Remains of the Day

FiveThirtyEight on Palin

Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, liveblogging from the Republican VP announcement,

Great visual: Palin walking out with her daughter. Not-so-great visual: Palin embracing McCain and looking like his daughter.

I had the same reaction to their age differential, and for all the reasons she might be a good VP choice--how she comes off to people in public appearances may matter more than what the pundits write about her--this is potentially a problem.

More from Silver:

Because it isn't really an argument about experience per se. It's an argument about whether she meets the basic threshold test of voters feeling comfortable with having her as President. Experience is a part of that, but so are essentially the aesthetics of it: picturing a young, attractive, kooky, female governor from Alaska who has an accent straight out of Fargo in the White House is going to be a much bigger leap for many voters than picturing Barack Obama there.

At a minimum, I'm looking forward to seeing how Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, and Jay Leno work Palin into their routines.

Based on early polls, it's starting to seem like Palin's selection won't make a difference to any of the entrenched Democratic or Republican voters. But this is before she's made her speech at the RNC. That's going to pull some serious ratings.

If the Republican VP search committee thought through their choice, and I'm sure they did, Palin seems like a choice designed to draw Obama supporters into outrage and ridicule, and so far it's worked (yours truly guilty as anyone).

But the Obama and Clinton reaction to her selection seems the better approach. Don't attack her on experience, or run the equivalent of McCain's "Celebrity" ads, attack her on issues. Leave the ridicule to the late night talk show hosts and comedians, and take the high ground. McCain is the candidate, and he provides enough target area for the Democratic Party to set up an entire firing range, from his houses to his weak grasp of economics to his policy shifts in the last eight years. If Palin is a liability, voters will be able to connect the dots themselves.

It's hard not to stave off a nagging fatalism on many things in life this year. The Cubs are playing well, but that only means we Cubs fans have to lash ourselves a few extra times, like Paul Bettany in The Da Vinci Code. The Cubs rotation might get shut down by Webb, Haren, and the Big Unit. Harden, Zambrano, Wood, and Marmol's arms might fall off. The Cubs might make the World Series and lose to the White Sox. And so on. Obama might lose because the Republicans mobilize their base better. Palin will steal enough independent women voters and evangelicals to push McCain into the lead. Biden didn't sway enough independents to Obama's side. And on and on.

But taken as pure drama, it's all golden. Forget W, I want to see the Paul Thomas Andersen movie about this election season. Who would play Hillary, Bill, Obama, and McCain? Tina Fey may look like Palin, but can she play her? Will Biden or McCain slip up and refer to Palin as a "gorgeous broad" in a Mad Men-esque moment? What if McCain wins and croaks and Palin becomes President? It could be a Hollywood movie come to life, like Dave crossed with Legally Blonde.

In the time of year when nothing good is hitting movie theaters, I'll be cozying up with a bucket of popcorn and watching the Cubs in the playoffs and Obama/McCain in the main event.

The joys of online simulcast

I've been at work during the speeches at the Democratic Convention the last week, but I've been able to watch bits and pieces via the Democratic Convention website. Not only was the video live, but with a fast enough connection the video came down in HD. The quality is fantastic.

This is just another example of a evolution in online video. Many people are getting used to the idea of catching missed episodes of TV shows online. But those are typically tape-delayed. More and more, events are being broadcast on TV and online live, simultaneously.

When you compare the two, in most cases online matches or even surpasses cable or broadcast TV. The one place TV still beats online is in raw video quality, usually. With the exception of a thin slice of people on blazing fast corporate networks or services like Verizon's FIOS, there's just not enough bandwidth to match that through a satellite dish or over-the-air antenna bringing down high-def video.

But in other aspects, watching online is superior. Start with portability. I don't have a TV, let alone a cable box, at work. But I have a laptop and a fast internet connection, so I can watch the Democratic convention at the office. When wireless broadband infrastructure in our country catches up to that in countries like Korea, internet TV will travel with you almost everywhere, and certainly to more places than your TV.

Consider selection. March Madness? Ever game was available via March Madness on Demand on the web, but on TV, in earlier rounds, you were often at the mercy of which game CBS chose to cover, cutting back and forth from one game to another.

In baseball, it's the combination of selection and mobility that gives MLB.tv the edge over MLB Extra Innings on cable or satellite. I've tried MLB Extra Innings via DirecTV, but that only gives me access to baseball games when I'm home in front of the TV. MLB.tv gives me access to those baseball games anywhere I have a web connection, and it provides quick access to box scores and other in-game stats.

How about the Olympics? In terms of selection, online wasn't fantastic, but that was a measured choice on the part of NBC. For obscure sports, however, NBCOlympics.com was often the only option. And if you wanted to see replays of key events? The web was the best choice. Instead of trying to record some five or six hours a night of Olympics TV coverage and then scanning through it with your remote to find the exact event you wanted to watch, you could just look up the event on the web and pull up the video clip instantly.

The infrastructure of the Internet is better suited to offer users the type of control over video that they've grown accustomed to having over other aspects of their life, from communications to news to music.

Every time I watch an event that's broadcast both offline and online simultaneously, I realize how ready I am for that time when every event broadcast through cable or TV is simultaneously available online. Can the infrastructure of the Internet handle that? Perhaps not in the volumes that would satisfy a sudden mass migration, but in time, most definitely.

When notable events are only on TV, I already find them antiquated. U.S. Open tennis? All that's available on the web are low-res video highlights. Why not broadcast day matches during week one via the web, where office workers might be able to keep up with a browser window off to the side?

Take any golf major. The first two days play out on Thursday and Friday, when most golf fans are at the office. I think some of the Masters was online, but why not the other three golf majors, and Ryder Cup?How about the first round of MLB playoffs, when because of TV schedule limitations and time zone differences, some games have to be played during the early afternoon of weekdays.

We wonder now how we used to live without mobile phones, when we had to get to a physical location to use a landline to call anyone. Someday, we'll feel the same in wondering how we ever lived with an Internet that didn't pipe live TV.

Palin in comparison

[Apologies for the headline. I've heard so many bad puns using Biden, I thought I had to even out the universe.]

John McCain's pick of Palin to be VP helps me to understand what kind of guy he is. He's that owner in your fantasy football league who reads a few good reports out of some team's training camp and drafts some unknown rookie wide receiver 7 rounds too early.

McCain barely knows her. Compared to McCain's vetting of Palin, Obama's research into Biden is like the type of security checks Middle Eastern people get at American airports. Obama is that guy in your fantasy football league who comes with a 12 tab spreadsheet model with built-in VBA macros and projections customized for your leagues scoring rules. Our President could potentially be the crazy guy from your fantasy football draft who picks from his gut--it's a terrifying thought--or that super-prepared guy.

By the way, I couldn't help but think that McCain chose Palin as she's the opposite of him: young, female, with a head full of dark hair and glasses. I wondered what would happen if we fused them into one single Presidential candidate. Using an advanced Photoshop action, I ran the scenario.

Here is the result.

What is Latin for month?

From a BP chat with Steven Goldman (who's fighting cancer):

Trieu (Cambridge, MA): I think everyone should always make decisions on a mortality basis. If only we had the strength to do so.

Steven Goldman: Nah... It's a sad way to live. What makes life tolerable is our ability to forget where it's all heading and just lose ourselves in the moment(s).

Interesting answer. The stock answer is to live each day as if it's your last, but I suspect Goldman is right in that it would be exhausting and impractical. Instead of carpe diem, perhaps carpe annum is the more practical time period.

More Pixar philosophy

The two most interesting points from the Harvard Business Review blog post "Pixar's Collective Genius" about keys to the successful leadership of Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull:

Redefining the vision. For decades, Ed's driving ambition was to help create the first full-length computer-animated feature film. After realizing that dream with Toy Story, he set himself a new goal: to build an organization that could continually produce magic long after he and Pixar's other cofounders were gone.

This is the challenge for all entrepreneurs: to make the transition from doing something themselves to creating organizations that can carry on without them. Walt Disney, genius that he was, failed this test.

Delegating power. Ed and his fellow executives give directors tremendous authority. At other studios, corporate executives micromanage by keeping tight control over production budgets and inserting themselves into creative decisions. Not at Pixar. Senior management sets budgetary and timeline boundaries for a production and then leave the director and his team alone.

Executives resist exercising creative authority even when it's thrust upon them. Take reviews of works in progress by "brain trusts" of directors at Pixar and Disney Animation. The rule is that all opinions are only advice that the director of the movie in question can use as he or she sees fit. Catmull, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and executive vice president of production Jim Morris often attend these sessions but insist that their views be treated the same way and refuse to let directors turn them into decision-makers.

Even when a director runs into deep trouble, Ed and the other executives refrain from personally taking control of the creative process. Instead, they might add someone to the team whom they think might help the director out of his bind. If nothing works, they'll change directors rather than fashion solutions themselves.

It's fascinating that Pixar is often spoken of as having such an empowering, delegation-based style while being fused at the hip with Apple, where you-know-who is famed for being a micro-managing tyrant (but one we love since we don't work for him).

Also, HBR hosts a longer interview with Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios titled How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.

I recently finished The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company and am halfway through To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, both of which tell the history of Pixar. It's more of an improbable story than I'd realized. For many years before it became the success story we know today, Pixar struggled to stay in existence with meager to no revenues. The former book is recommended if you just want an inexpensive textual history of the company, while the latter is more expensive but larger, like a coffee table book, with color photos printed on high quality paper.

Caro on Obama and LBJ

Robert A. Caro on Obama's presidential campaign as a descendant of Lyndon B. Johnson's civil rights legacy.

LOOK what has been wrought! Forty-three years ago, a mere blink in history’s eye, many black Americans were unable to vote. Tonight, a black American ascends a stage as nominee for president. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Just give them the vote,” and they can do the rest for themselves.

All during this long primary campaign, after reading, first thing every morning, newspaper articles about Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, I would turn, as part of the research for my next book, to newspaper articles from 1965 about Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to win for black people the right to vote.

And I would think about Johnson’s great speech, when he adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, when he joined his voice to the voices of all the men and women who had sung the mighty hymn of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King cried when he heard that speech. Since I am not black, I cannot know — cannot even imagine — Dr. King’s feelings. I know mine, however. To me, Barack Obama is the inheritor of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legacy. As I sit listening to Mr. Obama tonight, I will be hearing other words as well. I will be hearing Lyndon Johnson saying, “We shall overcome.”

Mad Men's one mistake

From Panopticist: Mad Men gets all the details right--except one:

...everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica.

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight.

Going back to your old documents and finding Arial in them is like seeing your horrific hairdo in that high school yearbook photo.

Digital cameras of note

Trailer for Knowing starring Nicolas Cage. Notable as this movie was shot on the Red One, recently profiled in Wired magazine.

I had a chance to visit Red headquarters last week and play with a couple of Red Ones they had set up with different lenses and configurations. What's amazing about the Red One is that what it allows a filmmaker to do is potentially shoot, edit, and output a 2K resolution movie (the Red One shoots 4K but 2K is close to the resolution of what you see in most movie theaters) all using equipment you can afford and put in your own house. On the price-performance curve, if you plot every camera from your average camcorder you can buy at Best Buy to something like a Panavision 35mm camera or even an IMAX camera, the Red One is an outlier.

The sensor in the Red One can be thought of as similar to the 12 megapixel sensor in your digital SLR, except the Red One can shoot 24 fps (or higher, if you want to overcrank), whereas your SLR shoots maybe 11fps in burst mode and eventually has to stop to clear its buffer.

If you can't afford a Red One, which while cheap is still a $17,500 body, todays specs for the new Nikon D90 should be really intriguing. The D90 follows in the footsteps of other Nikon Digital SLRs, but there's a twist. This 12.3 megapixel SLR can also shoot HD, 720p, 24fps video.

As David Pogue points out, there are some limitations:

• Shooting HD, the max shot length is 5 minutes.
• The audio is mono.
• The camera shoots in .avi file formats that eat up a ton of memory card space.
• Once you start recording video, autofocus no longer works.

The last one was the biggest disappointment to me as it would have been amazing to shoot a fast-moving subject in high dev without having to have an AC (assistant cameraperson). On a professional film shoot, when making a movie, the 1st AC is responsible for pulling focus, or adjusting the focus on the lens during a shot. So there is no autofocus on a professional film shoot, like you have on a prosumer camcorder. But that's by design. Anyone who's watched a consumer home video and watched the focus drift in and out as the camera's autofocus struggles to figure out where you want focus to lie knows that manually controlling focus is one of the professional cinematographer's tools, not a hindrance.

But for the average consumer, shooting their child at a soccer game with their D90, having the full capabilities of the Nikon's autofocus systems to track their child as they spring towards the camera would be amazing.

Still, all that being said, adding HD video capabilities to an SLR is a nifty trick. I don't need a D90, but I'd sure love one. It won't be too long after these are released until we see the first short film shot entirely on the D90.

By the way, you can buy a Nikon mount for the Red One so that it accepts Nikon lenses to shoot with also. Every day, digital SLRs and digital camcorders converge.

The moment you become a New Yorker

Article in the NYTimes about that moment, some period into your first year living in New York, when you become a New Yorker.

Though I can't recall a specific moment things changed for me in NYC, I did reach, sometime about four or five months into living in NYC, a state of harmony with the city, when I understood its rhythms and its personality, when I felt all the privileges of living in the country's greatest city open to me.

The city, like its people, can seem prickly, antagonistic, or even dangerous. But NYC has more layers than any city I've lived in, and the longer you're there, the more it surprises you.

The world's most powerful copying machine

Transcript of a great lecture by Cory Doctorow on the Internet and copyright law. Besides covering DRM and copyright law, Doctorow touches on some of the same points Clay Shirky raises in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, about the implications of the lowered costs of collaboration using the Internet.

Adium 1.3

The new version now adds Facebook chat connectivity.

A fresh take on reality programming

From one of the sites in my blogroll, This Blog Sits At The, a fresh look at the qualities of reality TV.

Reality programming is instructive. Pam and I watch Project Runway. I see a new design come down the runway, I take my money and I place my bet. Out loud, so that Pam can hear, I say what I think. And eventually I discover whether my judgment bore any resemblance to the experts who eventually hold forth.

It's clear that some education is taking place. My judgments diverge less and less. This means that this kind of reality programming is actually making me a more discerning observer of the world of fashion. It is helping me internalize my own modest mastery of the code.

...

Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap. It is by no means a "raw feed." That is YouTube's job. But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is "stealing signals" from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit. (Mixed metaphor alert. Darn it, too late.)

This is an era in which we are inclined to issue lots of brave talk about cocreation, open source, and dynamic institutions. We speak of breaking down the citadel that separate the corporation from the real world. Well, this is actually what it looks like (for certain purposes). And funny old TV may in fact be one of the first meaning makers to figure out how we solve this particularly thorny problem. This, in turn, would make reality programming not the end of civilization as we know it, but a test case in what comes next.

What I find fascinating about reality programming are people who are addicted to the shows yet love to watch them just to tear down the participants. There is something bizarre in that ironic, conflicted behavior. Not that schadenfreude doesn't exist, but there is no greater charity you can contribute to a reality program participant than your eyeballs to their ratings.

Speaking of reality programming, Hulu now has the first episode of Architecture School.

Two from Melville

Two more DVD's of movies from one of my favorite directors, Jean-Pierre Melville, drop October 7, from Criterion: Le Doulos and Le Deuxieme Souffle.

New Firebug

Firebug 1.2 out today.

Obama's economics worldview

A preview of a feature by David Leonhardt in this Sunday's NYTimes Magazine on Obama's economic policies. A really worthwhile read. You can choose who to vote for based on political ads or party affiliations, but this day and age makes it easier to research candidates than in years past, and it's worth the effort.

The press and the public have had a hard time coming up with an easy narrative for Obama's economics, perhaps because he doesn't fit neatly into pre-conceived economic stereotypes for liberal or conservative politicians.

He should have much appeal to voters who classify themselves as socially liberal, economically conservative.

The partial embrace of Reaganomics is a typical bit of Obama’s postpartisan veneer. In a single artful sentence, he dismissed the old liberals, aligned himself with the Bill Clinton centrists and did so by reaching back to a conservative icon who remains widely popular. But the words have significance at face value too. Compared with many other Democrats, Obama simply is more comfortable with the apparent successes of laissez-faire economics. Sunstein, now on the faculty at Harvard, has a name for this approach: “I like to think of him as a ‘University of Chicago’ Democrat.”

Obama believes strongly in experts and empirical research, and part of his appeal is not just his intellectual curiosity but his willingness to bring in the best and brightest to inform his decisions in all policy areas.

As anyone who has spent time with Obama knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research. (James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at Goolsbee’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”) By surrounding himself with economists, however, Obama was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets. What tends to distinguish Democratic economists is that they set out to uncover imperfections of the market and then come up with incremental, market-based solutions to these imperfections. This helps explain the Obama campaign’s interest in behavioral economics, a relatively new field that has pointed out many ways in which people make irrational, short-term decisions. To deal with one example of such myopia, Obama would require companies to automatically set aside a portion of their workers’ salary in a 401(k) plan. Any worker could override the decision — and save nothing at all or save even more — but the default would be to save.

Those interested in the core tenets of the behavioral economics ideas that influence Obama should pick up Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's book Nudge and keep up with the Nudge blog. They call their philosophy "libertarian paternalism" and believe institutions can improve people's lives without impinging on their freedom of choice. It's one of the better economics texts I've read recently.

As to where Obama stands relative to McCain on tax cuts, especially given that McCain's ads attack Obama as a tax-raiser?

Dating back to Reagan, Republicans have packaged tax cuts on high earners with more modest middle-class tax cuts and then maneuvered the Democrats into an unwinnable choice: are you for tax cuts or against them? Obama, however, argues that this is the moment when the politics of taxes can be changed.

To do this, he is proposing tax cuts for most families that are significantly larger than those McCain is offering, along with major tax increases for families making more than $250,000 a year. “That’s essentially a major part of our economic plan,” Obama said. “But it’s also a political message.” Economically, he is trying to use the tax code to spread the bounty from the market-based American economy to a far wider group of families. Politically, he is trying to drive a wedge through the great Reagan tax gambit.

The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.

And more:

All told, Obama would not only cut taxes for most people more than McCain would. He would cut them more than Bill Clinton did and more than Hillary Clinton proposed doing. These tax cuts are really the essence of his market-oriented redistributionist philosophy (though he made it clear that he doesn’t like the word “redistributionist”). They are an attempt to address the middle-class squeeze by giving people a chunk of money to spend as they see fit.

He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

Near the end of the article is an assessment of Obama and McCain's economic plans and their chances of success.

But it’s not entirely clear what the alternative is, at least in the broad sense and at least for the time being. A much more left-wing agenda than Obama’s would consist of erecting new trade barriers, reregulating various industries and otherwise getting the government even more involved in the economy than Obama would. This program has the dubious distinction of being disliked by both voters and experts alike. Populism hasn’t won a national election, or even the Democratic nomination, in decades, and economists can point to any number of ways why it wouldn’t work anyway.

Republicans, on the other hand, have an economic strategy that may still sell politically. But is there much reason to think that it would lead to a very different result from Bush’s? There have now been two presidents in the last 30 years — Bush and Reagan — who cut taxes and promised that deficits would not follow. But the deficits did come, and they went away only after two other presidents — George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton — raised taxes. It also seems fairly clear by now that tax cuts for the affluent do not necessarily trickle down to everyone else.

For Democrats who want to think the worst about their opponents, McCain’s reliance on these ideas may be affirming. But it’s really a shame. For the time being, only one party is applying the lessons of history to the country’s biggest economic problems. There is no great battle of new ideas, and that can’t make it more likely that those problems will be solved.

Tomb of the Unknown Designer

One of the stars of these Summer Olympics, in addition to Michael Phelps, has been Beijing National Stadium, forever to be known as the Bird's Nest.

But whereas you can't help but know Phelps' mom and coach by now thanks to NBC's extensive coverage, you probably have not heard of Herzog & de Meuron. That's the Swiss architecture firm that designed the Bird's Nest, in addition to the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Tate Modern in London. In 2001, Herzog and de Meuron won the Pritzker Prize.

The article notes that architects, outside of celebs like Gehry or Koolhaas, don't get the level of respect they deserve here in the U.S. That's a shame. If you read a book you like, you'll probably remember the author. If you like a movie, you may know or find out who the director is. It shouldn't be any different for design or architecture.

The woman who should sing the next Bond song

Last night at the Viper Room (famous as the venue outside which River Phoenix died), I heard the woman who should sing the next Bond theme song, and her name is Janelle Monáe.

Her set was short, just 5 songs, but it was one of the most energy-packed, blow-your-mind 5 song sets I've heard since, well, ever. I've heard her songs online via MySpace, and I was impressed, but seeing her live is an experience unto itself and not to be missed. She's like a live bolt of electricity on stage, and frankly I'm not sure she could keep maintain it for a 15 song set without just passing out and getting carried off in an ambulance.

The Viper Room's concert hall is tiny, and that was part of the experience. Being able to see her animated expressions, being able to see her dancing like her life depended on it. I'm sure I'll never experience her music that way again. For her last song, she crowd-surfed, and I nearly ruptured my other Achilles trying to help guide her across as she passed over my head.

She has an interesting style (that hair!) and sound, both futuristic yet classical. That's why she'd make a great choice for the next Bond theme song. She can bring some of the Shirley Bassey funk and marry it to a more modern, hip-hop sound. With her interest in science fiction--she references androids in her album cover and some of her songs--she might even be able to write lyrics that incorporate "Quantum of Solace" in an organic way.

Her music is hard to describe. She went from the propulsive drive of "Many Moons" to the hushed emotion of "Smile". My favorite track is "Sincerely Jane". There's funk, hip hop, soul, pop, and bits of other musical goodness in there.

After the concert, we all stared at each other wide-eyed, and then I ran over to the merchandise table to buy her CD, because all I could think was "this girl's going to blow up" and "I need to buy stock in her."

You can buy her CD Metropolis: The Chase Suite or mp3's from Amazon. Here's the rest of her appearance schedule for 2008; those of you in SF, Portland, Seattle, Arlington, NYC, or Chicago should get your tickets now.

Man on Wire

Last weekend, I caught Man on Wire, a documentary about wire walker Philippe Petit and his attempt to walk between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974. After watching it, I wondered how it was that such an obsessive personality could have escaped Werner Herzog's eye. Those are his specialty.

It turns out Petit and Herzog are longtime friends, and Esquire has a transcript of a conversation between the two.

WH: What I do is for spectators. Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.

PP: But the cows remember.

Tech product reviews: Kodak Zi6, Microsoft Photosynth

Positive review of the Kodak Zi6, which is the little handheld video camera that's like the Flip except it shoots HD (720p up to 60fps).

I'm curious about the audio quality, but I have a Flip, and if the Zi6 combines the Flip's simplicity of use and portability with HD quality it seems like a handy little gadget. Not even film school students and camera snobs always want to deal with busting out a full-sized camera and pro-level gear.

***

Walt Mossberg reviews the upcoming Microsoft Live Labs release of Photosynth (releases this Thursday to the public for free). The demo seems to have floated around for years, and I'd long since given up hope of seeing it in the wild (when's the last time anything from Microsoft Labs made it into the public?). So to hear it will be released as a website for free for anyone to use is a pleasant surprise.

Mossberg has mostly positive things to say. Sadly, the Mac version is not ready yet, so it's Windows only for now.

I've been testing this service for about a week, and while it has its flaws, I believe that Photosynth offers a dramatic new way to use your photos and to share them with others.

Photosynth works within a Web browser, using a small plug-in you install. Currently, it works only in Windows, using Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser or its rival, Firefox. A Macintosh version is in the works, but for now, you can't even view others' synths in the Mac operating system.

When Photosynth works right, the results are wonderfully satisfying. But it takes some skill to get a set of photos the service can match up well, a quality Microsoft calls being "synthy." Ideally, portions of each slice of a 3-D scene should show up in at least three photos, with 50% overlap between them. After you upload your pictures and Photosynth does its best to make them into a 3-D scene, the service assigns them a percentage number that indicates how synthy they were.

Interestingly, you can only run Photosynth on a Mac if it's running Windows XP or Vista via Boot Camp, not via Parallels or VMWare Fusion. The error message if you try to use Photosynth on a Mac:

Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet.

Learn to pronounce the clothes you can't afford

How to pronounce fashion designer names, so as not to embarrass yourself during Fashion Week.

ya-MA-moto? Really?

A quick trip through Buzzfeed

Is Obama announcing his running mate tomorrow morning? Drudge thinks yes.

Funny bust, err...bus stop ad.

Speaking of the Wonderbra, they came up with another clever billboard, a photomosaic made up of hundreds of photos of women in their bras.

If I work on the top floor of this building and they announce that they're doing a fire drill test some day, I'm calling in sick.

Backlashes seem to have been accelerated by the Internet, so it's surprising that it took so long for the Radiohead backlash. Me, I'm going to see Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday and I couldn't be more excited.

At this moment, there might not be a bigger way for a woman to summon a world of fame onto herself than by dating Michael Phelps. First contender: fashion model Lily Donaldson.

Into the uncanny valley

I still don't think "Emily" has crossed the uncanny valley--in fact, she may just have gone deeper into it--but there's no doubt she's a big improvement over previous efforts towards realistic human facial expressions in digital animation. There's still something not quite right, especially with her eyes. But it's a visible step forward.

The Wii game we've all been waiting for

All Star Cheer Squad lets you experience competitive cheerleading (as opposed to your run-of-the-mill weekend warrior variety). For maximum realism, THQ brought on Tony G, of Bring It On fame, as a consultant.

Like many of you, I'm wondering if this game requires a separate spirit fingers accessory.

TDS on the Olympics

Nothing like The Daily Show to put Olympics controversies in perspective.

8 short notes on the day of Phelps' 8th gold medal

You wouldn't think a man would have much leisure time in a race in which he sets a new world record of 9.69 seconds, but Usain Bolt had enough of a lead at the end of the men's 100-meter dash to blow out finger pistols, flash Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella triangle hand sign, and check his watch.

If I were racing against him, I'd be intimidated just seeing "Bolt" on the back of his jersey.

***

I thought I saw Michael Phelps ride across the pool to his last medal ceremony standing on the backs of two dolphins, holding a trident.

***

I was wondering about something at dinner yesterday and saw that someone else had asked Marginal Revolution the same thing: for such a populous country, why has India won so few Olympic medals?

***

Visual evidence that Nikon has made a huge comeback against Canon in the professional sports photography market. Look at the lenses in this shot of the press photography area at the Olympics.

Black lenses are likely Nikon's mounted on D3's, while the light gray lenses are the Canons that used to dominate.

***

Is it worth carrying an airline-mile credit card? Probably not unless you are a big-spending, high-flying, elite status traveler. I ditched mine several years ago in favor of various cashback cards.

***

Is it really possible Anthony Lane didn't know right away which actor was playing Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder? From his review:

He is a doughy, balding monster with big spectacles and even wider hand gestures, all his power distilled into profanity: a grotesque update, if you will, on the movie executive with the shock of white-hot hair, brought to life by Rod Steiger, in “The Big Knife,” more than fifty years ago. It took me half the running time to realize who was playing this new beast, and it was only his voice that triggered the recognition; I suspect that there will be gasps during the end credits, as people see his name and find themselves rethinking the whole movie, marvelling at what could have inspired so stiff an actor to unfurl and bounce around.

Roger Ebert also thinks some people will not recognize the actor behind this cameo:

The movie is a send-up of Hollywood, actors, acting, agents, directors, writers, rappers, trailers and egos, much enhanced by several cameo roles, the best of which I will not even mention. You’ll know the one, although you may have to wait for the credits to figure it out.

Really? I think most every person in the theater will know who it is right away.

***

As if it wasn't already hard enough to tell what people really look like from their carefully chosen and touched-up Facebook profile photos, soon we may all have access to software that can automatically enhance facial attractiveness. This SIGGRAPH paper discusses the technique and shows some results which were validated by independent ratings.

***

Ah, only in Texas.

Hulu love from sites I frequent

Some sites I frequent have posted some Hulu links. I'd like to think it's love, but in web currency, links are like slaps on the butt in sports.

Filmoculous: "Some movies I didn't realize you could watch in their entirety on Hulu: Metropolitan, The Fifth Element, 28 Days Later, Requiem for a Dream, Lost in Translation, Koyaanisqatsi, and Eternal Sunshine."

Kottke, continuing the Filmoculous thread: "Me either! Also available are Raising Arizona, Lost Highway, Hoop Dreams, Sideways, Master and Commander, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, and Groundhog Day."

Will Carroll, in Baseball Prospectus: "I can't watch the Olympics without thinking of this video."

Literally, a photo finish

Sports Illustrated has a series of photos showing just how close Milorad Cavic came to upsetting Michael Phelps in the 100-meter butterfly yesterday. It's easy to see why, to some outside the pool, it looked like some conspiracy that Phelps won. He was so far behind before that final half-stroke that chopped the wall that it looked like an error when they superimposed that #1 graphic in his lane on TV.

I don't understand the advantages of wearing the high neck Speedo LZR Racer suit versus just the legskin, but I wonder why Phelps only wore the legskin for this swim, and whether that would have made a difference. Cavic wore the high neck bodyskin.

Mitch Hedberg

I want to hang a map of the world in my house then I’m gonna put pins into all the locations that I’ve travelled to. But first I’m gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won’t fall down.

Because every now and then, a dose of Mitch Hedberg is required.

Fail

When I saw this photo of Spain's Olympic basketball team making slanted eyes in an ad, I thought there couldn't be any possible way they could have known what that gesture meant. How could anyone be so blatantly racist? I haven't seen that gesture since the playground days in elementary school, and the feeling it evokes has evolved. Then, it stung. Now, it angers.

But the Spaniards have not apologized, and participants like Pau Gasol are quoted saying, "It was supposed to be a picture that inspired the Olympic spirit."

Huh?!?

Jason Kidd is right, if the U.S. team had done something like that, David Stern would have disciplined them. But no one, not even FIBA, has done anything, not even a public rebuke.

I'm rooting for the U.S. Olympic hoops team to remedy this by meeting Spain in the finals and kicking their asses up and down the floor.

Babar's USA

A photo of mine, one of the Hollywood sign, appears in this Babar children's book, and it's on the cover, too.

I don't get anything if you buy the book, but I was happy to contribute because, well, you know, I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.

Sure, Whitney Houston sang it, but I live it.

Me Winner

That common victory pose, arms thrust high, chest stuck out -- think Michael Phelps -- may be innate to primates according to scientists. Their evidence is that chimps and monkeys do it also, and blind athletes who've never seen others do it also strike that pose.

What I want to know is what the root of the walk-off home run celebration is. If I spot a gorilla throwing off a half-coconut shell helmet and then jumping into a big group of gorillas, at which point they all start hopping up and down in a circle, I'm going to freak out.

Black Bull

A Starbucks coffee grande has over 4X the caffeine of a Red Bull. This and many other interesting coffee facts via this NYTimes article.

Serious party people know that the go-to drink to get you to the crack of dawn is coffee and vodka.

How artists work

A long set of links to articles or interviews in which various artists describe how they work.

Olympics humor

From Jessica Hagy's Indexed:

Someecard:

Giving Alain Bernard the finger (.08s worth)

The Olympics are a time for being part of the global community, for sportsmanship, for setting aside our differences and celebrating...

...yeeeaaahhhhh! Suck it France!

In the pool, Lezak had seen Bernard hit the far wall first.

"I'm not going to lie," Lezak said. "When I flipped at the 50 and I still saw how far ahead he was, and he was the world-record holder 'til about two minutes before that, when Sullivan led off with the world record, I thought, it really crossed my mind for a split second, there's no way.

"Then I changed. I said, you know what, that's ridiculous. This is the Olympics. I'm here for these guys. I'm here for the United States of America. It's more than -- I don't care how bad it hurts, or whatever, I'm just going to go out there and hit it.

"Honestly, in like 5 seconds, I was thinking all these things -- you know, just got like a super charge and took it from there. It was unreal."

...

With the pressure of all of it on him, Lezak threw down the fastest split of all time, 46.06.

Yoo hoo, Pretty Boy

After finally watching Margarito pound Cotto's face into a Margarito pizza on my friend's DVR, I am ready to pony up money to see Mayweather step into the ring with Margarito. Pretty Boy ducked Margarito once despite an $8MM guaranteed payout, but if he really wants to cement his legacy he should come out of retirement and face down the Tijuana Tornado.

I feel pretty

The most interesting thing about this John Edwards story: the National Enquirer scooped the MSM. Second-most interesting angle: Edwards admits that all that time on the campaign trail made him a narcissist.

That one must be a bit self-absorbed to want to run for President is not surprising. As Chris Rock opined in his current comedy tour, "Do you realize how arrogant you have to be to think you deserve to be President of the United States?" But I haven't heard a candidate explain an affair that way before.

Maureen Dowd's column ends:

Back in 2002, Edwards sent me a Ken doll dressed in bathing trunks, Rio de Janeiro Ken, with a teasing note, because he didn’t like my reference to him as a Ken doll in a column.

In retrospect, the comparison was not fair — to Ken.

Oof.

The demographic inversion of the American city

Alan Ehrenhalt writes of the demographic inversion of the American city in his article "Trading Places" in The New Republic.

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

Later:

We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

Having grown up in the suburbs thinking it could not possibly be a more dull existence, I've always had a desire to live in a big city, of which Manhattan has been the apex in my life thus far. But then I didn't experience big cities when they were plagued with higher crime rates, and of course the public schools in most cities are either terrible or too expensive.

Ultimately, though, the current inversion is less the result of middle-aged people changing their minds than of young adults expressing different values, habits, and living preferences than their parents. The demographic changes that have taken place in America over the past generation--the increased propensity to remain single, the rise of cohabitation, the much later age at first marriage for those who do marry, the smaller size of families for those who have children, and, at the other end, the rapidly growing number of healthy and active adults in their sixties, seventies, and eighties--have combined virtually all of the significant elements that make a demographic inversion not only possible but likely. We are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings can live wherever they want, and many will choose central cities over distant suburbs. As they do this, others will find themselves forced to live in less desirable places--now defined as those further from the center of the metropolis. And, as this happens, suburbs that never dreamed of being entry points for immigrants will have to cope with new realities. It should come as no surprise that the most intense arguments about hiring and educating the undocumented have occurred in the relatively distant reaches of American suburbia, such as Prince William County, Virginia.

Just a fascinating article.

Somewhere in between, there lies the vision of Jane Jacobs, who idealized the Greenwich Village of the 1950s and the casual everyday relationships that made living there comfortable, stimulating, and safe. Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will not reappear: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the twenty-first-century are looking in some sense for the things Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in. And, by and large, I believe central cities will give it to them. Not only that, but much of suburbia, in an effort to stay afloat, will seek to urbanize itself to some extent. That reinvention is already taking place: Look at all the car-created suburbs built in the 1970s and '80s that have created "town centers" in the past five years, with sidewalks and as much of a street grid as they can manage to impose on a faded strip-mall landscape. None of these retrofit efforts look much like a real city. But they are a clue to the direction in which we are heading.

To quote Paris Hilton: "That's hot"

The world's most expensive car, the Aston Martin One-77, a hand-made coupe, will cost $2.3 million. At most 77 will be built.

It's hard to say that any car that costs that much could be worth it, but damn that's a beautiful automobile.

Already, problems with Olympics broadcasting

I was so excited for this year's Olympics because for the first time, 2,200 hours were going to be put online at NBCOlympics.com. DirecTV has some 6 or 7 channels dedicated to the Olympics. It didn't seem possible that the problems with the last Olympics would recur, namely that anyone who is on the Internet would find out results before they were shown somewhere.

Alas, that idea of maximizing audience via an artificially enforced notion of primetime still haunts us. If you want to watch Michael Phelps compete in events, you don't get to see them live, at least not on the West Coast in any legal fashion. I logged into ESPN this morning and there on the front page were the results of Phelps' first heat of the 400 IM Medley (which I won't share here). In fact, the result is even listed on the homepage of NBCOlympics.com. But the network is trying to still aggregate an audience for TV, so marquee events like that are not shown online, they are only shown on TV on a delayed schedule. In this case, the heats are shown at 3:30 to 4:30pm PST.

The final is at 5pm PST, but on the west coast they are going to delay coverage until 8pm PST, so for three hours the East Coast and Midwest in the U.S. will know the results, while the PST folks will have to detach all electronic devices and live in willful ignorance of the sports world if they wish to have any suspense when watching the main events on TV.

The revolution will be tape-delayed. Sigh.

Bernie Mac dead

Just 50 years old. People still die from pneumonia?

Mad Men Illustrated

Opening Ceremony: The Big Picture

Was hoping The Big Picture would cover the Olympics Opening Ceremony, and they did.

Best. Opening. Ceremony. Ever.

Related: Some of these photos by Li Wei remind me of moments from the Opening Ceremony.

Oprah's political endorsement value

[via Marginal Revolution] A study on the value of Oprah's political endorsement to Barack Obama concludes that "her endorsement had a positive effect on the votes Obama received, increased the overall voter participation rate, and increased the number of contributions received by Obama." They also note that "the results ... suggest that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for approximately additional 1,000,000 votes for Obama"

The paper can be read as a PDF.

I cannot tell if 1MM incremental voters is valuable, though it feels like a strong number.

My curiosity is stoked: what are the five most valuable endorsements a candidate can receive? Labor unions? Governors? Senators? Newspapers? Which ones?

Ah, youth

Having come in a night early for a morning meeting here in Boulder, Colorado, Christina and I strolled around University of Colorado campus tonight. Being around a university reminds me of the happiest time of my life, as an undergrad.

We walked into one building, saw signs for a performance, and walked out to find a play being put on in an open-air theater. I stood to watch a scene--given the many references to D'Artagnan I assume it was The Three Musketeers--then walked out with a smile on my face.

Nothing like mannered student theater acting and eating disorder brochures in the hallways to remind one of college.

Hamlet, the Facebook Feed Edition

Hamlet, the Facebook Feed Edition (via a coworker Nellis). Some highlights:

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Ophelia removed "moody princes" from her interests.

Polonius is no longer online.

I'm a !@#$%*? You're a *&%$#@!

In a letter, Giles Coren excoriates the Times sub-editors for altering the last sentence of one his columns. The Sunday Times sub-editors respond to Giles with their own letter and wonder why he had to be so rude and profane.

Good points all around. Not quite a literary feud, but similar entertainment value.

On a related note, Chuck Klosterman is overjoyed by the Shaq-Kobe feud and mutual hatred.

Usage error: enamored with

Enamored takes the preposition of, not with.

From my favorite reference book, A Dictionary of Modern Usage, by Bryan Garner.

How common is this usage error?

Approximate Google search results for "enamored with": 1,160,000

Approximate Google search results for "enamored of": 877,000

Some among the usage police have come to accept "enamored with" given its widespread adoption, but to me Garner is law.

Scrabulous reincarnated

After the Hasbro lawsuit that killed Scrabulous on Facebook, the creators have resurrected it with a different look and slightly different rules as Wordscraper.

The feisty underdog still has some bite.

[via Techdirt]