High Andes think of the future as behind them, the past ahead of them, different than most everyone else, perhaps because of differences in their language. I have a conceptual metaphor for time as well. My mental map of the years looks something like this:

It's a bit more involved than that (if you imagine it as a flat board, the right side of the board is actually pushed further away from me so that the entire board is at an angle), but that's the best 2-d representation I can come up with. 1974 is the start b/c that's the year I was born. When I think of sports events of importance to me, I think of them as falling on this spatial representation of my life. 1984, Cubs lose in NLCS to the Padres. 1985, Bears win the Super Bowl. 1991, the Bulls win their first championship.

When I think of an individual year, my spatial representation is a vertical one, with January at the top, December at the bottom, the days of each week running horizontally, from Sunday at the far left to Saturday at the far right, one week above the next. I suspect this arises from the idea of a wall calendar whose pages are torn out and affixed to the wall, one month above the next.

When I think of 24 hours, my mental image is of a 12 hour circular clock, like an analog watch, with 12:00 at the top. The same with a minute, it's a circle with 0 and 60 seconds falling at the top.

***

Flickr still maintains a 20MB per month upload limit for its freeloading customers. Having just returned from a wedding, I had set up a Flickr group for everyone to use to compile photos for the bride and groom, but then the groom pointed out that the service is all but useless to people without pro accounts because they can only upload a few pics. Flickr needs to raise the upload bandwidth for non-paying customers.

Their pricing seems to be based in a world where printing was not possible. They should up the bandwidth limit but offer cheaper printing prices and longer storage of photos for Pro members. You want to hook people by getting them to upload pics, then convert them to paying customers by giving them strong incentives to stick around.

***

Is football (soccer) boring? I used to think so, but I'm coming around this World Cup (from the television ratings, it appears I'm not alone). I don't have the appreciation for the sport that an actual player has, but my love of cycling has opened my mind to sports that are usually described as appealing only to practitioners. A few things appeal to me. The sheer athleticism and coordination of some of the players is stunning, like watching Reggie Bush in the open field, but if he had to dribble a football. The format of World Cup once it moves into single elimination raises the stakes. Every goal that is scored seems a miracle, and many seem gorgeous in their angles and athletic execution. And the Brazilian female fans? Yet another justification for high definition television.

The global appeal of the World Cup leads to some great gatherings to watch matches. In Beijing last Saturday, as Jed and I were strolling down a dark street after the wedding, we came upon a group of Chinese twenty-somethings gathered around the blue-white glow of a television on the patio of a cafe. They had beers in hand and we were screaming with delight at every twist and turn. If I could have felt my feet, I am certain that I could have joined this group of strangers and been sharing Yanjing beers with them in no time. In 1994 I attended one World Cup match at Stanford Stadium, Brazil - Russia, and from start to finish it was one of most raucous sporting events I've ever been to. I spent almost the whole match jumping around, trying to learn some Brazilian chants and songs.

Still a few things about the sport put me off. Watching two subpar teams battle to a scoreless tie, the ball turned over time and time again, holds about as much appeal as watching professional darts. The theatricality involved in diving is just absurd; they should make players who dive exchange their soccer shorts for skirts for the next match. And using penalty kicks to determine winners in matches that are scoreless through overtime seems a poor method for determining the superior team.

I've often heard that he U.S. loses its best athletes to sports like basketball and football. I'm curious to see some athletic profiles of the best football (soccer) players. How tall and heavy are they, and what are their times in the 40? Vertical leaps? Strength? What types of American athletes would fare best if converted?

***

Please, please, let it end.

How to photograph fireworks

A few tips. Happy 4th!

The deepest cut

I arrived at Beijing Airport this morning (yesterday morning? who knows anymore) to fight a chaotic mob of people in the international departures area. You have to fill out a departure form and pass through some outbound customs screen before you can even check in. I battled to the counter to grab a departure form, but as my hand reached the pile of forms, someone else grabbed a form and yanked it out, running its edge along my right thumb and opening a deep one-inch papercut.

The sudden and sharp pain startled me, and I shouted. Then proceeded to bleed like a geyser all over the counter, the forms, my clothes. The crowd around me pulled back, horrified, then just went to the next counter over to continue their quest for a departure form. I was left clutching my thumb like an idiot. I opened my suitcase with my left hand and pulled out my toiletries bag, but I had no bandages or first aid materials. I held my right thumb out to my side, dripping blood on the floor. I had three heavy bags and was surrounded by a sea of unsympathetic travelers, not a bathroom in sight. So I just wrapped my thumb in another departure form and waited until the bleeding stopped, and then went on my happy way looking like I'd just slaughtered fifteen chickens. Fortunately my questionable appearance didn't attract any unwanted attention from the authorities, and I managed to clean up after I'd cleared security.

But my papercut pales in comparison to the one Thor Hushovd suffered in Stage 1 of the Tour de France. In the final sprint for the finish line, a spectator swiped one of those giant cardboard hands from PMU across Hushovd's right upper arm, opening a huge gash that proceeded to bleed all over him (in a bunch sprint, riders are flying over 40mph, so running a piece of hard, sharp cardboard across your arm...my eyes are watering just thinking about it). In an odd coincidence, PMU is the sponsor of the green jersey that Hushovd won at last year's Tour.

This is close to what I looked like at Beijing airport this morning, except no one was helping me and my quads are not that huge.

Sizzler

I finally had a chance to take my new Macbook Pro out for a spin while in Beijing, and it came through for me, allowing me to edit a wedding toast video in time for the ceremony on Saturday. Compared to my old, ancient Powerbook, the Macbook Pro is much snappier, with better speakers and a stronger wi-fi antenna.

I'm not sure I'd refer to it as a laptop, though, because you can't put the thing on your lap. I didn't think it was possible, but this model runs even hotter than my previous model, and if I left it on my bare legs I'd be peeling skin off the bottom of it in short order.

Perhaps Apple can sell some add-ons to dissipate the heat, like a coffeemaker and a hotplate so you could brew coffee and scramble some eggs while checking your morning e-mail.

Glass half...

Something in the Chinese culture or disposition lends itself to brutal honesty. I've experiencd this firsthand many times in the past. Seeing an aunt for the first time in ages, I've been greeted more than once with, "Wow! You've sure put on some weight. You should work out some more, maybe skip dinner tonight."

With my Americanized sense of tact, I can only smile sheepishly and reply good-naturedly, "Yeah, hah hah."

On my flight back from Beijing to Newark today, the American pilot came on as we descended into New Jersey, "The weather's a bit overcast, so we may experience a bit of turbulence on our descent."

He was followed by the translation into Mandarin from the Chinese stewardess, "The weather in the Newark area is very bad, hot and stormy. The descent will probably be very rough. Please get to yoru seat and buckle your seatbelt immediately!"

After we'd survived our landing, we pulled a stop on the runway.

Pilot, in English, "We've been informed that our gate is still occupied, but it should be clear in 10 to 12 minutes, so we'll just sit here for a brief moment."

Stewardess, in Chinese, "There's another plane at the gate. We'll probably be held up for 15 to 20 minutes until we can move."

Of course, the stewardess was right. I wonder what Chinese stewardesses say about departure delays in China.

"Ladies and gentleman, we're being held up while we wait for the pilot who's sitting on the toilet right now. That's what happens when you have one too many of those freeze-dried monstrosities we call meals, one of which will be sitting on your tray table shortly, if we ever take off. Please turn off your cell phones. I'm supposed to tell you that they'll interfere with the airplane's communications, but that's a lie, we just don't want to listen to twenty-nine businessman jabbering away in the cabin about pointless nonsense."