Remains of the Day

Gates goes Green

Alex Steffen calls Bill Gates' speech on climate at TED "the most important speech of the year." Having the world's most powerful philanthropist focused on the climate change problem is undoubtedly important.

But the most interesting part of Steffen's post is its conclusion, in which he offers an improvement to the equation Gates unveiled at TED.

Now we might start with the energy use to deliver those services (E in the Equation). The energy intensity of any given form of prosperity can, I believe, be improved quite a bit; but the idea that E can be dramatically improved without improving the kind of prosperity we're attempting to provide is the very definition of what I call The Swap. The Swap doesn't work.

And we don't need it to. The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.

We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving efficiency.

The answer to the problem of cars and automotive emissions, for instance, isn't designing a better car, it's designing a better city. The answer to the problem of overconsumption isn't recycling cans or green shopping, it's changing our relationship to stuff, so that everything we use and live with is designed for zero waste, and either meant to last ("heirloom design" and "durability") or to be shared ("product service systems") or both. The best living we've ever had is waiting beyond zero. What looks like a wall to many people from this side of zero, looks to like a trellis from the other side, a foundation on which new thinking can flourish.

Cities are the tools we need for reinventing prosperity. We can build zero-impact cities, and we need to. Any answer to the problem of climate change needs to be as focused on reinventing the future as powering it.

The geek shall inherit the earth

This much-blogged article by Garry Kasparov in The New York Review of Books is worthy of the attention. What's fantastic is Kasparov's deeper exploration of the impact of the rise of powerful chess software.

Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of need ing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies.

...

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

...

The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all.

What's perhaps even more intriguing, though, is Kasparov's recount of the results of a chess tournament hosted by a chess website in which players were all allowed to play against each other with the aid of computers.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Can this result (weak human + machine + better process as superior option) be replicated in other areas of human-computer partnership? While Kasparov is talking about chess in this article, the fact that so many people now carry phones that are more powerful than the earliest personal computers has elevated the importance of human-computer collaboration. We are not yet the cyborgs of sci-fi imagination, but in some aspects of life, we're closer than we may realize.

The gap between those who can work in partnership with computers and those who cannot (for whatever reason, socioeconomic or generational or other) is evident in so many ways. Even among those who are computing-enabled, there are differences in ability. When I'm out with a group of people and we're looking for a restaurant, or directions, the people with smartphones with Yelp and Google Maps are more capable than those without. We can go further and observe that even among those with smartphones, some are better at using them to their full potential than others. Is that a result of superior process, or a stronger human?

White liberal guiltlessness (and some stuff about Avatar)

This is an old link but one I meant to share a while back because I enjoyed it. Giovanni Tiso notes that critical discussion of both Avatar and past injustices against Haiti are being decried as inappropriate, the former because hey, it's just a movie, and the latter because a tragedy is no time to try to hash out our complicity in Haiti's poverty.

Similar backlash occurred after 9/11 in the U.S., when any attempt to analyze whether U.S. policy had contributed to the rise of Al-Qaeda was treated as heartless political pandering. It's just another instance of the tyranny of the OR, where it's assumed one can't be both analytical and sympathetic. I would hope we're able to appreciate that real-life is more nuanced than that, even if we can't tolerate that level of complexity from our mass entertainment.

Besides, I’m a consumer of information just like everybody else, of serious, sometimes cataclysmic front page news that bleeds into entertainment news and back again, a phenomenon made even more pronounced by the design of Web pages and aggregators and by the nature of hypertext if, like me, you get most of your news online.

In that environment, it is quite natural that James Cameron should accept an award in the name of a people that is indigenous only to his head, and that it should be greeted at best with a collective smirk or shrug or guffaw, since after all it was done in the spirit and logic of the times, while actual political statements of demonstrable historical urgency, like Peter Hallward’s, attract offense and derision. And this same spirit and logic will dictate that an immense human tragedy that weighs on the shoulders of the international community should be consumed as an act of God, outside of history, in the same present tense as entertainment, asking of us only that we fill that void with as many random quick fire donations - think of the convenience of texting for relief - as we can fit in the course of our normal activities and in the time allotted for caring for such things.

There is only one thing worse than white liberal guilt, and it’s white liberal guiltlessness, demanding that history not be ‘brought into it’, that memory be erased. We must fight that. And, yes, give, and give discriminately.

Esoteria

Lindsay Beyerstein defends Y Tu Mama Tambien from a detractor who implicates the movie's female lead Luisa as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. What is a MPDG?

Onion AV writer Nathan Rabin coined the term to describe Kristen Dunst's character in a scathing review of Elizabethtown: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

Natalie Portman is usually trotted out as Exhibit A in MPDG litigation.

I liked Y Tu Mama Tambien and endorse Beyerstein's defense against said charges. But I also enjoyed adding MPDG to my vocabulary.

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A touching Roger Ebert story. No, not that one, though that is a great one that's gotten a lot of coverage recently, and deservedly so. In losing his voice, he found a new one in his online journal (his output has expanded into Twitter as well). I have my own Roger Ebert stories from having chatted with him a few times at Sundance, but I'll share those another day.

I DVR'd Ebert on Oprah today, but I'm not sure tonight is the night to watch. I must brace myself for the emotional impact.

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"All the Good Stuff Always Happens in the Ladies Room" by Paulina Porizkova

It's a funny read, honest and not ironic. It evokes my sympathy when I read about her "frequent bouts of self-doubt and the occasional humiliation of being a celebrity past her prime" and I don't often feel sympathy for supermodels, the title granted her in her byline.

I link to it mostly because it reminded me that we live in an odd age when celebrities are writing at us in an unmediated fashion more than I can ever remember. Celebrity Twitter accounts, blogs, websites, and iPhone apps. I'm not sure what I should feel when a celebrity tweets from their high life: what other celebrity they just ran into, what it's like on the red carpet or on the movie set or the exclusive party they're at. It seems like vanity, or perhaps insecurity, or maybe they have nothing else to write about because their lives are really one long string of parties punctuated by an occasional gig that resembles work. I'm not sure how I feel about this other than it should be the subject of a Chuck Klosterman essay.

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Shawn Blanc makes his plea for a good iPhone feed reader. I made a similar wish earlier this month.

I use three newsreaders on my iPhone today: Byline, Reeder, and NetNewsWire. Use might not be the right word. I bounce between them depending on my mood, but none of the three thrill or delight me yet.

I differ from Shawn a bit in my primary complaints about the three. Byline is the fastest of the three and allows offline reading which I love, but a few things about its UI irk me. One is that after loading its initial set of items, you have to click a link at the bottom to load more stories from your feed. But that link is placed right below a Mark All As Read link which I hit by mistake all the time. The second is the inability to select stories from an individual feed. Sometimes I don't want my full newsfeed, I just want the latest from one feed. I'd also love the option to save state the way Tweetie does so i can start browsing forward from the last article I was shown in my previous Byline session.

Reeder allows me to select individual feeds, but it doesn't save state. The worst problem is that it chokes on syncing all the stories from all my feeds. I spend a lot of time waiting for Reeder to register my screen gestures as it syncs; those long delays drive me crazy. I can't tell if my iPhone has frozen or if Reeder is just constipated (I have syncing turned on at startup so every time I launch the app I'm waiting around for something to happen). I've had to all but turn Reeder syncing off to use the app which is too bad because it has a lot of other features I appreciate.

As for NetNewsWire, on the iPhone it is essentially unusable for anyone with any healthy number of feeds. It feels as if my phone has just frozen.

My hope is that someone solves this on the iPad because that has the potential be a fantastic newsreader device, especially as the Kindle is not great in that area. An iPad with a great Google Reader app and access to browsing all the usual news websites through mobile Safari and a great ebook reader would be something I spend a lot of time with on the toilet. Did I say toilet? I meant "around the house."

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Is this the same old woman who looks like a little girl from Orphan?

The Redesign of the NY Times Magazine

Long commentary from design director Arem Duplessis, complete with images, here. I enjoy reading these redesign commentaries or case studies.

RIP Alexander McQueen

The real-time obituary of today comes not from the news or recollections from a person's friends or colleagues but via a trickle of lamentations on my Facebook Wall or in my Twitter feed, a small wave that grows in size and crests about a half day later before crashing on shore, the story passing then into the hands of old school media. It's clear from that part of my life that a lot of my friends were into Alexander McQueen.

I'm no high fashion expert, but his death did recall for me this gorgeous hologram of Kate Moss shown at one of his fashion shows. I wish a higher res copy were available, but this will at least give an idea. You had to be there (for the record, I wasn't).

Progress bars everywhere

What if there were progress bars everywhere, like on stoplights? I like seeing progress on downloads when in my browser, and real world extensions of online progress bars, like subway station displays that indicate when the next train arrives, are pleasing. We display when the ad will end on Hulu. What if we had displays that showed when the trailers/pre-show-ads would end at the movie theater? A countdown clock to when your flight was scheduled to lift off, displayed on your seatback TV?

At Amazon, we contemplated a world where RFID chips could give you a near real-time status check on where your package was, physically, to the point where you could see it flying towards you in a UPS truck on an online map. When is it too much info, and when is it useful? My guess is that we haven't gone far enough yet. Just having the option there is often enough to soothe the mind even if you don't need to access the status.

Unhappy hipsters

Yet another new niche blog. This one, Unhappy Hipsters, grabs images from Dwell magazine and recasts them by giving them a caption. It's not F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the conceit is like a clever joke.

2009 felt like the year of the themed Tumblr. Every month I hear of a new one, visit once and dive through a few pages worth of posts, chuckle, and then never visit again. They're the food trucks of the internet.

Weinstein feedback to Errol Morris

From the entertaining Tumblr blog Letters of Note is this letter from then Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein to Errol Morris at the time The Thin Blue Line was in release.

Without the full context of their correspondence up until then, and having not seen Morris's performance on NPR, it's difficult to interpret fairly. But a few thoughts:

• As feedback goes, it's efficient. Learning to give and receive honest feedback is critical in business, and being overly sensitive is a barrier to achieving good work. We're all human, of course, and it's perhaps impossible to take criticism of one's work with complete impartiality, but given enough repetitions, one can cultivate a professional receptivity that leads to more efficient interchanges. I like to think of standup comedians honing their routines in the most brutal of environments, the small comedy club, receiving instant feedback in the form of laughter or, in the worst case, jeers. There's a certain courage and maturity required to submit to unmoderated feedback, and more of the world needs it in the age of the internet, where anonymous feedback through mediums like email and blogs and Twitter comes with zero cost.
• Plenty of successful executives have a cultivated the personality of an enfant terrible. But is the sarcasm really necessary? "If you have any casting suggestion, I'd appreciate that." That needless dig doesn't ease the reception of any useful feedback in the note. Just on a purely economic basis, I've never understood the fascination on the part of so many people in the entertainment business with being assholes, it would seem like a bad move in a world where it's difficult to predict who you might need to work with again given the variability of success on the part of even the industry's brightest talents.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger

Margaret Talbot sets the table for Perry v. Schwarzenegger in this week's New Yorker. The stakes are high.

If the Perry case succeeds before the Supreme Court, it could mean that gay marriage would be permitted not only in California but in every state. And, if the Court recognized homosexuals as indistinguishable from heterosexuals for the purposes of marriage law, it would be hard, if not impossible, to uphold any other laws that discriminated against people on the basis of sexual orientation. However, a loss for Olson and Boies could be a major setback to the movement for marriage equality. Soon after Olson and Boies filed the case, last May, some leading gay-rights organizations—among them the A.C.L.U., Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights—issued a statement condemning such efforts. The odds of success for a suit weren’t good, the groups said, because the “Supreme Court typically does not get too far ahead of either public opinion or the law in the majority of states.”

In other words, the case is an interesting challenge to what Jonathan Rauch has called radical incrementalism.

DIA: Is the government (at the state and federal level) moving fast enough on gay marriage?

Mr Rauch: Yes. Just the right speed. America is divided on the meaning of marriage and is understandably cautious about tampering with an age-old, embattled institution. On the other hand, Americans are increasingly sympathetic to gay couples who are pledged to care for each other (and their children) but who are legal strangers to one another, a situation which just makes no sense.

On gay marriage, activists on both ends of the spectrum conspired against radical incrementalism. One side tried to ban gay marriage forever on every inch of American soil; the other side dreamed of mandating it nationally by court order. To its great credit, the country refused to be hustled. Instead it is taking the truly conservative approach, which is to try gay marriage in some places, without betting the whole country.

I think same-sex marriage will prove its worth and win slow but sure support: much stronger, more durable support than if it had been thrust upon an uncomfortable and largely hostile country. If I'm wrong, and if same-sex marriage really will be ruinous for straight marriage, then we'll have a chance to find that out.

America's handling of SSM is true Burkean conservatism at its best. More here.

Obama has often been characterized as a Burkean conservative; more on Burke and his political philosophy can be found here.

If the consequence of the plaintiff's losing this case is indeed a setback of a decade or more in the fight for gay marriage, that's a perverse predicament for same-sex marriage proponents to be in, where the most effective way to fight for what you seek might be to not fight for it at all.

The other case out there that fascinates me is the Shepard Fairey dispute with the Associated Press and whether he infringed on the copyright for a photo taken by AP photographer Manny Garcia for his famous Obama Hope poster. Copyright law is under pressure in this age of sampling. More and more, royalties seem destined to dwindle to nothing, but both copyright and patent law needs a refresh in this digital age. Patent trolls are a pestilence on the entrepreneurial spirit.

Charities for Haiti

Charity Navigator has a suggested list of charities to support if you want to aid the people of Haiti, along with suggestions for vetting charities that aren't on the list.

Tony Judt

From a profile of the historian and political essayist Tony Judt, who suffers from ALS.

Judt called attention to America's and Europe's worship of efficiency, wealth, free markets, and privatization. We live, he said, in a world shaped by a generation of Austrian thinkers—the business theorist Peter Drucker, the economists Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Joseph Schumpeter, and the philosopher Karl Popper—who witnessed liberalism's collapse in the face of fascism and concluded that the best way to defend liberalism was to keep government out of economic life. "If the state was held at a safe distance," Judt said, "then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay." Public responsibilities have been drastically shifted to the private sector. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come."

From an interview with Judt:

What, then, should people in Eastern Europe know about the United States' position toward them and their region?

Judt: This is not an area of great interest to the United States, whereas Russia is a great power, which could be useful to the United States, or a great nuisance to the United State. Either way, we will deal with Moscow. And listening to Warsaw is something we shall only do for the purpose of politeness. I do feel that it's important to say this, which is so obvious to me when I go to Washington, and it's a reason why the East Europeans will do much better to invest in a stronger EU, because only a strong EU -- because it's on Russia's borders -- will be forced to think about what it means to deal with Russia, territorially.

Remember, when Americans think about Russia -- just as when Americans think about the Middle East -- they think about "over there." It's a long way away; it's a foreign policy problem.

When Europeans think about Russia, or the Middle East, it's right next door. It's not a foreign policy problem, it's a domestic problem. Islam, immigrants, gas, memories of empire, it's all right next door.

This matters to Europe in a quite different way. Dreaming about Washington is one of East Europe's great mistakes. And they would be advised not to indulge it. Washington is not about to run to their rescue against Russia.

Borowitz Report

Andy Borowitz joins The New Yorker with his Borowitz Report. I've never heard of it, but it seems to be a one-man Onion. First up: Full Body Scans to Double as Annual Checkups:

The President added that instituting the body scan/checkup could ward off some terrorists right from the start, “because a lot of them will balk at the $25 co-pay.”

But according to Davis Logsdon, who studies terrorism and health care reform at the University of Minnesota, the body scans may attract more terrorists than they deter: “If there’s one complaint that terrorists have about al-Qaeda it’s that they have lousy benefits.”

Jacobs vs. Moses

Re-evaluating history's verdict on Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses.

Paper towels versus air dryers

Which method of drying your hand in a public bathroom is cleaner? Answer here.

I wonder if they air dryers evaluated were of the high-powered variety. In the Denver airport on my last business trip, I went to use an air dryer, and when I placed my hands beneath them, I was hit with a concussive jet of air so forceful it propelled me across the bathroom and through the opposite wall, leaving a person-shaped hole in the tiles.

Miscellany

Google Reader asked some notable folks what their top picks were for Google Reader. Good idea, but I find it a bit offputting that so many folks chose their own website as one of their short list? Their sites are already listed and linked under their names, are we to believe they really spend time reading their own writing in Google Reader?

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This past weekend, I was driving home on the 405 and saw a massive, odd-looking cloud standing alone in a clear blue sky, like a single head of cauliflower poking its head up through a bed of smog. Then I realized it was smoke from the fires in the San Gabriel mountains. It looked like a scene from 24, as if someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on LA. Here's one tightly-cropped time-lapse video of the smoke from the fires.

To truly appreciate how terrifying it looks, watch this wider-framed time-lapse which will give you a sense of the magnitude of this latest SoCal conflagration.

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Hitchcock is a storyboarding app for the iPhone that can use photos. You're limited to the fixed focal length lens of the iPhone, but I could see it being a handy tool on set. We were shooting our Alec Baldwin Super Bowl commercial earlier this year in NYC, and the director Peter Berg grabbed my iPhone at one point and used the camera to help us visualize a shot he envisioned. He mentioned offhand that he wouldn't mind having a simple tool on the iPhone for quick previz.

It's $19.99, but there are more specialty tools coming to the iPhone that aren't intended for mass audiences, and those can justify higher prices.

Incidentally, I wish the iPhone app store had a way to put apps on a wishlist, or save them for later view. I often see apps that I think I might want to buy later, and I never have a way to remember them. Like this one cool app I saw last week, what did it do again, it was something about...oh, forget it.

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A BMW concept diesel-hybrid. As with all concept cars, it looks absurdly futuristic, but it's heartening to see higher end manufacturers committing to the sustainability movement. Design can lift up the mundane and make it desirable, and having manufacturers like BMW or Tesla pushing the high end of this market can only help.

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On Japanese simplicity.

In just over 30 years Hello Kitty has become a multibillion-dollar model of resourceful minimalism within the global juggernaut of Japanese pop culture. From Tokyo to Tehran, her expressionless, barely sketched visage adorns key chains, backpacks, toiletries and even a Hello Kitty-themed airline jet. Late last year an entire maternity hospital with Hello Kitty imagery adorning bedspreads and birth certificates opened to great fanfare in Taiwan.

But why is she mouthless? Because when you look at Hello Kitty, or “Kitty-chan,” as she is affectionately known in Japan, she will feel just like you do. As Japanese anime critic Hideki Ono says: “Your brain projects the missing information, then your imagination fills it in and feels the pleasure of participation.”

The Japanese design aesthetic has a strong influence on my product team as all my designers are either Japanese or very into Japanese culture.

During my trip to Tokyo earlier this year, I couldn't help but notice that the metropolis of over 12 million people was so clean relative to other cities its size and population. Each night, as we walked back to our hotel after a day of sightseeing, several massive street cleaning vehicles would pass us on the road.

It's not that every part of Tokyo is tea gardens and bonsai trees. Any place with the urban density of Tokyo is going to feel overcrowded, and it's important, as many commenters on the article rightly point out, that cleanliness does not equal a low environmental footprint, even if that's the superficial impression.

I watched Miyazaki's Ponyo recently. Though it is on the surface a retelling of The LIttle Mermaid, it is at its core a story about humans trying to come to harmony with the environment and their natural surroundings. When he makes these movies, is he holding the Japanese up as paragons of that, or is he taking shots at them, too? Often his heroes and heroines are children. Is he issuing a call to the next generation to correct the environmental failings of their parents?

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The resurrection of the suburban novel? I never read many suburban novels while growing up in the suburbs, but there is something to the thesis of this article, that the suburbs are about a state of mind as much as they are about a physical place. The post-war generation fled to the suburbs in search of a big house, a big backyard, a more peaceful and fulfilling existence. That they found a spiritual wasteland that filled them with an almost depressing boredom.

That feeling of disappointment or disillusion is one with broad applications and perhaps explains the enduring nature of the concept of suburban dystopia.

The Downfall of the Downfall parody

Just brilliant, though you should go on YouTube and watch a few of the earlier Downfall parodies first to get the full impact (e.g. Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, Hitler finds out Michael Jackson has died, Downfall of Grammar).

Some memes grow tiresome quickly; I have yet to tire of this one. But once a meme becomes self-referential, perhaps it has swallowed its own tail.

Car free

The NYTimes hosted an online roundtable about the possibility of going car-free in America. Witold Rybczynski's entry contained one interesting note.

There are only six American downtown districts that are dense enough to support mass transit, which you need if you’re going to be carless: New York City (Midtown and Downtown), Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco. That’s it. The breaking-point for density and mass transit feasibility seems to be about 50 persons per acre, which means families living in flats and apartments, rather than single-family houses, even row houses. Not necessarily high-rise apartments, but at least walk-ups.

Since most Americans still prefer living in houses, this is a problem — at least as far as carlessness is concerned. A more realistic goal for most Americans would be a semi-carless community, that is, one that is walkable within the neighborhood for convenience shopping, school-going and errands, and drivable for weekly shopping, consumer purchases and so on. A combination of twins, townhouses and low-rise apartments. Think of it as a halfway house.

It is sad to not see LA listed among those, but I've long since resigned myself to the necessity of a car in this town.

Marc Schlossberg chimes in:

The goal should not be car-free, but car-appropriate. The car was a wonderful invention: door-to-door travel, in relative comfort, at the time of one’s choice. The costs of using the car for every type of trip, however, are finally apparent, from their contribution to global climate change, the national obesity epidemic from loss of daily physical activity and the 40,000 deaths per year on the roadways, to the social isolation and neighborhood fragmentation that the roadway system creates. The way forward is not to eliminate cars, but to relegate them to the tasks they do well.

He goes on to describe ways to minimize car use, the most interesting of which is to reduce availability of parking (after making walking a more viable option).

El Bulli, Dan Brown, et al

Man hits the culinary lottery and gets a reservation at El Bulli, then recounts his meal in comic book form. 30 courses! I felt engorged and exhausted just reading about all the dishes.

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Bill Maher rants at Huffington Post about the idiocy of Americans in an article titled "New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country." Bryan Caplan would be proud.

At times like this, trying to pass some form of healthcare reform, even a watered-down version because of the difficulty of getting any big change through the conservative institutional roadblock that we call the Senate, one wonders how the government has ever achieved anything on behalf of anyone other than a special interest.

Obama took his argument directly to the people in an Op-Ed in the NYTimes. I'm curious who was the last President of the U.S. to write an Op-Ed in a major American newspaper. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it wasn't the previous occupant of the office.

An interesting sidenote to the whole debate on healthcare reform is the uproar over Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's editorial in the Wall Street Journal arguing against the health care bill on the table. The Opinionator over the the NYTimes tracks the timeline of the whole brouhaha. If you disagree with Mackey, I don't think boycotting Whole Foods is the solution, but I do think CEO's of companies need to be careful of what they say because it's too convenient to read their comments as representative of the views of Whole Foods as a company, and it's dangerous to ascribe too many coherent policy decisions to a capitalist institution, even one like Whole Foods which many people associate with a progressive lifestyle.

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Andrew Collins examines the global phenomenon that is Dan Brown, universally reviled by literary critics and other writers but whose next novel The Lost Symbol will command the largest first print run in Random House history at 6.5 million.

I'm not sure it's such a paradox that someone can be a bad writer yet spin a real page-turner. What grabbed me about The Da Vinci Code was the fabricated secret that tied together so many known quantities in history in a clever way, from The Last Supper to Mary Magdalene and everything in between.

The plots of his stories themselves never strike me as plausible or gripping, his characters are two-dimensional (and that may be generous, though perhaps I'm being sexist in finding gorgeous and leggy nuclear physicist Vittoria Vetra of Angels and Demons a bit implausible), nor is his command of the English language that noteworthy. After all, one chapter of The Da Vinci Code concludes with this sentence, one that would have failed me out of my first year fiction writing class in college:

Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino.

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A physicist writes that The Time Traveler's Wife may be the most scientifically accurate movie treatment of time travel ever. No comment on whether the cheesy slow dissolve of Eric Bana each time he travels through time is also consistent with the laws of physics, or whether his expressionless acting is a consequence of too many leaps through time and space.

The article's a good read, though, as I didn't realize that physicists had come to such consensus around these constraints of time travel. I still say The Terminator remains the most brilliant time travel movie because of its stunning revelation that by going back in time to change the future you just create it, illustrated in the movie by the Moebius strip of a plot in which John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mom, only to have Kyle Reese become his father.

In that twist, the movie adheres to one of the principles stated in this article, the so-called "self-consistency problem," that is, "You can't kill your own grandfather."

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Justice Antonin Scalia and Thomas, the Twiddle Dee and Dum of the Supreme Court, argued in the minority against allowing a prisoner to challenge his murder conviction after many witnesses recanted their testimony and implicated another person as the actual murderer. Scalia, in his dissent (PDF), claims the following:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.

Those quotation marks around the adverb actually in that sentence rank among the most pernicious and cruel punctuation I've ever encountered. It is not a ringing endorsement of our government that both Scalia and Thomas ended up with lifetime appointments on the highest court in the nation.

***

For those of you waiting with bated breath for Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, this week's New Yorker features a short story by Dave Eggers, "Max at Sea" which is an excerpt from Eggers upcoming novel The Wild Things which itself is loosely based on the screenplay Eggers wrote with Jonze for the movie, which in turn is based, of course, on the children's book by Maurice Sendak.

Health care reform and special interests

Hendrik Hertzberg posts a letter from Arnold Relman in response to one of his columns on healthcare reform. Relman and Hertzberg both point to special interests, namely lobbying by the current healthcare industry, as one of the key blockers to true reform.

What's interesting is that Hertzberg goes on to trace the problem of special interests back to the structure of U.S. democracy itself.

But how did those interests get so vested in the first place? Why do interests like the health-care industry have so much money and influence? I am convinced that the underlying cause can be found in the unique hydraulics of our centuries-old political mechanisms.

We have three separately constituted “governments”: the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. Each is elected independent of the other two. None relies on either of the others for its political survival. In most democracies, the ruling legislative party or coalition, on the one hand, and the prime minister and his or cabinet, on the other, must stand or fall together. This creates a powerful incentive for coöperation—an incentive entirely missing from our system.

Over the past few years I've come to believe that special interests may be the single biggest problem with our government, though my research on this issue is still in its early stages. I hadn't ever wondered why special interests might have more influence in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

Jonathan Rauch, a writer whose writing I always find insightful, tackles the issue of special interests in his book Government's End. I just purchased it for my Kindle and look forward to seeing what he has to say on the topic, whether he finds structural amplification to be a contributor.

I think of entrenched ideas in my head as having the same special interest backing as established institutions do in our society, though the backers of my past ideas are not lobbyists but the dangerous desire for the appearance of consistency in our opinions and the fear of admitting errors. This is one of the great dangerous forces in society (one of the others being "us versus them" mentality, to which humans are so susceptible).

Serendipity

Interesting post by Ethan Zuckerman on the topic of serendipity and whether the rise of the internet and digital media has increased or decreased it.

I need to think about this issue more. With the rise of the internet, my exposure to ideas has increased, which is wonderful, but I consciously try to avoid limiting myself to the same several silos of thinking over and over. Adopting a naturally contrarian mindset helps, and every few months I tend to rotate the blogs or news outlets I read regularly, not just to avoid groupthink but because I find myself naturally tiring of the same schools of thought being pressed by the same authors again and again.

Clustering is a danger, though. The same set of blogs you follow in your newsreader, the same set of sites you visit regularly because they're bookmarked, the same core set of people you follow on Twitter, all of these are huge sources of selection bias.

Be curious and skeptical. That's all I can offer for now.

***

Old link from Wimbledon: amusing t-shirt worn by Serena Williams at the press conference after her Wimbledon victory.

Clarence Thomas and Saving Private Ryan

This week's New Yorker includes a humor column riffing off of this remarkable fact:

Justice Clarence Thomas has not asked a question from the Supreme Court bench since Feb. 22, 2006. . . .

“I have on many occasions or a number of occasions when things were becoming particularly routine gone down to my basement to watch ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ [Thomas] said. “I can’t tell you why that particular movie, except we have it and it’s about something important in our lives—World War II.”

—“Reticent Justice Opens Up to a Group of Students,” in the Times, April 13, 2009.

It's tough to argue against Clarence Thomas as the worst Supreme Court Justice in my lifetime.

Twilight

xkcd today was brilliant. Score one point for Stephanie Meyer.

On the other hand, the fact that Twilight won every award at the MTV Movie Awards made me feel out of touch, old. I suppose the awards at that ceremony are really just filler until the next prank or joke.

Clinton

In the NYTimes Sunday Magazine, a profile of Bill Clinton post-presidency. What was most interesting to me was a passage covering his ability to convert enemies to friends.

Yet if Clinton has a powerful memory for slights, he also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation. He is likelier to find peace with people who hate him the most than with friends who betray him. He focuses his considerable charms on seducing the person in the room he finds most resistant.

...

Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy’s investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton’s side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton “a real friend.” When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: “I didn’t know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do.”

It reminded me of one of the 48 Laws of Power:

Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies

Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Sunday

I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.

I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.

***

So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.

I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.

***

Last survivor of the Titanic dies. I knew she was ready to pass on after she dropped that blue jeweled necklace into the ocean.

***

Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.

***

In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.

Miscellany

Toy Story 3 teaser trailer. What jumps out at me now is not the technology of the digital animation, which is commonplace, but how quickly we recognize our old friends Woody and Buzz and friends. Consistency of character is the magic sauce here.

***

Cool--Hulu Desktop made it into Uncrate. I have a secret list of ambitions for Hulu, and most of them consist of getting Hulu featured in things I follow in my own daily life. Some others: getting mentioned on The Simpsons, by Oprah, by the President, and in the lyrics to a hip-hop song. Getting Jason to get one of those black and white dot photos in the WSJ.

***

Useful little site: copypastecharacter.com

***

Mad Men Season 3 episodes may be squeezed by 2 minutes to accommodate more ads. Damn this recession.

***

Eastbound and Down Season 1 is coming to DVD in June. Can't wait. I love me some Danny McBride, like I did Will Ferrell before his overexposure.

***

How they shot those Where Amazing Happens commercials for the NBA where classic plays are gradually painted in, one player at a time.

Kottke posted a great dissection of the Kobe to Shaq alleyoop spot, noting how it contains evidence of just how dysfunctional Kobe and Shaq's relationship already was at that time.

***

Jeffrey Toobin profiles Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker. Toobin opened my eyes to just how much Roberts has already shifted the Supreme Court right during his short tenure. Roberts may be Bush's most unpublicized but lasting legacy.

Still, there is no disputing that the President and the Chief Justice are adversaries in a contest for control of the Court, and that both men come to that battle well armed. Obama has at most one more chance to take the oath of office, and Roberts will probably have a half-dozen more opportunities to get it right. But each time Roberts walks down the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath, he may well be surrounded—and eventually outvoted—by Supreme Court colleagues appointed by Barack Obama.

I loved Toobin's book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

***

If Obama is Spock, then is Kirk John McCain?

Two challenges

This Munsell hue test is a fun challenge of one's color vision. I was nervous taking it and perhaps overly excited when I submitted my arrangements and received a perfect score.

That might be my proudest accomplishment since breaking 100 for the first time on Flight Control on the iPhone (at $0.99 for a limited time only, Flight Control is a steal).

Here is a YouTube video of someone breaking 10,000(!?!) on Flight Control which makes breaking 100 seem like not such a great feat after all.

Skype billing issues

I've been hit with the Skype billing issue discussed in this Slashdot thread. A few days ago, I received three e-mails in succession:

• The first said came with the subject "Skype: problem with your payment" and began with the greeting "Hi there Joel Adams, Unfortunately your payment failed, but don't worry, we didn't deduct any money from your card." I thought it was a phishing attempt, but it listed my correct Skype Name. Uh oh. I haven't ever paid into my Skype account, and my name, as most of you know, is not Joel Adams. Alarm bells went off.
• The second e-mail came 3 minutes laterwith the subject "Skype: we've delivered your purchase." It began with the greeting "Hi there Roseangela Rubio, Thanks for buying Skype Credit. We're happy to confirm your payment." AGain, it included my correct Skype Name. I was even more worried, and a bit confused. Who is Roseangela Rubio?
• The third e-mail, with the same time stamp as the second, had the subject line: "Welcome to Auto-Recharge". This note was addressed to Roseangela Rubio.

I immediately logged into my Skype account, changed my password, canceled Auto Recharge, and removed the credit card in my account. Then I waded through the customer support links to find one to submit an inquiry as to how this could have happened.

I received a reply 2 days later saying that it seemed a third party might have gained access to my account, and asking me to change my password. Of course I'd done all of that already. What was aggravating was this paragraph:

Skype can not refund the money you might have lost due to this incident. Every user has to take care of his/her security systems on private computers.

Please check if your PC?s security systems are running properly and if they are up to date. In order to prohibit those incidents Skype strongly advises to regularly update your PC's security software (e.g. firewall, antivirus etc.). It is possible that a trojan or some kind of hidden information collector is installed on your computer and sends this to a third party who uses this information abusively. Also be aware of different 'phishing' sites or Skype chat messages from strangers that contain links or require you to reveal personal information (passwords, credit card numbers etc.)

Any reasonably tech saavy user is going to resent the implications in this e-mail, the tone of voice that lumps them in with people who write their password on post-it notes and stick them on their computer monitor. I keep all my passwords in Yojimbo, I don't use dictionary words, etc. I always forward phishing messages, most of them for eBay, Paypal and Bank of America, to those companies.

I've written Skype back and demanded a refund, and we'll see how that goes. I've enjoyed using Skype a bit here and there in the past. It's a solid product. But any security issue like this, followed up by a customer service response that includes a sermon on PC security, is bound to leave a really bitter taste in one's mouth. Let's see how they respond.

In the meantime, if you're a victim of this problem, and you're reading this message, you are the resistance! (I just returned from a screening of Terminator: Salvation)

Glass 40% full

There was lots of press hand-wringing last week about a Nielsen study showing that 60% of Twitter users quitting the service after one month. The press, many whom were late in jumping on the Twitter explosion, seemed to revel in their schadenfreude as they poured fuel on the meme of Twitter user retention.

The 60% of Twitter users who abandon the service after one month is less than the 90% of recycled news coverage that can't formulate an original thought. How many people abandon their weblogs? Among people I know, it's much higher than 60%. Does that mean the remaining blogs are worthless? For an answer, maybe we need to consult the mainstream media, and to do so, ironically, we probably have to scour their blogs. I can't think of a mainstream media outlet today that doesn't have at least several blogs as part of their daily output, though by the time they jumped on the bandwagon it was already the size of an aircraft carrier.

I confess to being a bit puzzled by Twitter when I first signed up in March of 2007. With few followers and just 140 characters per tweet, it felt like I was shouting through a battery-less megaphone under water.

A few things changed my feelings towards Twitter. One was the launch of Favrd, which helped to separate the wittiest tweets from the chaff (pun intended) and which drew man people into using it as an outlet for humor, rather than just mundane status updates. The second was the launch of an app that could sync my Twitter account to my Facebook status.

The last, and most important, is that the service achieved enough critical mass that Twitter search became a useful tool for me to track what people were saying about Hulu. Maureen Dowd may wonder "Is there any thought that doesn’t need to be published?" and may think "I don’t care that my friend is having a hamburger?", but someone else's meaningless status update is someone else's treasure. If you tweet "I am having a hamburger animal style at In-N-Out. Sweet heaven." and that becomes searchable a few seconds later, that is somewhat useful information for In-N-Out.

[As an aside, I like lots of Dowd's work, but I'm glad Evan Williams and Biz Stone gave better than they got in that interview. Funny stuff. I appreciate her opinions on lots of issues, but on this one she's out of her element.]

A better example is that when I know one of our (Hulu) tv ads is going to air on a certain program, I can get real-time feedback on what people thought. I can't get that anywhere else, not through Google, not through Facebook (because their status updates are not globally searchable), not through the press, nowhere. That is the heart of the Twitter revolution, and that's why companies like Google want to buy Twitter, because Twitter has carved out that significant mindshare on the web.

As to how Twitter can make money, I can think of several premium services that some clients would pay for. If I could, for our @hulu account, allow our users to subscribe to particular types of messages, all from the same @hulu account, I'd pay for that. Imagine that we had one Twitter account for each show on our site, and you could receive a tweet when a new episode hit the site, with an auto-shortened link to that episode. I can do that via e-mail today, but e-mail is slow and expensive and polluted by spam.

I have many other ideas, but if I post them all I might someday have to pay a fortune to use Twitter someday, so I'll leave it at that. This is no guarantee that Twitter will be a great service for monetization; turning massive traffic and mindshare into revenue is no sure thing on the web as many cases have shown (free e-mail accounts remain, for the most part, free, for example). But they've jumped onto the hockey curve growth trajectory track, cemented their place in the cultural zeitgeist, and achieved that ever-elusive first-mover advantage which generates increasing returns (RIP Pownce). So their ultimate destiny is largely in their control, which is all you can ever hope for as a startup.

NOTE: For those of you who find me decreasing frequency of posting here depressing, try following me on Twitter. There, my volume per post is lighter, of course, but my frequency of posting is far higher. 308 updates there in just over a year now, somewhat backloaded.

Daisy chain

Along the lines of Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition) is If Homer's Odyssey were written on Twitter. And, while we're at it, Sportscenter Anchors Tell The Story of Jesus Christ. And speaking of Jesus, how about The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel?

Oops

Online brokerage Zecco claims it wasn't an April Fool's Day joke, but the timing is suspicious, and most certainly inauspicious: on April 1, customers opened their accounts, looked at their balances, and found they were suddenly millionaires. In a sign of our times, some of them proceeded to purchase stocks with their newfound wealth, and in a panic, Zecco's sold off the new purchases and charged the difference to the customers.

Good times all around. I pity no one in this fiasco. But I enjoy reading the Zecco forum posts as one user after another discovered their good fortune.

This age we live in

Right now on Amazon, it costs more to purchase the MP3's for Neko Case's new album than it does to buy the CD and have it shipped to you. It's as if they're discounting the CD to compensate for the hassle of it's physical form factor taking up space in your home, having to be packed for your next move, etc. This is the opposite of what has been the rule to date, which is that it's cheaper to buy the digital good because they pass through the savings of foregoing shipping and handling of an actual good.

---@---

Silicon Alley Insider reports with seeming surprise that Jeff Bezos is working in an Amazon distribution center for a week. That shouldn't surprise anyone--almost everyone at Amazon went to work in the distribution centers over the holidays for many years to help handle the spike in holiday orders (at the time, there wasn't enough temporary labor in any of the markets where the DCs were located to handle the seasonal volume surge, though in this economy it might be different). With increased distribution capacity and automation, such stints are no longer required annually, but when I left Amazon every new employee spent at least some amount of time working in customer service inquiries and the distribution centers. It was always part of being the world's most customer-centric company.

---@---

I'm with Khoi Vinh on this one: the SXSW badges, program, and maps this year were all but unusable. Not to minimize the difficulty of producing these with a volunteer team, but one thought on how to leverage some talent is to ask for help from one of the many participating design firms or panelists in exchange for prominent credits on the materials, and maybe some free advertising inventory. One's work would certainly reach a very chatty and influential crowd there.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Very nice. Not surprisingly, Helvetica is typography's equivalent of hydrogen.

Prank War

Heard about this from Rob at work: two guys from College Humor have been waging a prank war. The latest two entries in their prank exchange are great.

Suburbs, cities, and conventional wisdom

Great essay in Design Observer trying to advance the discussion about suburbs versus cities.

Whether in art or architecture, the suburbs seem to lack cultural authorship and a “back story” — the suburban landscape simply unfolds ex nihilo — out of nowhere and out of nothing. This lack of identity also represents a lack of history. Suburban time is strangely suspended, literally an arrested development frozen in its initial phases of construction: no wonder most people conjure an image of suburbia as a series of new housing starts and barren landscapes. From William Garnett’s photos of Lakewood Park in California to Robert Adams’ pictures of suburban Denver, there is a long tradition of using photography to record these processes of transformation, and because they are focused on an early moment in the life cycle of suburbia, they do not typically provide any evidence of human settlement, aspiration, or inhabitation. Most suburbs are now old enough to have a history, and enough inhabitants over time to establish an identity. A perceived lack of identity and history, however, accounts for the proliferation of rebranded suburbia: the creation of new pedestrian streetscapes, “downtowns,” and town centers.

The inability to situate a suburban aesthetics or to develop a language and theory to assess suburban forms as anything but an aberrant urbanism is clearly one of the crucial hurdles in constructing a more objective and less judgmental approach. The continued reliance on urban theories, assumptions, biases, and practices as a lens for viewing suburbia only compounds the problem. Rem Koolhaas can theorize the Generic City and Junkspace, and Sarah Susanka, author of the Not-So-Big franchise, can write about the virtues of downsizing, but there is very little between these extremes. Another difficulty in developing a suburban aesthetics is the issue of popular taste. Most forms of criticism and artistic practice cannot perceive suburbia without the posture of ironic distance or cynical dismissal. Historian John Archer in his essay from the catalogue, “Suburban Aesthetics Is Not an Oxymoron,” undermines the conventional assumption that suburbia represents an empty, thin, and inauthentic form of consumption — a paucity of experience — a myth that is contradicted by the richness of suburbia’s symbolic universe, an experience lived by its occupants rather than viewed by its critics. The greater social and cultural context has shifted for both urbanites and suburbanites. The oft-claimed alienation of the suburbs and the supposed close-knit communities of the city are both myths — convenient stories we tell about the other in the hope that the world next door will be kept worlds away.

350 - the most important number on earth

Evidence is accumulating that we've passed the tipping point in the global warming crisis.

"If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," it said, "paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

Later...

DIY conservation makes great practical sense, but we won't save the planet that way. One by one, trying to do the right thing, we add up to...not nearly enough. You cannot make the math work that way—there are too many sockets and too many tailpipes and most of all too much inertia for voluntary action to do the trick.

Miscellany

Sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote about Rickey Henderson, whose excessive batting crouch helped him to draw lots of walks:

Rickey Henderson's strike zone is smaller than Hitler's heart.

***

A recent New Yorker article in the Food Issue examined the knife-making industry and profiled Kramer Knives of Seattle. Bob Kramer is one of a select group of Master Bladesmiths in America (as credentialed by the American Bladesmith Society); there are only about a hundred. To pass the test, one's knife must undergo a grueling series of tests, from rope cutting to wood chopping to shaving hair.

There is a multi-year waitlist to buy one of Kramer's knives, used by the likes of super chefs like Thomas Keller (I myself am on that waiting list). He has collaborated on a more widely available series of knives that are sold exclusively by Sur La Table. The Chef's Knife from that series is a beauty (if you're looking for a last-minute gift idea that will just dazzle a loved one who loves to cook, that's a great way to go, though my mother always shunned giving knives as gifts because of the Chinese superstition that giving such a gift foretold the severing of that relationship).

Upgrading the dull chef's knife is one of the best investments a home cook can make. Dull knives make cooking a lot of work and leads to injuries when a knife slips. Proper knife technique is the other simple lesson a chef should learn. To properly capitalize on your knife's edge, the blade should be moving horizontally across the food being cut. Too many people just press down, and that's not how a knife is designed to work. Doing so exerts a lot of needless effort and is slow. Think of your arm and knife moving in a continuous elliptical motion, like the horizontal metallic bar on the outside of a train engine car's wheels.

***

I don't recall what things were like four years ago, but it feels to me like there are many more "letters to the President-Elect" in the media this time around, on topics from bailouts and reviving the economy to drugs, food policy, and education. I suspect this is the consequence of having a President we regard as well-read and thoughtful.

***

An old article from The Morning News, as seen back on Reddit today: How do you know if a girl loves you?

If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.

Two links to the NYTimes

Oh, now the U.A.W decides to offer some concessions to the Big 3, when the Big 3's potential demise might drag the U.A.W. down with them. As Superman said at the end of Superman II, "Too late, Luthor! Too late."

In economic terms, the demise of the U.A.W. would be a good thing for the Big 3. In the U.S. auto industry, as in the airline industry, labor unions have long left those companies incapable of profitability, which is hard enough when the Big 3 can't make a car anyone wants to buy.

***

Six habits of highly respectful physicians.

...medical schools may be underemphasizing a much simpler virtue: good manners.

I agree, many doctors behave like asses, but how do I resolve that with my favorite doctor, Gregory House?

The risks of being an early adopter

Great, my assistant is quitting on Dec. 8. You'd think in a recession she'd be grateful for the work. I guess I wasn't paying her enough. The truth is, I never paid her a dime, but then again, she never asked. Well, it was fun, and useful, while it lasted. Maybe someone can revive the service as iwantjoanholloway.com?

Pownce is closing shop, too, and this before I ever posted a single thing to my account. Aping Twitter's service and adding some just midly useful accoutrements didn't do it for them, no surprise.

Yes, in times of recession, some sort of revenue model matters.

Guided bullets

Maybe the crazy bullet-bending reality of the movie Wanted isn't so far-fetched.

Design matters

Gregg Rapp is a menu engineer. He designs menus to increase restaurant profitability.

The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. "This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong," he explains. "If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing." It's better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer's appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.

Also important is placement. On the basis of his own research and existing studies of how people read, Rapp says the most valuable real estate on a two-panel menu (one that opens like a magazine) is the upper-right-hand corner. That area, he says, should be reserved for more profitable dishes since it is the best place to catch--and retain--the reader's gaze.

Cheap, popular staples--like a grilled-chicken sandwich or a burger--should be harder to locate. Rapp likes to make the customer read through a mouthwatering description of seared ahi tuna before he finds them. "This is akin to the grocery store putting the milk in the back," he says. "You have to walk by all sorts of tempting, high-priced items to get to it."

The adjectives lavished on a dish can be as important as the names of the ingredients. What would you rather eatplain grilled chicken or flame-broiled chicken with a garlic rub? Scrambled eggs or farm-fresh eggs scrambled in butter? "Think 'flavors and tastes,'" Rapp says, repeating a favorite mantra. "Words like crunchy and spicy give the customer a better idea of what something will be like." Longer, effusive descriptions should be reserved for signature items. Especially the profitable ones.

My favorite Sarah Silverman joke from her show tonight

So, we have a new President. Yes, isn't it great? I got to attend a fundraiser recently, and afterwards, I went over to talk to him, and I wanted to ask him a question, but I didn't want to look stupid, so I said, "Senator Obama, when you were at school at Harvard, did you encounter any racism?"

He took a long look at me, and then he said, "I'm Kanye West."

There's more, and it's darker, and I'm too much of a prude to print it here.

NYTimes shutters Play magazine

Too bad. Play had become one of my favorite quarterly publications in the NYTimes. I'd rather have Play than their quarterly Fashion or Travel magazines. That they couldn't round up enough advertisers to justify a quarterly publication is surprising to me.

Which is why it saddens me to tell you that Play is closing shop, a victim of the ailing economy crippling all businesses these days. We had such grand plans for Play in 2009, and the regret runs deep; Play has been the kind of publication one doesn't get to create much anymore. But we're grateful to have had the chance to make this magazine, and to have had such a rich relationship with so many devoted readers. Believe me, you'll be missed.

NYMag Profile of Malcolm Gladwell

Another profile of Malcolm Gladwell, this with his next book Outliers: The Story of Success set to release Tuesday.

Outliers is at once Gladwell’s least and most ambitious book. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, which took their counterintuitiveness to extremes, the conventional wisdom Gladwell seeks to demolish in Outliers isn’t even really CW anymore. Is there anyone who still believes that “success is exclusively a matter of individual merit,” which is how Gladwell describes his straw man? And yet, as Gladwell examines all the things other than individual merit—the “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies”—that produce hockey stars and software billionaires and math geniuses, he builds a brief for a massive reorganization of social structures and institutions that will give people who don’t have those advantages and opportunities and legacies an equal shot at success.

Much of the criticism of Gladwell -- that he pilfers other people's ideas and simply renders them understandable for the lay person -- makes him sound like just a really good blogger: a gifted polymathic storyteller.

Here's a video of Gladwell's talk at Pop!Tech this year, one focused on the findings from Outliers.

The Evil Pleasure

Robin Hanson on what he terms the evil pleasure:

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.

He was spurred to this thought by an article by Pascal Boyer in Nature, unfortunately barricaded behind a pay wall. However, you can search for Pascal Boyer articles in Google Scholar. Many are available there for the reading if you click on the "All # versions" link at the bottom of each listing.

Hanson's blog is titled Overcoming Bias, and he's ruthless in that goal. I find his advice stern yet inspiring.

Getting that coveted copy of the NYTimes

Sadly, I was shut out of getting a copy of the NYTimes yesterday, like many people. A note on their website today:

[Note to readers: Copies of Wednesday's paper were again available for the $1.50 cover price Thursday at Times headquarters, at 620 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, between 40th and 41st Streets, until they run out. Commemorative editions may be ordered online or at 1-800-671-4332 for $14.95, which includes shipping and handling.]

Alas, the phone line is overwhelmed and not fielding calls right now, and that online link times out. If you're in the pipeline and get a timeout, the store also annoyingly redirects to the NYTimes.com front page for no good reason. Oh, if only Amazon could fulfill everyone's orders; clearly the NYTimes Store has the capacity to handle very little order volume.

Among Obama's many powers we can add the ability to temporarily revive a moribund business.

Netflix Instant Play finally available for Macs

Via Microsoft Silverlight. Rolls out tomorrow and requires Intel-chipped Macs.

The Onion = Nostradamus

Article from Jan 17, 2001 The Onion: "Bush: Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over."

Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"

...

"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. "Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton's America."

...

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

To think I laughed at the time. Please let this long tragicomedy end.

Wassup

A tv commercial, updated.

Palin's dangerous rhetoric, McCain's tolerance thereof

Palin's ignorance and lack of qualifications to be our Vice President, let alone President, are a source of both humor and horror, but now that she's been set loose to fan the flames of racism with unsubstantiated rhetoric, I can't look at her without recoiling in anger and disgust. For McCain to tolerate the types of things Palin is saying at campaign stops these days is to ensure that the last thing people remember about his legacy, once he loses this election, is the turn towards the darkside.

I see video of people holding up signs saying that Obama is a Muslim even though he is easily proven not (with all due respect to Muslims, the term is not a slur, though the Republicans have no qualms about using it that way), or equating him to Osama bin Laden and a terrorist, and I mourn for the death of reason. More than that, I fear what some ignorant loonies might do, their passions stirred up by Palin on the campaign trail through her reprehensible wielding of innuendo and slurs. She's an amateur playing with Molotov cocktails, and it needs to stop.

A sample of writing from others on this topic...

George Packer in The New Yorker:

What’s undeniably true is that Republican rallies and the incendiary language of party leaders are stirring up the darker, destructive mob passions that have a long history in American politics. At the very least, the Republican ticket is making sure that, if Obama wins, he’ll be regarded as an illegitimate and dangerous President by thirty or forty per cent of the country.

Palin is too shallow to understand the weapon she’s playing with; she’s just thrilled to be the birthday girl and the object of so much semi-erotic devotion. But McCain knows better. His manner in debates and at rallies tells me that he’s conflicted about the forces his campaign is unleashing. Win or lose, he’s already damaged his cherished reputation beyond repair. But there’s still time for him to show leadership and do what’s necessary. The responsibility lies with him. In his speeches and at the final debate next week, McCain should say: “Barack Obama is a decent man and a good American. I deplore his policies, I doubt his judgment, I don’t think he has the experience to lead the country. But no one who supports me should question my opponent’s patriotism or his right to stand alongside me in this race. I would rather lose than win with the votes of fear-mongers or bigots.”

Hendrik Hertzberg in this week's New Yorker:

Early this month, McCain moved nearly his entire advertising budget into negative territory. But “negative” hardly does justice to the mendacity of the campaign of vilification that bracketed Nashville. “Barack Obama has said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians,” Sarah Palin said the week before. “Such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.” McCain’s wife, Cindy—who, in May, had said, “My husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all”—told a rally last week, “The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body.” A McCain television spot summed up the line of attack:

Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are [Obama’s voice] “just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America.

Here is what Obama actually said, fourteen months ago: “We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” He was calling for reinforcements, not casting aspersions. And, as McCain must know, the one Senate vote on which the charge of defunding the troops is based has a mirror image. In May of 2007, Obama voted against a troop-funding bill because it did not include steps toward withdrawal from Iraq; two months earlier, McCain had voted against one because it did. In neither case did their parliamentary maneuverings pose the slightest risk to the life of a single soldier.

More from Hertzberg:

The Obama campaign has been spending money on negativity, too, of course—about a third of its advertising outlay. And a few of their ads have been purposely misleading. For example, an Obama radio spot says of McCain, “He’s opposed stem-cell research.” (That too-clever use of a contraction allows the line to be more truthy than true: McCain flip-flopped on embryonic-stem-cell research in 2001.) But there is no equivalence between the two campaigns. If there were, Obama’s ads would be “raising questions” about the other ticket’s “associations.” For example, Todd Palin was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party—to which his wife, as governor, has sent friendly greetings—between 1995 and 2002. Four years before Todd joined, the A.I.P.’s founder, Joe Vogler, declared, “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” and added, referring to the Stars and Stripes, “I won’t be buried under their damned flag!” (Sure enough, in 1995, Vogler, after being murdered in connection with an informal transaction involving plastic explosives, was buried in Canada.) Good material for an attack ad there, no? Ditto the fact that during the early nineteen-eighties John McCain sat on the advisory board of General John Singlaub’s U.S. Council for World Freedom—the American outpost of the World Anti-Communist League, a sort of clearing house for former Nazi collaborators, Central American death-squad leaders, and assorted international thugs. And, unlike Obama’s alleged palship with Ayers, these things are true.

The Obama campaign hasn’t gone there, for which it deserves no special credit; it has more to gain from sticking to the realities of the economy and the war. But the other side has been late in having second thoughts. This became frighteningly obvious in recent days, as the rallies McCain and Palin have held around the country turned into bloodcurdling hate-fests. The shouts of supporters in response to the candidates’ attacks on Obama—“Traitor!” “Terrorist!” “Kill him!”—were uttered without rebuke. On CNN the other night, Anderson Cooper asked David Gergen, the soul of moderate concerned citizenship, about “all this anger out there.” Gergen replied, “We’ve seen it in a Palin rally. We saw it at the McCain rally today. . . . There is this free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we’re not far from that.” Suddenly, McCain seems to be worried, too. “I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments,” he told a restive crowd in Lakeville, Minnesota, last Friday. “I will respect him, and I want everyone to be respectful.” The crowd—the mob—booed. If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own. One can only hope that the tragedy will be his alone, and not the nation’s.

Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic:

Attacking Obama for his toleration of Bill Ayers is legitimate. Attacking him for not dissociating himself from Jeremiah Wright earlier is legitimate. Attacking him for raising taxes is fine. But associating him with "terrorists" in the context of large, angry crowds isn't. Calling him a traitor and someone who seeks to put US troops in harm's way in an emotionally fraught time isn't. Not immediately and strongly rebuking crowd cries of "terrorist," "kill him!" and "treason" isn't.

McCain must loudly and clearly disown and disavow this rhetoric soon. Or we all may live to regret it more deeply than we can currently imagine.

Frank Rich in the NYTimes:

At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

More from Rich:

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

He concludes:

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

Joe Klein in his blog for Time:

Watch the tape of the guy screaming, "He's a terrorist!" McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes... and I thought for a moment he'd admonish the man. But he didn't. And now he's selling the Ayres non-story full-time. Yes, yes, it's all he has. True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn't done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today--and more, it is a national disgrace.

Greg Sargent in Talking Points Memo:

When is the unhinged frenzy gripping crowds at McCain-Palin gatherings -- not to mention McCain-Palin's own role in stoking that frenzy -- going to become a big story?

Today in Wisconsin, a McCain supporter unleashed a long, unhinged rant in which he blasted the "socialists taking over our country" and referred to Obama and Nancy Pelosi as "hooligans." McCain didn't utter one syllable of objection. In fact, he nodded bemusedly at the "socialist" mention.

And at the end of the man's rant, McCain said that the man was "right."

Related to all this, Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama.

On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

Hitchens concludes:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

Fake celeb Twitter accounts

The use of Twitter for basic info, where you are, what you're doing, is not nearly as amusing as using it as a new comedic form, among which one of the more amusing niches is fake celebrity tweeting.

You know of Fake Sarah Palin by now, but one order higher on the complexity scale of humor is interaction between fake celebrity Twitter accounts.

Here's Fake Megan Fox replying to Fake Michael Bay:

@michael_bay has a saying: "I turn things from boring to awesome. Then I turn them from awesome to Bay."

My favorite fake Michael Bay tweet:

If Im groggy in the am I get a triple venti espresso from starbucks and dump it on the first homeless person I see in downtown LA. It works.

Every character on Mad Men seems to have their own Twitter accounts, though they don't quite do it for me. Part of the charm of those characters is their entrenchment in that time and the inscrutability of their inner lives, so the self-conscious and reflective nature of a Twitter account doesn't fit (AMC briefly had Twitter take them down, though they've since been restored).

Happy Columbus Day

I would be pleased to send this e-card to some AIG executives if someone would let me know which golf resort they're partying at now.

Stephen Colbert to appear in Amazing Spider-Man #573

I didn't even realize that Stephen Colbert is running for President in the Marvel Universe, but now he's making his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #573.

There will be a variant cover featuring Colbert swinging through the city with Spider-Man in tow (as seen to the left).

This is sure to get play on The Colbert Report, and I'll try to remember to link to the clip once it appears on Hulu.

In the meantime, I'm surprised by how many serial comic books are still in circulation. I suppose they serve the same purpose as patent applications, allowing Marvel to license properties out for movies and toys. The stories themselves matter little now, which is ironic since Hollywood turns to comic books for story franchises. Comic book characters are like pre-existing concepts which, in their built-in awareness, offset enough marketing spend to justify hanging just about any plot on them.

That New Yorker Obama cover

It's all the rage. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart spoof it for this week's Entertainment Weekly.

The Nation spoofed the New Yorker cover just a week or two ago.

I might just have to find someone to go in on with me for this as a pairs Halloween costume.

Diesel turns 30

This video promoting Diesel's upcoming 30th anniversary party? Clever.

I'm not sure if it's SFW or NSFW. Depends on the quality of your mind's eye, I suppose.

Helvetica, the brand logo typeface

This poster makes an elegant case for Helvetica as the most popular corporate brand typeface.

If You See Something

Bernie Hou, who used to do the online comic strip Alien Loves Predator, now has devoted himself full time to the online comic strip If You See Something.

The latest entry is a beaut. It's titled Google Releases New Chrome Browser.

Convention vs. Convention

If we're to judge the quality of the two conventions by the quality of their streaming video, then hands down it's a victory for the Democrats. The Democratic Convention site had, and still has, high-def video using Move and Silverlight. The Republican Convention site has fuzzy YouTube videos.

Maybe the poor video resolution will be flattering to McCain's complexion. There is some element of this disparity in online experience that is consistent with the Luddite image of the Republican Party, especially McCain, relative to the Democratic Party.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Unnecessary Knowledge

Toplist of Unnecessary Knowledge factoids. I like this one:

In “Silence of the Lambs”, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) never blinks.

Fear, God, and State

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias writes about a fascinating article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

A stunning hypothesis from the latest Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

"High levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal control and ... increased beliefs in the existence of a controlling God and defense of the overarching socio-political system. A 4th experiment showed ... a challenge to the usefulness of external systems of control led to increased illusory perceptions of personal control. ... A cross-national data set demonstrated that lower levels of personal control are associated with higher support for governmental control."

It seems we hope a stronger and more benevolent God or State will protect us when feel less able to protect ourselves. I'd guess similar effects hold for medicine and media - we believe in doc effectiveness more when we fear out of control of our health, and we believe in media accuracy more when we rely more on their info to protect us. Can we find data on which beliefs tend to be more biased: confidence in authorities when we feel out of control, or less confidence in authorities when we feel more in control?

This week's New Yorker

Strong issue of The New Yorker this week. Having to fly a bit this week, I had time to read it nearly cover to cover.

Two articles which are not online but are quite good: "All the Answers" by Charles Van Doren, who was played in Quiz Show by Ralph Fiennes. After the scandal, what happened to Van Doren? In his own words.

The other, my favorite article in the issue, is a Gladwell-esque Annals of Science article titled "The Eureka Hunt: Where in our brains do insights come from?" and written by Jonah Lehrer. Though it's not online, it is here in PDF form (thanks Kottke), and I will post a few excerpts here:

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. "The relaxation phase is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers." Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. Jung-Beeman said, "The problem, though, is that we're always so rushed. We've got to get the kids ready for school, so we leap out of bed and never give ourselves a chance to think." He recommends that, if we're stuck on a dificult problem, it's better to set the alarm clock a few minutes early so that we have time to lie in bed and ruminate. We do some of our best thinking when we're still half asleep.

As Jung-Beeman and Kounios see it, the insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation--the brain must be focused on the task at hand--transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections. We must concentrate, but we must concentrate on letting the mind wander.

Further on:

One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight. While it's commonly assmed that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to focus, minimize distractions, and pay attention only to the relevant details, this clenched state of mind may inhibit the sort of creative connections that lead to sudden breakthroughs. We suppress the very type of brain activity that we should be encouraging.

Some anecdotes:

In his 1908 essay "Mathematical Creation," Poincaré insisted that the best way to think about complex problems is to immerse yourself in the problem until you hit an impasse. Then, when it seems that "nothing good is accomplished," you should find a way to distract yourself, preferably by going on a "walk or a journey." The answer will arrive when you least expect it. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, preferred the relaxed atmosphere of a topless bar, where he would sip 7 UP, "watch the entertainment," and, if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins.

Two articles which are online which are worth reading are Evan Osnos's article on young Chinese nationalists who reject the West, and David Samuels article "Dr. Kush" on the medical-marijuana economy.

19 years after the events in Tiananmen Square, this is not where we would have expected a sizeable portion of the youth of China to arrive ideologically. They don't necessarily support the Chinese government, but they reject Western democracy, also. Here is the video cited at the start of the article, one that represents many of the feelings of this group.

Whatever you think of its ideas, it's hard to deny that it's a fascinating example of user-generated propaganda, and maybe the famous video ever made with Windows MovieMaker (if you count its views on Sina.

Mike Peed reviews Adour, a new NYC restaurant by one of the famous chefs of our time, Alain Ducasse.

There are people, a dwindling lot, who are secure in their mortgages and to whom the spectre of five-dollar-a-gallon gas presents more a challenge than a threat. These people eat at Adour.

And of course, there is Anthony Lane's review of Mamma Mia! which, to this male, is likely more entertaining than the movie iself.

And why is it called Bluetooth anyway?

The director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute warns his staff to limit cell phone use to minimize cancer risk. While no studies have detected a link, that does not necessarily prove that there isn't a link. It reminds me of the Bill James article "Underestimating the Fog" (PDF) in which he noted that just because past studies haven't detected clutch hitting doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Cell phones and bluetooth headsets emit non-ionizing, microwave radiation. That much we know. Do they increase your risk for brain cancer? To conduct a study of that magnitude would take years and years and cost millions of dollars. It's unlikely anyone will fund a study like that.

So we're all part of a real world experiment. Here's how I see it playing out. Some people will get brain cancer 20 years from now from high cell phone use, and they will bring massive lawsuits against the cell phone companies. But one special person will gain superpowers from all that radiation, a sort of slow burn Bruce Banner. But this hero's powers will only be active in large metropolitan areas, will wane when going through tunnels or riding in elevators, and will come with some inexplicable state and local taxes.

One risk from bluetooth headsets that has been confirmed: wearing one will make you look like an idiot.

Related:

• Tips to reduce cell phone radiation exposure
• CNET's list of highest-radiation cell phones.

Watchmen comics set in motion

Watchmen comics set in motion: chapter one now available for free at the Apple store.

Common usage error

From this week's New Yorker.

Purchased song sync via the iPhone

Important science

Scientific American interviews an expert in kinesiology and neuroscience to ask if someone could really be Batman. The conclusion was that it might be possible, but only for a short while before your body broke down.

Was this really a deep question people needed scientific verification for?

Rock Band 2

A pic of a premium drum kit that will be available for Rock Band 2.

$299, so not exactly a mass market product. Here's a pic of the new Rock Band 2 wireless guitar, from a Kotaku article with some more details about what's new in Rock Band 2:

"The Last Lace-Up"

Image by Kelly Shimoda for the NYTimes for an article on 66 year old Empire Roller Skating Center in Crown Heights, which closed last year.

Camus: "[the] one truly serious philosophical problem"

Illuminating article on suicide in this week's NYTimes Magazine. The key insight is that many suicides can be prevented by making it harder to carry out: make the act itself more work and the impulse towards suicide will often just pass. I'll just excerpt large portions as it speaks for itself.

To turn the equation around: if the impulsive suicide attempter tends to reach for whatever means are easy or quick, is it possible that the availability of means can actually spur the act? In looking at suicide’s close cousin, murder, the answer seems obvious. If a man shoots his wife amid a heated argument, we recognize the crucial role played by the gun’s availability. We don’t automatically think, Well, if the gun hadn’t been there, he surely would have strangled her. When it comes to suicide, however, most of us make no such allowance. The very fact that someone kills himself we regard as proof of intent — and of mental illness; the actual method used, we assume, is of minor importance.

But is it?

As it turns out, one of the most remarkable discoveries about suicide and how to reduce it occurred utterly by chance. It came about not through some breakthrough in pharmacology or the treatment of mental illness but rather through an energy-conversion scheme carried out in Britain in the 1960s and ’70s. Among those familiar with the account, it is often referred to simply as “the British coal-gas story.”

For generations, the people of Britain heated their homes and fueled their stoves with coal gas. While plentiful and cheap, coal-derived gas could also be deadly; in its unburned form, it released very high levels of carbon monoxide, and an open valve or a leak in a closed space could induce asphyxiation in a matter of minutes. This extreme toxicity also made it a preferred method of suicide. “Sticking one’s head in the oven” became so common in Britain that by the late 1950s it accounted for some 2,500 suicides a year, almost half the nation’s total.

Those numbers began dropping over the next decade as the British government embarked on a program to phase out coal gas in favor of the much cleaner natural gas. By the early 1970s, the amount of carbon monoxide running through domestic gas lines had been reduced to nearly zero. During those same years, Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by nearly a third, and it has remained close to that reduced level ever since.

More evidence.

In the late 1970s, Seiden set out to test the notion of inevitability in jumping suicides. Obtaining a Police Department list of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 — an astonishing 515 individuals in all — he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently “completed.” His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.

“That’s still a lot higher than the general population, of course,” Seiden, 75, explained to me over lunch in a busy restaurant in downtown San Franciso. “But to me, the more significant fact is that 90 percent of them got past it. They were having an acute temporary crisis, they passed through it and, coming out the other side, they got on with their lives.”

In Seiden’s view, a crucial factor in this boils down to the issue of time. In the case of people who attempt suicide impulsively, cutting off or slowing down their means to act allows time for the impulse to pass — perhaps even blocks the impulse from being triggered to begin with. What is remarkable, though, is that it appears that the same holds true for the nonimpulsive, with people who may have been contemplating the act for days or weeks.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” Seiden said, “people who attempt suicide aren’t thinking clearly. They might have a Plan A, but there’s no Plan B. They get fixated. They don’t say, ‘Well, I can’t jump, so now I’m going to go shoot myself.’ And that fixation extends to whatever method they’ve chosen. They decide they’re going to jump off a particular spot on a particular bridge, or maybe they decide that when they get there, but if they discover the bridge is closed for renovations or the railing is higher than they thought, most of them don’t look around for another place to do it. They just retreat.”

One of the twisted features of this phenomenon:

Animating their efforts is one of the most peculiar — in fact, downright perverse — aspects to the premeditation-versus-passion dichotomy in suicide. Put simply, those methods that require forethought or exertion on the actor’s part (taking an overdose of pills, say, or cutting your wrists), and thus most strongly suggest premeditation, happen to be the methods with the least chance of “success.” Conversely, those methods that require the least effort or planning (shooting yourself, jumping from a precipice) happen to be the deadliest. The natural inference, then, is that the person who best fits the classic definition of “being suicidal” might actually be safer than one acting in the heat of the moment — at least 40 times safer in the case of someone opting for an overdose of pills over shooting himself.

As illogical as this might seem, it is a phenomenon confirmed by research. According to statistics collected by the Injury Control Research Center on nearly 4,000 suicides across the United States, those who had killed themselves with firearms — by far the most lethal common method of suicide — had a markedly lower history of depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, previous suicide attempts or drug or alcohol abuse than those who died by the least lethal methods. On the flip side, those who ranked the highest for at-risk factors tended to choose those methods with low “success” rates.

“We’re always going to have suicide,” Hemenway said, “and there’s probably not that much to be done for the ones who are determined, who succeed on their 4th or 5th or 25th try. The ones we have a good chance of saving are those who, right now, succeed on their first attempt because of the lethal methods they’ve chosen.”

Inevitably, this approach means focusing on the most common method of suicide in the United States: firearms. Even though guns account for less than 1 percent of all American suicide attempts, their extreme fatality rate — anywhere from 85 percent and 92 percent, depending on how the statistics are compiled — means that they account for 54 percent of all completions. In 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, that translated into about 17,000 deaths. Public-health officials like Hemenway can point to a mountain of research going back 40 years that shows that the incidence of firearm suicide runs in close parallel with the prevalence of firearms in a community.

The article concludes:

In September 2000, Kevin Hines, a 19-year-old college student suffering from bipolar disorder, leapt from the Golden Gate. Along with Ken Baldwin, he is one of only 29 known survivors of the fall. Today Hines controls his bipolar disorder with medication and a strictly controlled regimen of diet and exercise and sleep, even while maintaining a frenetic schedule. Having recently married, he is frequently on the road lecturing for a suicide-prevention network while simultaneously working toward a psychology degree. One of his most intense ambitions, though, is to finally see a suicide barrier erected on the Golden Gate.

“I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late. Somehow I made it; they didn’t; and now I feel it’s my responsibility to speak for them.”

After having read this article and watched The Bridge (the documentary that captured footage of jumpers off of the Golden Gate Bridge and went back to interview friends and relatives to try an understand what led the person to that point), I wonder why they don't put up some wire fence over the railing at the Golden Gate Bridge to make it harder to climb up and over.

Weekendery

30 Tables of Contents

***

When I'm working on my computer on a project, like wireframes or sketches or just writing, one of my favorite CDs to pipe through my headphones is Ghost In The Shell: Original Soundtrack by Kenji Kawai. I'm not sure why it sells for $57 on Amazon. Perhaps because it's an import. If you can find a cheaper copy somewhere, perhaps on eBay or on your next trip to Tokyo, I recommend it.

***

Andrew Stanton consulted with Johnathan Ive, Apple design guru, on the design of Eve, the white robot in Wall-E.

A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple's behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar's converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a "lovefest" with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. "Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn't even really allude to where the future of technology was going," says Stanton. "The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do." (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)

***

Speaking of Wall-E, a bunch of us caught the midnight showing Thursday night at the El Capitan theater. No surprise, I enjoyed it on many levels, in particular the early scenes on earth. With a score by Thomas Newman and Roger Deakins-consulted cinematography, the creative talent was A-plus-list. Comparing it to Hellboy II, which I saw Saturday night at the LA Film Festival, helps to illuminate why the latter fell flat for me.

Wall-E and Eve, though they are robots without mouths or noses or much in the way of facial muscles other than articulated mechanical parts and blue digital LEDs for eyes, respectively, move with a fluidity and expressiveness that was lacking in most of the characters in Hellboy II. Under all that makeup, Hellboy is working with a more limited facial muscle repertoire than a middle-aged actress on her tenth round of Botox. The fish character, Abe, and a new character, Johan Strauss, have even less expressive faces. Abe wears a rubber fish mask that can do little other than blink, while Strauss has no face at all, just a glass dome for a head. Voice work can only take you so far.

Hellboy II also suffers from what plagues stories for most sequels, which is a sort of character stasis. Sequels that are conceived of only after the success of the first installment tend to be "the further adventures of..." rather than stories with any character arc. From the first movie, we know Hellboy is a sarcastic, wisecracking brute who likes to pummel monsters first, ask questions later. In this movie, he still is. The screenplay has several storylines, including one about Hellboy's uncomfortable relationships with the humans he protects, but the mix of fantasy and real-life isn't organic and tightly woven the way it was in, say, Pan's Labyrinth.

I look forward to more work from Guillermo del Toro, but I hope it's original stories and not more installments of Hellboy.

When animals attack

I haven't seen the movie, but Is this the plot of The Happening?

Nevertheless, local and federal officials have advised citizens confronted head-on by a red wing to simply stare back into its eyes.

Which sounds like advice out of a Holiday Inn commercial.

New Yorker caption contests

Many on the web dismiss the New Yorker caption contest entries as neither funny nor clever, but I can never think of any good ones, even though the contenders selected each week seem obvious in hindsight.

Where the Hell is Matt?

R.I.P. Tim Russert

I read the news as I was waiting to board my flight to Chicago today, and it felt as if a beloved uncle had passed away.

To higher ground we go

McSweeneys recommends us

Hulu made McSweeney's Recommends. It's one of those high fives that means more because it's a reference I often visit.

Yes, I recommend McSweeney's Recommends, which I guess makes it a meta recommendation.

SomethingStore

I decided to take a roll of the dice with SomethingStore.com since I'd read so much about it recently. Mail in $10 and receive a mystery item through the mail.

I ended up with an ugly Made in China pocketwatch, one that, had I purchased it in China, would have cost 10 cents. I guess if they were all winners it wouldn't be much of a business.

Remains of last weekend

I had my leg cast swapped out last week. When I walked into the office, the nurse who admitted me took one look at my leg and recoiled in shock.

"What the hell kind of angle is your foot set at?" he asked. My foot was pointed straight down, like a ballet dancer on point.

"I don't know! I woke up from surgery and my foot was set that way," I said, suddenly concerned.

"Man oh man," he said, shaking his head. "That's the most severe angle I've ever seen."

The guy who was responsible for recasting me looked like Milton from Office Space but about 200 pounds heavier. He had an exasperated "seen-it-all" weariness about him, as if he wished this train of patients with ruptured Achilles would stop appearing in his office but knew that it wouldn't. He looked at me and shook his head, and I felt judged, guilty of some hubris that had led me to this sorry state.

To remove the cast, he pulled out a small handheld circular saw and made two cuts from top to bottom on either side of my leg. The saw blade protruded about an inch, and my cast looked to be about an inch thick, so when Milton put saw to cast I strained as hard as possible to push my leg as far away from the blade as possible. I was terrified, and my leg cowered against the opposite side of the cast. Milton didn't seem concerned and pulled the blade straight down with an almost bored nonchalance.

He pried the cast off, and for the first time in weeks, I saw my leg. There was a four inch wound running up the back of my leg from my heel, stitched together with black thread in a cross-hatched pattern.

The surgeon came in, took a look, said the wound looked to be healing fine, and left. Milton asked him about the crazy angle of my foot, but he replied that my wound was healing and that was the important thing.

Milton had my lie on my belly, and then he rubbed some local anesthesia on my wound. Just as I started to feel it burn, he began (I think) removing my stitches. It felt as if someone was putting a soldering iron to my ankle, and I bit my arm to stomach the searing pain.

Then it came time to pry my foot up partway towards the normal 90 degree angle that feet are at when you stand normally. There was only one problem: after two weeks of being pointed down, my foot did not want to come back up. Milton asked me to try pulling it up myself, but despite urgent messages from my brain, my foot did not move.

I couldn't see Milton over my shoulder, but I pictured the slightest of grins on his lips as he grabbed my foot and a board of some sort and pried my foot up.

I let out a grunt as a violent pain shot up my leg. He continued to pry, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. If someone had walked in on us, it would've looked like a UFC fight, with Milton trying to break my foot to get me to tap out.

I didn't submit, but Milton did notice that I was in pain.

"You think this hurts? I just pulled your foot up like 20 degrees. Next time I'm pulling it up the rest of the way, like 40 degrees. You better take some painkillers before you come in." And then he cackled maniacally: "Bwahahahahaha!"

Okay, he didn't cackle. But after seeing the beautiful nurses in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I can't lie, the walrusian Milton was a bit of a letdown.

I hobbled out of Milton's torture chamber with a new, slim cast on my leg but in enormous pain. I sat in the waiting room and immediately inhaled two Vicodin, which I hadn't touched in a week and a half.

The best thing to come out of this office visit was obtaining my doc's signature on a form authorizing me for a temporary handicapped parking placard. I mailed that off to the California DMV as soon as I got back to the office.

Milton, we will meet again soon, but I will be bringing my two friends, Percocet and Vicodin.

***

Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb. There's an analogous videogame sensation. Whenever I hear a song from Rock Band on the radio, I feel a phantom guitar in my hands and see green, blue, yellow, red, and orange notes dropping from the sky.

***

After trashing his teammates in the preseason, Kobe Bryant goes and says he stayed with the Lakers because he tweaked his leadership to instill his teammates with his DNA. Arrogant, yes, but also maybe not the best thing to say given his, uh, personal history, both past and present.

***

Yes, the Lakers have Zen master Phil Jackson as coach, but let's not forget that Doc Rivers has the Celtics shouting "Ubuntu!" coming out of every huddle. Open source operating system? That seems pretty zen to me.

***

Sometimes it feels like the web is too big. Look at this list of sites of "Top 60 music websites that deliver the greatest free music."

60 sites! I'd be more than happy with, say, 10, but to be honest I probably use maybe 3.

***

Now that I'm on crutches, and now that a temporary handicapped permit is on its way to me in the mail, I flash dirty looks at any non-handicapped person I catch coming out of the handicapped stall in the bathroom.

If I hadn't had to pee so badly after the Indiana Jones screening that morning it opened, I would've stayed around until I caught whoever had occupied the handicapped stall at the Hollywood Arclight.

Speaking of the new Indiana Jones movie, I've read a lot of fans of the new Indy movie who dismiss anyone who didn't like the movie as elitist. Sorry, but those people are wrong.

I don't care if you did like the movie, but don't tell me about summer popcorn flicks. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great summer popcorn flick. This latest Indy flick...cost me three hours and $11.

***

This is old, but still worth posting. Chris Matthews obliterates a right-wing lunatic on TV. One of Matthews' finer moments.

The Body People

The NYTimes profiles Barack Obama's "body man" Reggie Love. Personal aide to Obama, Love plays hoops with the Presidential candidate, watches Sportscenter with him, and handles miscellaneous issues like food stains on the tie. Previously, Hillary Clinton's personal aide Huma Abedin garnered a lot of press attention--the NY Observer article titled "Hillary's Mystery Woman: Who is Huma?" practically described her as a superhero, a glamorous, cool, fashion icon.

Now that I'm on crutches, I'm ready to accept applications for my own body person. For the near future, the job will be more Driving Miss Daisy than pickup hoops, but the nightly Sportscenter viewing can commence immediately.

Rift between Sports Guy and ESPN?

Hmm. Maybe that explains the scarcity of his columns on ESPN recently. The timing of an appearance of his own blog is suspicious also. [via Deadspin]

If he chooses to part ways with ESPN, I'm sure he can find another sports outlet to foot his bills for flights out to random sporting events. Though it sounds like what he needs is to move from ESPN to the HBO-equivalent of ESPN, where he can drop the kid gloves on certain topics.

blah blah blah

I'm not picking sides on the debate about the impact of the web on journalism, but I do venture to say that stories like this would not have made the news prior to the rise of the web.

American Airlines to start charging $15 for the first checked bag. That's great, because I just adore flying those roomy coach seats. I I look forward to being charged to use the bathroom, charged to do the crossword on the in-flight magazine sudoku, and charged to rent an overhead bin for my carry-on luggage, too.

Eating vegetables raw is not always the healthiest way to consume them. Thank goodness. Also good news: eating vegetables with a bit of fat, for example in full-fat dressing, may help you absorb more vitamins.

Innovators and innovation

Lots about innovation this past week. The May 12 edition of The New Yorker was the Innovators Issue, and one of the better ones in recent memory.

It features an article by Malcolm Gladwell, ostensibly about Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, a sort of idea-generating patent-filing machine, but really about the radical idea that innovation or innovative ideas may not be as rare as we think, may not be the result of genius and eureka moments. Can you capture innovation or ideas merely by dedicating time and resources to searching for them?

The issue also features a profile of someone who I've never heard of but whose work I've undoubtedly seen dozens if not hundreds of times: Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost digital retoucher of fashion photographs.

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs.

I'm aware that most fashion photographs are worked over in post-production, but seeing an example of Dangin's work in the actual print copy of the issue surprised me with how much he actually alters body parts and features. Manipulating the truth, or giving the public what it wants?

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Also profiled: Grant Achatz, head chef at Alinea, one of the more famous restaurants in America, and perhaps the most famous outpost of the molecular gastronomy movement in the U.S. I ate at Moto many years ago, just before Alinea was set to open, and already there was a several month waiting list for Grant Achatz's first restaurant of his own.

Achatz is trying to fight his way back from tongue cancer, a particularly devastating illness for someone who depends so heavily on his sense of taste. I'd still love to eat at Alinea which, along with French Laundry and El Bulli, are the three restaurants that top my dining hitlist.

Achatz is putting out the Alinea Book, a cookbook, this fall.

Lastly, and not from The New Yorker, was this popular article (free registration required to read it) from McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Pixar's Brad Bird about how he and Pixar foster innovation.

A great interview, from which a few points stood out to me.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

This is true in so many walks of life, from the office to the film set to the locker room. What's difficult about achieving this, though, is that it's so easy for senior management/directors/coaches to be oblivious to the morale of their companies/cast and crew/teams. This is perhaps most true for the business leader.

The very nature of being senior management insulates one from the troops. The most common shape of a modern business org. structure is a pyramid, which is designed for efficiency of downward communication, but not for the reverse. CEO's sit in gilded offices on the top floor of ivory towers, and access to them is restricted by intimidating assistants. The power structure in companies means that even if morale is down, no one lower down on the org. structure is likely to be honest in front of the CEO or the head of their division for fear of being seen as a malcontent.

It's a real challenge. It's not easy for the top dog to be just "one of the guys" to use an old and somewhat sexually dated saying. I'm reminded of Henry V in Shakespeare's play, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, disguising himself as a commoner and walking around his camp to both gauge and raise the morale of his men. He does so with the recognition that it's the only way his men will speak honestly with him. In fact, the first question posed to Henry V as he wanders in disguise is from a sentinel, Pistol:

Discuss unto me; art thou officer?
Or art thou base, common and popular?

It's an interesting choice of words, "common and popular," and it speaks to the difficulty of being both powerful and popular, derived from the Latin populus for "the people."

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

On the Hulu development team, we've tried to counteract both the insulation and communication issue by all sitting in one communal cube farm. Everyone, regardless of title, has the same setup. So far it's worked out great.

First of all, there's a collegial feeling fostered by all sitting together. Communication is sped up; rather than fire off e-mails, many exchanges can be handled by simply strolling a few feet to a colleague's cube, or just by swiveling a chair. News travels really really fast in dev heaven, the nickname of our little office neighborhood. Many times, one of us overhears a conversation between some colleagues and can jump in with a suggestion or solution.

If our setup weren't enough to encourage interaction among the team, we also set up central snack or food areas in the center of dev heaven to encourage more foot traffic and casual encounters. We keep several rolling whiteboards in the area to allow for quick, mobile meetings or brainstorms.

We keep one or two communal offices nearby for those times when people need to do jump on conference calls or make personal calls. It's not the conventional setup for development teams, what with Peopleware extolling the virtue of private offices for every developer, or even for normal companies, but in a startup that needs to stay nimble and move quickly, it's been a plus for us.

One last point from the Brad Bird interview:

Brad Bird: Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Amen.

My first patent

Cool, I actually got awarded a patent. That patent is the basis of what is now Amazon's Flexible Payment Service. It's humbling to be on the same inventor list as some of those names.

A who's who of Achilles tendon injuries

A list of famous people who've suffered severe injuries of their Achilles. Gives me some comfort that most were able to come back strong.

The oddest entry on the list: Brad Pitt tearing his Achilles while playing Achilles in Troy. There you go. Yet one more thing that Brad Pitt and I have in common.

Mentos + Coke

~1,500 students in Belgium set a new record for Mentos-Coke fizz-fountains.

Smoking

David Sedaris on smoking in this week's New Yorker.

When I started smoking myself, I realized that a lit cigarette acted as a kind of beacon, drawing in any freeloader who happened to see or smell it. It was like standing on a street corner and jiggling a palmful of quarters. “Spare change?” someone might ask. And what could you say?

...

Given my reputation as a strident non-smoker, it was funny how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life were a play, and the prop mistress had finally showed up. Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill and then empty. My hands were at one with their labor, the way a cook’s might be, or a knitter’s.

Speaking of smoking, season one of Mad Men comes out on DVD July 1. I've tried to kick the DVD-buying habit this past year, but hot diggity that is some tempting product packaging.

Disappointing that the Blu-Ray box art for the same box set is purely conventional.

Recommended

Chris Rock's latest standup tour - Last night I caught Chris Rock's latest standup show with some coworkers. I have to let it soak in over a few weeks (during which I will dutifully, as a male, repeat his jokes to many of my coworkers and friends with a substantially substandard delivery that will deflate 85% of the humor of the routines), but with the performance fresh in my mind I'm convinced it's his best standup performance yet. I was in tears a couple of times. The Presidential election, race relations, differences between men and women, marriage, sex, steroids...he ranged over all the topics I was hoping he'd hit. If he's coming to your town, get yourself a ticket.

There's nothing like seeing good standup live; you can watch the inevitable HBO special, but you won't have the energy from thousands of people laughing to feed off of (the flipside is probably also true, that seeing bad standup live is exponentially more uncomfortable than seeing it on TV).

I last saw him live in Seattle some four years ago, during his Never Scared tour. Of all the standup comedians I've seen live (not a huge list, but includes folks like Dennis Miller, Seinfeld, Russell Peters), Chris Rock is my favorite. I saw Seinfeld twice in a four year span, and he repeated a great deal of his material. Though Rock covers similar themes in each show, I've never heard him use the same joke twice.

***

Lays ketchup flavored potato chips - one of my coworkers brought a bag back from Toronto. Apparently this flavor is a specialty north of the border. In America we love ketchup with our french fries, so why hasn't this flavor of chips caught on here? Whatever the reason, to satiate my fix I may have to resort to bidding on eBay.

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State of Play - the British just seem to be able to crank out great political thrillers and police procedurals (I'm still a huge fan of Spooks, or MI-5 as they rebrand it for BBC America). This six-part miniseries stars the always fantastic Bill Nighy and a young Kelly MacDonald and James McAvoy, to name a few actors more recognized this side of the pond. It starts, as these things often do, with a dead body. When the press, government, industry, and police all tug on the thread, the plot unravels at a healthy clip.

Applying diminishing returns

Arnold Kling offers some life advice based on broader application of the law of diminishing returns.

My tip is to pay attention to the law of diminishing returns. For example, the number of authors who write two books that are worth reading is at least two orders of magnitude less than the number who write one book worth reading. Most of the time, you should assume that if you've read one book by a given author then you do not need to read another. Too many people follow the opposite strategy--reading more books by authors they like.

Staying in the same organization for more than few years also puts you on the wrong side of the point of diminishing returns. Working in an organization is a learning experience. But, as with going to college, there comes a time when you need to stop taking their courses and proceed to graduate.

Teachstreet launches

Big congratulations to my friend Dave and his team for launching Teachstreet yesterday morning. Teachstreet is a service that connects people who want to learn something with local teachers. In its beta incarnation, the site lists over 25,000 classes in Seattle.

I worked briefly for Dave at Amazon, and he was my roommate here in Santa Monica my first year in LA when he was helping his friends with JibJab. Everyone knows him as, first and foremost, one of the all around good guys. He has a very genuine enthusiasm and honesty that is rare in the corporate world. It's a combination of qualities more common in entrepreneurs, so it's only fitting that he's now launched his own company. I'll bet anything that his team and colleagues love working with him.

It's good to see a new generation of startup companies spawning out of the Amazon.com alumni network.

More current songs

I wish Rock Band would add some more genres of music to its downloadable song lineups. There are too many heavy metal and classic rock tunes for my taste. Judas Priest? Boston? Do people in Rock Band's core demographic really know how to sing these tunes? I sure don't, and neither do my friends.

Elevators

Nick Paumarten's article "The lives of elevators" in last week's New Yorker offered a useful education on the basics of "elevatoring":

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset. In a residential building or a hotel, the tolerance goes up, but only by ten or twenty seconds. In the nineteen-sixties, many builders cheated a little—accepting, say, a thirty-four-second interval, and 11.5 per cent handling capacity—and came to regret it. Generally, England is over-elevatored; India is under-elevatored.

Fortune carries a “probable stop” table, which applies probability to the vexation that boils up when each passenger presses a button for a different floor. If there are ten people in an elevator that serves ten floors, it will likely make 6.5 stops. Ten people, thirty floors: 9.5 stops. (The table does not account for the exasperating phantom stop, when no one gets on or off.) Other factors are door open and close time, loading and unloading time, acceleration rate, and deceleration rate, which must be swift but gentle. You hear that interfloor traffic kills—something to mutter, perhaps, when a co-worker boards the elevator to travel one flight, especially if that co-worker is planning, at day’s end, to spend half an hour on a StairMaster. It’s also disastrous to have a cafeteria on anything but the ground floor, or one floor above or below it, accessible via escalator.

An over-elevatored building wastes space and deprives a landlord of revenue. An under-elevatored building suffers on the rental or resale market, and drives its tenants nuts.

Confirming something I read somewhere else a long time ago:

In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power.

And then, an illuminating discussion of the science of personal space:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.

Bodies need to fit. Designers of public spaces have devised a maximum average unit size—that is, they’ve figured out how much space a person takes up, and how little of it he or she can abide. The master fitter is John J. Fruin, the author of “Pedestrian Planning and Design,” which was published in 1971 and reprinted, in 1987, by Elevator World, the publisher of the leading industry magazine, Elevator World. Fruin introduced the concept of the “body ellipse,” a bird’s-eye graphic representation of an individual’s personal space. It’s essentially a shoulder-width oval with a head in the middle. He employed a standard set of near-maximum human dimensions: twenty-four inches wide (at the shoulders) and eighteen inches deep. If you draw a tight oval around this figure, with a little bit of slack to account for body sway, clothing, and squeamishness, you get an area of 2.3 square feet, the body space that was used to determine the capacity of New York City subway cars and U.S. Army vehicles. Fruin defines an area of three square feet or less as the “touch zone”; seven square feet as the “no-touch zone”; and ten square feet as the “personal-comfort zone.” Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—“intimate distance,” the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, “Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.”

The standard elevator measure is about two square feet per passenger—intimate, disturbing. “Elevators represent a special circumstance in which pedestrians are willing to submit to closer spacing than they would normally accept,” Fruin wrote, without much parsing the question of willingness.

I thought of this issue of personal space on my Virgin America flight back from NYC to LA this past Sunday. I was in the aisle seat of my row. The man in the middle seat was large, his waist flowing over the armrest into my negligible personal space. He wore only a tank top undershirt, and wore it a bit too comfortably for my taste. He coughed and cleared his throat and groaned incessantly, an audio tour of bodily function.

But the most horrifying realization, coming as it did at the start of a six and a half hour flight, was that my neighbor was, uh, malodorous, and the amplitude of his scent rose and fell in accordance with the raising and lowering of the arm closest to me. I donned my noise-canceling headphones but longed for equivalent technology for my nose.

I wonder, though, if some of NYC's energy isn't simply the result of its sheer human density. Just as taking a volume of gas at a constant temperature and decreasing the volume increases pressure, so does the difference in human density between LA and NYC explain much of the difference in the personalities of the residents of each city.

Extra extra

Interesting rumor: 24.4MP Nikon D3 replacement on the way? Or are some D3s 24.4MP cameras in waiting?

Unused script by Michael Chabon for Spiderman 2. (UPDATE: link to the full script PDF was removed, sadly)

New York state passes bill forcing Amazon.com to start charging New Yorkers sales tax. Ouch.

Steven Spielberg acquires the rights to make a 3-D live action version of Ghost in the Shell.

Feed Our Kids Well?

The long lost first episode of The Dana Carvey Show is now available on Hulu, featuring, yes, the infamous "Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies" sketch. Timely satire, perhaps, given this election season?

In one of those inadvertent and bizarre coincidences, the ad campaign on this skit happened to be Ragu's Feed Our Kids Well campaign, leading to the the unplanned visual convergence below (click for a larger view; you won't fully understand unless you've seen the skit).

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

***

A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

***

PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Fifa Street 3

Le foot.

Firefox 3 versus Safari 3

John Gruber with a great comparison of Firefox 3 and Safari 3 beta browsers for the Mac. His preference is for Safari 3, though he notes that Firefox has some important advantages.

I've been using these two browsers (Firefox 3 b5) for a few weeks now as well. I prefer Firefox 3, for a few reasons. As Gruber notes, Safari is a memory hog, and given the number of applications I have open at once, Firefox's efficient memory usage makes a difference. I hate that Safari doesn't offer that option to open up with the tabs from your last session. Such a simple fix, I have no idea why they haven't added that after so many generations now.

And, of course, there's Firebug. Indispensable, and even better now that version 1.2 is in alpha. The Web Dev Toolbar is another useful plugin, and I use FoxiPod just about every day.

But Gruber is also right in that both are a step up from the previous generation: faster, more powerful and functional.

UPDATE: According to ZDNet, Firefox 3.0 b5 holds a slight speed edge on Safari 3.1, though both are faster than their previous versions, Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4.

Misc

Who is Jimmy Carter endorsing? Seems pretty clear it's Obama.

***

Is it possible to go out both with a whimper and a bang? This may be the business equivalent. RIP ATA and your dirt cheap airfares which I've taken advantage of a few times over the years.

***

One of the cooler hacks I've encountered recently: hack your portable Canon digital camera to enable new functionality like RAW file formats, live historgram displays, unlimited interval shooting, high speed shutters, and much more. I'm so going to do this once I can track down a card reader.

Odds and Ends

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.

Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.

Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?

Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.

The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.

My life is complete

Hulu got a shout out from Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy.

Check out Hulu.com and be prepared to waste a ridiculous amount of time. That's all I'm saying. By the way, all the "Paradise Hotel 2" episodes are on there, and if you watch the first five episodes and don't consider Rahiem one of your top-five favorite reality TV characters ever by the time you've finished plowing through them, then I'm giving you a full refund for $0.00.

Last week we also got a plug in the newsletter Daily Candy, which, given how many women e-mailed us last week to point it out, seems to be as popular with the ladies as Sports Guy is with the boys.

The bizarre

Floyd Mayweather knocks out The Big Show, but not before playing up the drama for the crowd.

Years later, the theatrics of wrestling and the popularity of said performances don't seem to have changed much.

***

The cast of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie includes:

Channing Tatum as Duke

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander

Sienna Miller as The Baroness

Ray Park as Snake Eyes

Dennis Quaid as General Hawk

Arnold Vosloo as Zartan

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Heavy Duty

Jonathan Pryce as the U.S. President

Marlon Wayans as Ripcord

Things I Like

* Modern Love, the weekly column in the Sunday Styles section of the NYTimes. I enjoy the introspective, confessional nature of each installment. This past week's column, "Mom, It’s Me, Your Son, Finally," was a good example of its tone. It's interesting to me how my tastes for various sections of newspapers and magazines has changed over time.

* New Balance 1220 running shoe series, of which the latest incarnation is the 1223. My flat, wide feet are thankful for shoes that, unlike Nikes, aren't made for people with perfect feet, narrow, high-arched. I guess that's to be expected from a shoe company named after a Greek goddess. The 1220's don't change too much from generation to generation, so when I walked into the store looking for a replacement for my 1221's, the saleswoman simply handed me the same size for the 1223s, and I walked out and was running in them fifteen minutes later. There's something to be said for product continuity in the shoe market.

I loved the Air Jordan VIII. It was the first pair I ever owned, and the day my mom bought it for me from a sports store in a mall is still a tactile memory. But subsequent models of the shoe changed so drastically that they just didn't fit my feet anymore.

* Runner's high (proof it exists?). I'd always thought runner's high was the occasional feeling that one could run forever without getting tired, but the definition in the article implies that it's something you always experience during running. Which may be why I have not experienced it in so long.

* Taco trucks. Seemingly an LA institution, the Hulu dev team seems to find a new one every week, each better than the next. I have yet to find one comprehensive listing of all taco trucks, though partial coverage can be found at The Great Taco Hunt and this Google Map.

Anti-emo riots?

Actually a serious story, but the headline seems like it could be stripped from The Onion: "Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico."

I had an image of frightened Death Cab for Cutie fans fleeing down the streets screaming.

South Park online

Every episode of South Park ever, online to stream for free. The amount of time a lot of people can spend online just went up a lot.

EW

Entertainment Weekly has an article on Hulu in today's issue. Online at EW.com, Ken Tucker created a list of 10 videos, personal picks, discovered as he surfed Hulu over a work week. It's a good list that I'll have to work my way through sometime (yes, as with being a film student and having no time to watch movies, working at Hulu leaves you with little time to watch much TV, except in your spare time, on Hulu).

Always exciting to be in a magazine that is such a pop culture touchstone, but especially exciting for Christina, our fearless PR leader.

How about an election every other year?

SNL isn't the only satire outlet energized by the election; The Onion has gotten a lot of mileage out of it, too:

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

***

Army Holds Annual "Bring Your Daughter to War" Day

"There were lots of explosions, and...and I saw a leg."

***

Mitt Romney defends himself against allegations of tolerance.

Why I wasn't wearing green

Because I forgot. My life contains no visible markers of upcoming holidays other than the commercial ones from retail stores. The only reason I know Easter is approaching is because the grocery store carries a lot of egg dye kits and those yellow gooey rabbits made of some unknown substance.

If I had remembered it was St. Patrick's Day, and if I were a woman, I would have tried to find an opportunity to send this e-card from someecards.

Tracy

SNL offers a counterpoint to Tina Fey's unabashed support for HRC.

Bershon

It's wonderful when you discover that there's a single word for something that, until that moment, you could only describe with many words. The word crystallizes it, makes it singular and whole, and gives the feeling or phenomenon some permanence.

Sarah Brown introduced the blogosphere to the term and defined it thus:

...the spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you’re also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner. Kelly Taylor from Beverly Hills, 90210 is the patron saint of bershon, as her face, like most other teenagers’, was permanently frozen in this expression.

A beautiful description, but if you're still unclear on the concept, the Flickr group I'm so Bershon will more than clear things up for you.

Walt

Walt Mossberg reviewed Hulu for the Wall Street Journal. Always a big milestone when someone like Mossberg or David Pogue in the NYTimes reviews your product. One reason they're so successful and important in the tech review space is their ability to write evaluations that are fair and useful to the widest range of consumers. His appraisal of our site is no different.

Some really cool free things

Work has been so busy recently I haven't had time to pass along some great free Internet services I've been using for a while now.

Sandy, the virtual assistant. I don't have a real-life assistant of my own, but Sandy sometimes makes it feel as if I do. I have a fondness for command-line interfaces, and being able to fire off a quick e-mail to Sandy saying "Remind me to pick up dry cleaning at 9am tomorrow" and having "her" e-mail and text me at that time the next day is very handy. Besides the simplicity of the service, the other thing I enjoy is the pseudo-personalized nature of Sandy's replies. I asked her to remind me of something earlier, and Sandy began her reply, "Wow! You're up late!"

Tripit - Where Sandy's abilities end, TripIt takes over. Most people I know book their travel online, and in the process receive all those oddly formatted travel confirmation e-mails. Then you have to sit there and enter the information into your calendar. It's a pain in the butt, and don't ever do it again. Instead, just forward those e-mails to plans@tripit.com, and TripIt merges all of them into a master itinerary, adding maps and driving directions and weather and all sorts of other useful information. You can print it, send it to your calendar, send it to your phone, forward it to friends and family, or even enhance it with custom information. Ingenious.

Instapaper - Like many people who've grown up with the web, I exhibit symptoms of Internet-attention-deficit-disorder. I regularly have 20+ tabs open in my browser, and I've long searched for a simple way to save a tab to read later so I can close it out for the time being. Instapaper is the simplest solution yet. Add a simple Read Later bookmarklet to your browser, click it when you want to save the web page to read later, and you're done. Visit Instapaper later and all your saved articles are there to read.

One benefit of LA weather

Headline, "stripped" of its context:

What can I say, LA has changed me.

Coming to a movie theater someday

Based on the true story: "I fell in love with a female assassin." A common movie plot (True Lies, La Femme Nikita, e.g.) finds a riveting real-world proof.

If adapted into a big-budget Hollywood film, likely Angelina Jolie as Marylin and, hmm, Ewan McGregor or Ed Norton or James McAvoy as journalist Jason P Howe?

Fortune

We (Hulu) got a write-up in Fortune today. It's one of the more detailed profiles of the company so far.

Ugly packaging, interesting goods

Fortune has an interview with Steve Jobs, who's always a good read.

Fortune is a reasonably well laid out magazine in print. Jobs is a design-obsessive. So there's some irony in the fact that this interview is stretched out across 15 pages so that Fortune.com can run more obnoxious ads that can cover up parts of the screen.

Technorati Tags: Apple, business, interview, stevejobs

Obama, the design element

Maybe one underrated strength of the Obama campaign is its design cohesion. Michael Bieruit analyzes Obama's branding campaign and comes away impressed, especially with his consistent typeface use.

And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said, "Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

Meanwhile, Hoefler & Frere-Jones shudder at the typography of the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

2008 is clearly a year of unusual thinking in political circles, because none of these familiar approaches can explain the utterly confounding typographic dress chosen by Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary's snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you're feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain's typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle. One of McCain's campaign themes is "Making Tough Choices:" is this the one you would have made?

Technorati Tags: barackobama, branding, design, gotham, typeface, typography

Can you hit floor 279 for me please?

I would like to visit Dubai sometime, if for no other reason than it seems like one of the most peculiar places in the world, a Las Vegas of architecture. If it's not Agassi and Federer playing tennis on the helipad of a hotel, or the world's tallest tower, the Burj Dubai, it's news that Hyder Consulting is designing a structure that will be twice the height of the Burj Dubai, or nearly one mile tall.

BLDGBLOG whipped up a graphic to illustrate how this building would fit in with the world's other tallest structures. It is sublimely ludicrous.

Technorati Tags: architecture, dubai

Notes from Buffett

Win-win

From here:

Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount. So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all. Is that so far from the reality we observe?

Seems like the incentives are aligned all around on this. It's rough flying with kids, both on the parents and all the other fliers who empathize but really wish their noise-canceling headphones could filter out the high-frequency screaming of a distressed child.

Yes he can?

Dick Morris now thinks Obama will defeat Hillary.

What a slugfest between two political heavyweights.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, politics, hillaryclinton

State of the arts

Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:

From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:

5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.

I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.

Sexual Harrassment and You

DFA

One of the better articles of 2007 was this Michael Lewis piece for Conde Nast Portfolio: "Evolution of an Investor."

Lewis profiles investment adviser Blaine Lourd, who went from a stock picker and salesman to a convert to the efficient market hypothesis. What caught my eye about the article was the prominent role played by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). Their mutual funds are targeted at investors who believe in buy-and-hold, passive index funds, diversified portfolios, the type of investing philosophy touted by people like Larry Swedroe. They don't sell direct to individual investors but only through select advisors who they feel espouse the same investing philosophies as they do.

I just happen to have most of my savings invested in DFA funds. I used to do a lot of individual stock investing, and I enjoyed it, but over time, I realized there were other things I enjoyed doing more keeping track of public companies. It's a lot of work to stay on top of a portfolio of individual stocks. I still keep a portfolio on the side of individual stock investments, but it's mostly for fun and invested in the only category I feel I have some more insight than most, which is in some premium Internet or tech brands. Other than that, I don't worry about my savings other than an occasional rebalancing.

DFA's funds are really low-cost, and they provide some very unique index funds that are hard to find on the open market, helping you to build a really broad, diversified portfolio. Being able to diversify into very particular markets has proven its value again and again. Last, year, for example, was not a strong one for U.S. equities, but my portfolio was helped by the strong returns in Emerging Markets.

If you're interested, you can find an investment advisor who has access to DFA funds through this webpage. I'm a firm believer that most people would benefit from not just DFA funds but the type of investment philosophy that their funds are associated with, and in making that statement I'm putting my mouth where my money is.

Technorati Tags: economics, finance, investing

Bill Clinton: "Screw It, I'm Running For President"

Hah.

Maybe money does buy happiness

The collection of answers to the annual Edge question for 2008: What have you changed your mind about? Why?

165 contributors, and some fascinating responses, as always. Daniel Kahneman, 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics:

To compound the irony, recent findings from the Gallup World Poll raise doubts about the puzzle itself. The most dramatic result is that when the entire range of human living standards is considered, the effects of income on a measure of life satisfaction (the "ladder of life") are not small at all. We had thought income effects are small because we were looking within countries. The GDP differences between countries are enormous, and highly predictive of differences in life satisfaction. In a sample of over 130,000 people from 126 countries, the correlation between the life satisfaction of individuals and the GDP of the country in which they live was over .40 – an exceptionally high value in social science. Humans everywhere, from Norway to Sierra Leone, apparently evaluate their life by a common standard of material prosperity, which changes as GDP increases. The implied conclusion, that citizens of different countries do not adapt to their level of prosperity, flies against everything we thought we knew ten years ago. We have been wrong and now we know it. I suppose this means that there is a science of well-being, even if we are not doing it very well.

The idea Kahneman had wanted to challenge was the idea of hedonic adaptation, that no matter how much our life circumstances change, whether we become wealthier, or get married or divorced, got healthy or sick, we all roughly returned to the same level of satisfaction. His idea was that as one's life circumstances improve, one's aspirations increase, and so one's satisfaction remains constant, but one's happiness is higher.

The paragraph above, though, challenges the idea of hedonic adaptation altogether. I have not read the findings from the Gallup World Poll referenced, but I'd long been a believer in the idea that money can't buy happiness, but extreme poverty can lead to unhappiness. But maybe we were all wrong?

What Tyler Cowen is nearly certain about

A list of 14 things Tyler Cowen is nearly certain about.

3. Government-dominated health systems, insofar as they work well (a number of them do), succeed simply by lowering costs. Health care has a murky relationship to human health, pharmaceuticals and broken limbs aside. A version of the single-payer system, as might be adopted in the United States, would not lower costs. We would be raising taxes and lowering medical innovation to give poor people a good deal more financial security and a slight bit more health; that is the relevant trade-off.

4. Overall, despite its many flaws, America is a force for liberty in the greater global community.

5. We are programmed to respond to the "us vs. them" mentality and highly intelligent people are no less captive to this framing. We should try very hard to get away from this framing.

6. America is a beacon of innovation for the world, and it is critically important that we allow the preconditions for American innovation to continue.

Kindness for Rudeness

I have ambitions, at year's end, of issuing lists of my favorite things from 2007, but let's be realistic. I am full of interests and plans, more so, I imagine, than the average Joe, but once they are pumped through the funnel of my free time, what comes out the other end is just a fraction, like the water flow from one of the annoying environmentally-friendly shower heads they put in our dorms when I was in college.

Better to just toss things out as I go. One of my favorite columns in the Sunday NYTimes is Modern Love in the Sunday Styles section, and catching up on two or three months worth of those this morning, I read this one, which I really loved: "The Exchange: Kindness for Rudeness."

Technorati Tags: nytimes, modernlove

Vanity Fair on Indy 4

The cover story of the latest Vanity Fair is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

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An article about how to deal with regret in a healthy way.

Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.

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Basia Bulat covering "Someday" by The Strokes.

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Kanye West gets p0wned by Beyonce in Connect Four.

Some random links perused over the holidays

Tyler Cowen lists policy areas in which his views are uncertain. It's refreshing that even an economist of his stature can admit that he is uncertain on so many issues. Cowen links to Arnold Kling's list of what he is certain about.

Vladimir Putin is Time's Man of the Year? Interesting.

RIP Borat, RIP Ali G. May you live on through the annoying and lousy impersonations of thousands of young males across the world.

Google, without asking permission, decides to share all your shared items in Google Reader with all of your GMail contacts.

Warner joins the DRM-free movement at Amazon's MP3 store.

M. Night Shyamalan has another of those twist movies in the works, releasing next June: The Happening.

Sleeveface is the art of augmenting the art on a record sleeve with your own body. You can't do that with a CD cover, unless, of course, you are a really small person.

Sedaris on air travel

Being stuck here at the airport reminds me of this recent David Sedaris piece in The New Yorker about flying business class. Really damn funny.

A true test of her power

The first pick in Oprah's Presidential Candidate of the Month Club: Barack Obama. Let's see how much influence she really wields.

It recalls one of the more famous Onion articles: Oprah Viewers Patiently Awaiting Instructions.

I hear Obama speak live on Dec. 10. It will be my first time hearing him live. I'm excited.

New Yorker this week

After a long absence, finally a new Malcolm Gladwell article in this week's New Yorker. He takes on criminal profilers and bursts the bubble of mystique around their techniques.

Another interesting article in this issue is from James Surowiecki, where he ties high risk behavior from hedge fund managers and many corporate executives to their incentive schemes. Hedge Fund managers make a lot of money when they raise the value of their funds, but their downside risk is much more limited. At worst they make less in a down year, but one good year followed by an equally bad year still nets them a lot on the ride up. CEO's with lots of stock options with a fixed strike price also have an incentive to take huge risks because their options are worthless no matter how far below the strike price the company's stock is at. It's also one reason I think so many startups shoot for the fences and a quick payoff/sellout rather than trying to build a lasting business.

$100 store credit for 8GB iPhone early adopters

Surprised by the backlash from early 8GB iPhone adopters, Steve Jobs posts a letter promising said people a $100 store credit towards a purchase from Apple as a partial match of the just-announced $200 price drop.

Third, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of iPhone, and even though the technology road is bumpy, we need to do a better job taking care of our early iPhone customers as we aggressively go after new ones with a lower price. Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple's website next week. Stay tuned.

Some dudes I like to read resurface

Jason Kottke is back from paternity leave to resume his duties as the premier web linker/town crier. No worries, he's well aware that no one's kids are as interesting to other people as they are to their parents.

Several people have inexplicably assumed that since I'm now a father, kottke.org is going to turn into some kind of daddyblog, and furthermore asserted that they'd like that not very much. Rest assured, not going to happen. I'm sure I'll make occasional mention of the family, but don't look for posts entitled "Umbrella Stroller Buying Guide" or "How to Buy Gender Neutral Clothing for Your Newborn (A: Don't Try, This is Nearly Impossible)".

George Saunders new nonfiction collection The Braindead Megaphone is out now.

The writer that turned me on to the short story form, Tobias Wolff, has a new collection of short fiction due out in March of 2008: Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories.

As for me, I've been hit by a runaway express train of a summer job and have been pretty busy, but I'll try my best to do better here.

The last part of summer

Big day today - the first 25 Red cameras shipped. From Jim Jannard:

Just so you know, I am here at 1:09am with the RED team personally reviewing each camera of the 1st 25. We are calibrating each camera and my job is to check the files in RED Alert! that Jarred is shooting. We are shooting ISO 320, 1000 and 2000. There are about 20 people here getting ready for tomorrow. It really is a memorable night. About a year and a half ago this was just a dream. Tonight the dream has become a reality.

I want to thank all those that believed in RED from the beginning.

Jim

And all around the world, high end digital video camera profit margins shrink.

***

Dancing with the Stars…it’s a lot about the casting. I’ve only ever seen clips, but the talent they’ve convinced to grasp at that last of their 15 minutes of fame has been impressive. Among the cast for the upcoming season:

• Mark Cuban
• Floyd Mayweather Jr.
• Wayne Newton
• Scary Spice (Melanie Brown)
• Helio Castroneves
• Jenni Garth
• Josie Maran
• Marie Osmond
• Jane Seymour

Mark Cuban isn't making some last clutch at fame, I think it's more about brand bolstering for him. Generating constant publicity for himself is just part of who he is. Mayweather is in the tail of his career, and I'm surprised to see him on the list. The The rest all make sense.

***

Farecast lauches hotel search in beta. It’s both similar and different to their airfare service which lets you know whether fares are likely to go up or down and thus whether to buy now or wait. Their hotel service, called Hotel Rate Key, lets you know whether a hotel’s rates are a bargain or not relative to that hotel’s historical rates.

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What the residents of Dunder Mifflin did on their summer vacation:

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Tom Wolfe reviews Entourage

But there is hope in this moxie wasteland of moviemakers. Johnny Drama draws not my ire. Here is the bravado-laden torch of the past, its fire fueled by protein shakes and casting off the nearly forgotten aroma of desire. His ginseng-toned body twisting and gyrating with anxiety and self-doubt, he’s a New Age Neal Cassady, passed up here for a Lifetime movie, there for a Hallmark Channel special—the Houghton Mifflin and HarperCollins of the television world. Johnny Drama is no mere muzzled bus driver, however. He is a symbol of irony, that word now recognized only by the literati. Played by Kevin Dillon, Sancho Panza to real-life brother Matt, this role oozes the true Hollywood pathos of silver-screen heartbreak. If watch Entourage you must, then watch it for Drama.

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Indexed - lots of fun. I have a hard time picking my favorite.

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Gorilla movie - [via Daring Fireball via Fresh Signals via AdFreak]

Two posts that seem like action and reaction

Time on the internet to surpass time watching TV for the average US household. I passed that point long ago.

TorrentSpy blocks US searches.

Famous title sequences

A YouTube compilation here.

Technorati Tags: art, design, movies, video, youtube

Tiger Woods imitating Charles Barkley's golf swing

Some links, some involving Jason Bourne

Ben Affleck hoping Jason Bourne has sidekick in next movie.

Trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling. Clever premise.

Scary view into the C.I.A.'s interrogation techniques. Scary stuff, especially the details on the interrogation technique called waterboarding. I'd say we need to call Jason Bourne to expose these practices, but the public already knows what's going on.

Gruesome death: man bitten by his pet black widow spider and then eaten by his other pet lizards and insects. Is this story true? Those generic photos make me skeptical.

A poster of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, produced entirely using the text of the script. From a company called L.A. Pop Art which specializes in using this technique called micrography to produce such prints. The pieces they have for sale don't interest me as consumer products, but I'd love to see the technique generalized so that you could order a custom print of any picture generated entirely from the text of your choice.

A popular article that circulated among the technorati a few weeks ago: In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich. Hard to feel sorry for people who have a couple million and still feel poor.

Technorati Tags: film, humor, movies, newyorker, tech, trailer

Concept art from Ratatouille, Imogen Heap

Hmm, an old post I forgot to post from a few weeks back...

You can see the goodness here. At the time I wrote this, I hadn't seen Ratatouille yet. Every one seemed to have seen it by the time I decided I couldn't wait any longer, so one night I just drank a Coke and caught the late showing one night after work. It was all that and then some. The animation was stunning.

***

Via FreshArrival, here's a WMV file of a live performance by Imogen Heap at the studios of Indie 103.1 here in LA back a . A friend from Starbucks got my a pass to go see her perform at the Starbucks music lounge at Sundance in 2006. Watching her work was intriguing because she used a series of gadgets, including a Macbook Pro, all of which she demonstrated to us before she played her set. She's one person but with all that gear she can sing with herself. The video gives you an idea of how she creates that big sound. Here are a few of my pics from the show at Sundance.

Technorati Tags: animation, art, music

Esquire's 2007 Sexiest Woman Alive

UPDATE: A reader writes in with a convincing case that the below is wrong, and I think the reader's right. Spoiler alert still applies, but it applies to the name you see in the first comment on this post.

Spoiler alert--don't read on if you don't want to know the identity of Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive. It's an annual ritual to guess who has earned the honor before several issues of photographic and textual clues are released.

Mike was the one who nailed it. We were sitting around playing with Connor, and I asked if they had any ideas. Neither he nor Ken had seen the first photo clue, so we pulled it up and perused it like forensic scientists. This, by the way, is a pose that I myself often strike for the camera.

All we knew was that it was some blond that's likely in the news (as past winners Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, and Jessica Biel haven't exactly been anonymous).

The clue that gave it away for Mike was the hint that she's often mistaken for Ashley Judd (all the first installment clues are here).

Katherine Heigl.

The person giving the clues in the interview must be her Grey's Anatomy co-star T.R. Knight. Another clue that fits the bill, according to a Google search, is the fact that she's an animal lover. Having come off a lead in Knocked Up, she fulfills the requirement for being somewhat in the entertainment zeitgeist.

Technorati Tags: esquire, magazine, woman

Ads, ads, ads

A trailer for the movie version of Kite Runner, posted by Yahoo alongside a video ad for The Bourne Ultimatum (at least it was last I checked) that plays at the same time, obscuring the audio of the trailer. Two ads fighting for control of your speakers. Yahoo must be hurting.

Another case of advertising gone wrong: this QSOL print ad. Sex and servers: sounds like a trashy novel set in the Bay Area.

Technorati Tags: advertising, movies, tech, trailer

Gen 4 M3

How's the latest M3 coupe rate out? Pretty damn well.

Everyone should test drive one at least once, just to experience what it feels like to have 8000 rpm of torque compressing you into your seat as you corner on rails, the engine growling like a dog baring its teeth. It's pure joy.

Technorati Tags: autos, cars

So that's how it works!

Funny link [Via Pogue's Posts].

Make sure to move your mouse around a bit or you may find it cryptic and uninteresting.

Technorati Tags: humor, web

Remains of a long day

You want a proxy for the state of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Sales of 300 on Amazon offer a good proxy. The movie was available on both formats. On Blu-Ray the sales rank is currently #5 on Amazon.com. On HD-DVD? It's Amazon sales rank is 12. Slight edge Blu-Ray. Of course, none of this matters because so few titles are available on either format, let alone both formats. In fact, most titles that are available on Blu-Ray are not available on HD-DVD and vice versa.

A brief history of shoegazing, a genre of music I should have been listening to in high school to express those oh so hidden depths of soul and heartfelt yearnings behind my otherwise shy facade.

NYTimes doing away with TimesSelect soon? Let's hope so.

Two new Nokia phones, the 7500 and 7900, look like...well, the analogy I'd us is that these new phones are to old Nokia candybar phones as Bizarro Superman was to Superman in the looks department. Cubist, or maybe crystallized?

Facebook is all the rage. I held out until I realized how many of my classmates were using it to communicate. I've now had a few months to fiddle around with it. It's a huge step up from the loud mess that was MySpace and the cleanest designed social networking site to date. It also did a smart thing in opening up for application development by third parties. But I have a lot of thoughts on how the site could improve and where it's vulnerable. I'm not sold on its longevity. Those thoughts will have to wait for another day, when I have more time. In the meantime, this article is a good read.

Technorati Tags: amazon, dvd, gadgets, mobile, music, nytimes, phones, facebook

Some old notes and links

VMWare's Fusion may top even Parallels and Bootcamp as a way to run Windows apps on your Mac.

After downloading the first iPhone software update, I've found the iPhone to be generally more stable. Mobile Safari was crashing a lot just before the update. Now? Not as much.

Why are U.S. health care costs so high relative to the rest of the world? Perhaps because American doctors make so much more than their international peers and because of the way they are paid--by the procedure. I'm not sure the right answer is to put doctors on a salary. If the services American doctors provide are superior or more specialized, it may be worth the money. Arnold Kling blames a different issue for soaring healthcare costs, arguing that what we have in the U.S. is more health care insulation than insurance.

Baseball Prospectus posted an interview with Dr. Alan Nathan, physics professor and also chairman of the Science and Baseball committee of SABR. In response to a question about counterintuitive baseball truths as related to physics, he offered three, the last running counter to a baseball axiom:

One example is that the grip the batter has on the bat does not play a role in the ball-bat collision. That is, a batter could just as well let go of the bat an instant before contact, and it would not make a bit of difference to what happens to the ball. Most people tend to be very skeptical of this conclusion, since they believe a batter "muscles" the ball when it is in contact with the bat. But, that is not what happens, as shown not only "theoretically" but also experimentally.

Another example has to do with the ability of the batter to track the incoming pitch. In fact, it is really impossible to do so. So, just like my previous example, the batter could just as well close his eyes when the ball is halfway to home plate and it won’t affect the outcome of the swing.

A final example: Can a batter get to first base quicker by running through the base or in a head-first slide? Most people believe the former. I believe the latter. The essential physics is that by sliding with outstretched arms, the batter reaches the bag before his center of gravity reaches it, whereas those two times more or less coincide when running through the bag.

Technorati Tags: apple, baseball, economics, iPhone, Mac, software, tech

TGI...oh shoot, it's Sunday night

Amazon Flexible Payments Service launches. That was the last product I worked on before leaving Amazon. After finishing a product definition and filing for a patent or two for the payment web service, I left for NYC and the film world. It had been so long since I'd heard anything about it that I though it had been killed, but I'm glad to see it make it to market. Just glancing at some of the service highlights, it seems to be have retained almost all of the cool features we envisioned for it, especially the flexible instructions. In the next year or so, some people are going to build some really cool payment apps using this service. There isn't the option for free person-to-person bank debit transfers, however, which, though it wouldn't make any money for Amazon, would enable some cool consumer apps.

GMailSecure is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that forces GMail to use https.

Meemix is another one of those Internet radio sites like Pandora or Last.fm that tries to serve up music that you'll like. I've played with the beta a bit and it seems to be choosing songs well. But goodness gracious that is one confusing interface. Whoever designed that page did Meemix a huge disservice. There are all sorts of non-standard icons everywhere, the majority of which might as well be hieroglyphics. You cannot underestimate the importance of a clear, simple interface for a new product like this, especially one fighting for mindshare in an already crowded space. Pandora, iLike, Last.fm, The Filter, and on and on. I don't track the stock market and venture capital space enough to say whether or not we're in the midst of another bubble, but there are definitely plenty of markets that are overcrowded. They can't all survive. If they truly intend on treating this as a beta that they'll learn from, they better clean up that interface pronto.

The NYTimes outs Fake Steve Jobs: he's played by Daniel Lyons, senior editor at Forbes. Thanks, NYTimes, for now shaving in half the fun that we all had reading Fake Steve Jobs' blog.

Gilbert Arenas is the Microsoft of the NBA. He got outed for stealing someone's joke about shark attacks and posting it to his blog as his own, and after some folks called him on it, he responded on his blog.

Let’s not forget, “Hibachi” was stolen too. Brendan Haywood used to say it before me. But I recognize good stuff and make it popular. Now “Hibachi” is patented by Agent Zero, son.

I’m not a thief, I just reused it.

Know who is a thief? The guy that is trying to sell the domain name of GilbertArenas.com to me. It’s my name! I have to buy it back from him. Now that’s stealing, borrowing, whatever you want to call it.

Technorati Tags: amazon, Apple, email, Firefox, google, music, stevejobs, web, webservice

Aagh

As long as the web's been around, it's frustrating how many goofy website issues I still encounter. A catalog of a few that have vexed me recently...

For lack of a compelling alternative, I still use Citysearch to look up restaurant locations from time to time. Their map links are terrible. From a restaurant page, when I click on the map link, I expect the resulting map to show me a close-up of the restaurant's location. For a long time, all I'd get was a giant map showing the United States. That really narrowed it down. Thanks a lot.

Now that bug has been solved, but the map view they send you to now is zoomed out so far that you have to click a few times just to be able to see the cross streets around the restaurant. Furthermore, instead of just showing you a red star for that business/restaurant you want to locate, you get a map showing all sorts of local businesses near that address. On that previous link I was searching for Urth Caffe. Can't see the red star showing you the location of the restaurant? That's right, it's hidden behind the huge flag indicating some place called The Galley. Who designs these sites? Citysearch was never going to set the world on fire, but it used to be mildly useful. Now it's the equivalent of an aging movie star who underwent a botched plastic surgery.

On that topic, I decided to try Yelp since I've heard a lot of buzz about them. I tried putting in Urth Caffe in the search box and it brought back two locations, but not the one I was searching for in Santa Monica. Apparently Yelp Los Angeles uses Los Angeles, CA as its default search location, but that doesn't include Santa Monica. Yelp! Oops. I meant Help!

The top search result, by the way, was a huge sponsored search results for some yogurt place. I hate how sites like these make the top search result a massive ad banner for something totally unrelated. What are the odds if I'm searching for a specific restaurant name that Yelp is going to pick out another restaurant that happens to be more interesting to me than the one I just typed into the search box?! Put that damn ad banner off to the side. On a positive note, at least the map on the page for each restaurant location was useful, zoomed in at a level where cross streets are visible.

Yelp's tagline is Real People, Real Reviews. That's a pretty thin proposition on which to differentiate that site from dozens of others city guides.

I placed an order for a book through Amazon.com. Subsequently, I was told the ship date had to be pushed back over a month. So I decided to see if it was available sooner elsewhere on the web. I found a copy at CafePress and was about to add it to my cart when I read the availability message more carefully: "Books will ship in a minimum of 5 business days." What does that mean? It will take at least five days to ship, but it's the maximum I'm interested in. The book could ship in ten years and still live up to that vague message. Needless to say they didn't get my order.

It's finally getting hot enough in LA that shorts are a necessity. I ordered a pair from Cordarounds about two weeks ago. I'd nearly forgotten about the order, but a nagging feeling that a some package hadn't arrived yet led me to follow up in my e-mail. Since Cordarounds has no online order tracking you'd better keep your order confirm e-mail or you'll be forced to call them to even get your tracking # or order status. Fortunately I had kept the e-mail, and through it I checked the UPS shipping status online and got the cryptic message: Billing Information Received. Just another customer-friendly message from UPS that means absolutely nothing to me.

Today I checked UPS again and received another informative status message: Manifest Pickup. If it read Manifest Destiny at least I would have felt hopeful about annexing some territory. Maybe "Manifest Pickup" would mean more to me if I were wearing a trucker hat. It reminds me of some of the error messages I used to get in Microsoft Windows. I don't mind if they include the technical terms for those who understand it, but a plain English explanation for the rest of us (who make up most of us) should've been up on the site ages ago. Anyhow, it's been two weeks, I don't have my shorts, and I don't know who to blame, but everyone involved elicits little black cartoon clouds over my head.

(UPDATE: Chris Lindland, the founder of Cordarounds himself, looked into my order and resolved the situation and knocked $20 off my order for the inconvenience. It's surreal to have the founder of a company answering your customer service e-mail, but suffice to say I'm happy for the personal touch and resolution. It's the old business adage that you can get a customer even more loyal than the one you might have had with a smooth order if you resolve an order gone awry with a quick apology and resolution and some compensation for the customer's trouble. It's well worth the customer goodwill in the long run. I'm still not happy about the UPS status messaging, however.)

It just reminds me that Amazon does with its online retailing experience appears simple but is in fact quite rare. I worked there for so many years that much of that I just took for granted, but being reliable and not doing goofy things with your website messaging and functionality are still enough to differentiate you on the web.

Most days I can't imagine how I used to live without the web, but somedays, like today, I just glare at my screen and shake my head in disapproval.

Technorati Tags: web

Coupon capital of the world

How to opt out of various forms of junk mail (the kind still delivered by a human being). Especially useful for LA-ngelites especially because I've never lived anywhere that subjected me to more grocery store mailers and envelopes stuffed with coupons. I barely have enough time to get my mail each day, let alone sift through it to clip coupons.

Technorati Tags: howto, LA, marketing

Wealth of Nations

A few interesting articles...

Why are some nations wealthier than others? In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond pointed to differences in geography.

In his new book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, economics professor Greg Clark identifies the main culprit as differences in quality of labor.

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Bruce Schneier discusses correspondent inference theory and why that evolutionary brain glitch undermines terrorism. Schneier based his article on a paper by Max Abrams in International Security titled "Why Terrorism Does Not Work" (PDF). All very fascinating and insightful.

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Joel on Software rants against the scourge of anonymous comments on the web. He's not saying anything new, but it's good to see the backlash continue. Reading long comment threads on most posts is a depressing thing.

Technorati Tags: book, economics, terrorism, security, web

Talk of the Town

Two interesting pieces from this week's New Yorker Talk of the Town are online.

Atul Gawande gives a solid overview of our nation's healthcare problems in light of SiCKO.

The documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has more than a few insufferable traits. He is manipulative, smug, and self-righteous. He has no interest in complexity. And he mocks the weak as well as the powerful. For all that, his movie about the American health-care system, “Sicko,” is a revelation. And what makes this especially odd to say is that the movie brings to light nothing that the media haven’t covered extensively for years.

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The finger of blame points to an obstacle different from the one the movie suggests: us.

Our health-care morass is like the problems of global warming and the national debt—the kind of vast policy failure that is far easier to get into than to get out of. Americans say that they want leaders who will take on these problems. Large majorities profess support for fundamental change. Yet when it comes to specific solutions we balk. A big reason is the cost. Even though universal health coverage can reduce the system’s over-all expense—for instance, by granting everyone access to preventive care and to prompt, consistent treatment for chronic illnesses—any plausible approach will shift substantial costs from the private sector to taxpayers. The cheapest proposals circulating would still require more than a hundred billion dollars a year in public funds—around a thousand dollars per American household.

On a somewhat related note, James Surowiecki proffers an explanation for the apparent conflict between American consumers' desire for higher fuel efficiency standards and for SUV's.

What’s happening here? Back in the nineteen-seventies, an economist named Thomas Schelling, who later won the Nobel Prize, noticed something peculiar about the N.H.L. At the time, players were allowed, but not required, to wear helmets, and most players chose to go helmet-less, despite the risk of severe head trauma. But when they were asked in secret ballots most players also said that the league should require them to wear helmets. The reason for this conflict, Schelling explained, was that not wearing a helmet conferred a slight advantage on the ice; crucially, it gave the player better peripheral vision, and it also made him look fearless. The players wanted to have their heads protected, but as individuals they couldn’t afford to jeopardize their effectiveness on the ice. Making helmets compulsory eliminated the dilemma: the players could protect their heads without suffering a competitive disadvantage. Without the rule, the players’ individually rational decisions added up to a collectively irrational result. With the rule, the outcome was closer to what players really wanted.

The same phenomenon is, to some extent, at work in the fuel-economy debate.

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The results of this size-and-power arms race are easy to see: between 1984 and 2002, the average vehicle got twenty per cent heavier and its zero-to-sixty acceleration improved by twenty-five per cent, while fuel efficiency stagnated. This is not because of technological difficulties or a conspiracy on the part of the auto industry. It’s because automakers have listened to car buyers, and put their energy into making vehicles bigger and faster, rather than more efficient. In calling for a law requiring better gas mileage in our cars, then, voters are really saying that they’re unhappy with the collective result of the choices they make as buyers. Sometimes, they know, we need to save ourselves from ourselves.

Perhaps something similar works against healthcare reform. Many people desire universal healthcare but don't want to foot the bill. As Bryan Caplan notes in The Myth of the Rational Voter, citizens often ask shake one first for more government programs while punching a ballot for lower taxes on the other.

Maybe you can't have it all.

Technorati Tags: cars, economics, healthcare, medicine, newyorker

Thanks to the linear forward motion of time it's Friday

Jim Jannard reports that the Red team has been able to shoot useable footage with the Red One rated at ISO 4000. Pretty amazing.

David Lynch to direct a commercial for Gucci's next perfume.

MIT neuroscientists identified the neuronal mechanics of déjà vu. Much to my disappointment, they have nothing to do with a glitch in the Matrix.

A few sites that I've just started playing with: Swaptree is a site that allows you to swap media products with other people. You pay for postage. I may start listing all my stuff on here since I've since resigned myself to the fact that most of my old DVDs an CDs and books are just about worthless used. Geni is a free website that allows you to build and maintain a family tree. Everyone you add to your tree can then build on it, and in just a week or two my tree has sprouted into something resembling a small shrub.

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, medicine, commercial, Red, science

Spiderman the musical?!

Marvel is in pre-production on Spider-Man the musical, to be directed by Tony-winner Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge.

Nice Flickr collection of the evocative name placards on apartment complexes here in Santa Monica. I agree with the photographer - these are the sole redeeming feature of the otherwise fugly apartment architecture ubiquitous in Santa Monica (and Los Angeles in general). You've never seen so much stucco and old shag carpet.

Kaoru Kubo is the famous voice heard on Airport Limousine buses ferrying passengers from Narita Airport to Tokyo. Very soothing.

A montage of beautiful title sequences by Kuntzel+Deygas who did the titles for Catch Me If You Can, among others.

Classified government report says Al-Qaeda is the strongest it's been since 9/11. How did this country ever elect Dubya? Perhaps Bryan Caplan is right.

Technorati Tags: LA, musical, photography, politics, travel

Decongestant high

I feel like something radioactive is bubbling in my sinuses. I'm not sure if it's the result of taking decongestants for two days straight now. For some reason all my decongestants seem to all be dosed at two pills every four hours. So sometime in the middle of every night I have to wake up coughing to death like a seventy year old smoker attached to an oxygen tank. Then I rush to take two more pills and lie there coughing until the medicine takes effect. Longer lasting doses please.

I apologize in advance for all the people I may have infected during my stay in Seattle. Tough to balance being sick with wanting to catch up with people.

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As a tribute to Radiohead's OK Computer, Stereogum asked some of its favorite musicians for covers of tracks from that much beloved album.

Clever commercial for...well, just wait for the punch line (Quicktime).

Watched a bit of the home run derby the other day and had to wonder who thought it was a good idea to have a crowd of eight year old boys who don't know how to catch a baseball waddling around the outfield running into each other while people like Vladimir Guerrero swing as hard as they can trying to hit the ball out of the stadium, and when they miss they hit searing laser line drives into the outfield. One of these years one of those kids will get hit flush in the face and go down like a criminal hit with a taser, and won't that be an awkward moment for Bud Selig.

Orlando Bloom's dirtstache.

Technorati Tags: baseball, commercial, marketing, sports, video

Live from the Emerald City

This post broadcast from the Emerald City, where yours truly attended Audrey and Matt's lovely wedding this weekend (some pics here). Seattle's gorgeous summer weather arrived early (for the Pacific Northwest) this year; it's actually warmer here than in Los Angeles. The only problem is that I have one of the worst summer colds I've ever experienced and have been hacking myself awake every night for a few hours. I'm popping decongestants like they're SweeTarts. If this is my last post ever, know that I probably choked to death on my own phlegm in the middle of the night.

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Telekinesis is an iPhone Remote application that allows you to access files on your computer via your iPhone.

Red is a popular brand name for high end products. Besides the camera, we now have SRAM working on a sub 2000g component group called Red (for those of you who are non-cyclists, a component group is all the stuff that goes on your bike frame (outside of your wheels and pedals and handlebars; components include your cranks and derailleurs and brake levers, stuff like that). Always good to have a bit of competition for the two market leaders, Shimano and Campagnolo.

The rumors are confirmed: Dan Patrick is leaving ESPN. The peak of ESPN's quality was when Patrick and Keith Olbermann hosted The Big Show. He faded from view for me in recent years as he moved over to the radio. I didn't even own a radio in NYC.

Dress like Roger Federer at Wimbledon. You're sure to impress in your all-white blazer and warm-up trousers when you show up for local club match, at least until you pull your hamstring in the third game. That was some final between Federer and Nadal, by the way. Those two epitomize the peak of the modern tennis game now; compare that to, say, footage of an Edberg-Becker final from back in the day and it's a totally different game.

You think you're always waiting a long time for the woman in your life to get ready? Lián Amaris Sifuentes took it to another level. She went through the usual preparations for a date but slowed them down to fill 72 hours, and she performed it in Union Square this weekend (so close to my old apartment!). NYU professor R. Luke Dubois shot the performance on three high-def camcorders and will compress it into a 72 minute video. Dubois has used this technique before, compressing previous Academy Award Best Picture winners into one minute. Some examples are posted here (Amadeus or Titanic, e.g.). That's what it must be like to have one's life flash before one's eyes. Trippy.

Technorati Tags: apple, art, cycling, ESPN, gadgets, iPhone, tennis, software, sports, tech

iNotes

Very little evidence supporting theory that poverty breeds terrorism. I find that reassuring.

In a Q&A about some device called the iPhone, Walt Mossberg says Apple will add Flash support to the iPhone browser through an early software update.

Alessandro Petacchi out of the Tour de France after doping charge. His urine sample after the third of his five stage wins at this year's Giro d'Italia showed an unusually high level of albutamol, an asthma treatment. He holds a therapeutic use exemption for its use, but he exceeded the permitted level of 1,000 nanograms/millileter. Well, there goes the top sprinter in the Tour. I'll still watch, though. I just got back on my bike the other day for the first time in ages, and on the 4th I went with Tory for a climb up Malibu Canyon Road. That climb kicked my butt all over the road but I survived to summit.

Crazy battle at Kruger National Park in Africa, caught on video. Some unlikely twists and turns. I think I caught Jeff Van Gundy in there, hanging onto the leg of a Cape Buffalo. I've seen enough specials to know that Cape Buffalo never leave a man behind (thx to Mark for the referral).

Verizon COO Jack Plating sends internal memo titled iWhatever, throws out some brave talk in the face of the iPhone. He is true in that the network is Verizon's first and most powerful advantage. But Verizon handsets are not impressive at all.

I had lunch with Robert today, and the cafe was broadcasting highlights from Wimbledon. We were talking about Federer's loss in the French Open final to Nadal, and Robert thought that a big problem is that Federer was not extending on his first serve. He was keeping his first serve motion in too close, resulting in his ghastly first serve percentage. You wouldn't be able to tell from the final score, but based on the % of points Federer won on his first serve, he would have won that much had his first serve gone in more. One of these years, Federer will break through against Nadal at the French. He's played well enough to do so in the past, but it just hasn't happened there at Philippe Chatrier.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cycling, economics, gadgets, iPhone, nature, politics, sociology, tech, tennis, terrorism, video, web, youtube

Cloverfield

Before The Transformers opening night showing, a trailer played for a J.J. Abrams movie coming out Jan 18, 2008. There's a teaser website for the movie that consists, right now, of just a single photo. The movie is known right now just by the internal name Cloverfield. The trailer made a brief appearance on YouTube before Paramount launched a lightning bolt of a lawyer and smote it into the ether. It looks to be some monster attack on NYC movie, but shot with handheld camcorders from the perspective of people on the ground. Creative trailer.

So to see the trailer, you have to go sit through The Transformers. I can't in good conscience recommend that, but I do suspect that if the Transformers played a big role in your childhood, you will get some pleasure from watching in the company of fellow Transformer-philes. Otherwise, it will probably strike you as the silliest use of someone else's $150 million.

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People are being deceived by SPF ratings and false labels on sunscreens and getting burned. Sunscreens are tested by applying 2 milligrams per square centimeter of body, so you should apply about two ounces to cover your body. But most people put on much less. A shortcut offered in this article is "Apply about a teaspoon of sunscreen to your face and a shot glass of it to your body."

Here's a list of the best sunscreens. Darn, I guess my Neutrogena Sunblock isn't that hot at UVA protection after all. This stuff is important to me now that I live in the land of perfect weather. It has been about 75 degrees and sunny for nine thousand days straight now.

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T-Mobile is launching a cellphone service in which you can make calls for free when your phone can connect to a T-Mobile wi-fi hot spot. It's a good thing for consumers when data streams start to merge. With this and Apple's entry into the handset market, perhaps the mobile phone industry will get a kick start. It's about time competition improved cell phone devices, services, and prices.

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Whoa! David Pogue, branching out into musical comedy.

Technorati Tags: film, gadgets, health, humor, iPhone, mobile, movies, nytimes, phone, pogue, trailer, video, youtube

A "reversal"

Joey Chestnut unseated six-time winner and reigning champion of the Nathan's hot dog champion Takeru Kobayashi by eating 66 hot dogs to Kobayashi's 63 in 12 minutes. Judges deducted from Kobayashi's final count because he suffered a "reversal"--a euphemism for vomiting--after the 12 minutes were up. 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes works out to 1 hot dog consumed every 10.9 seconds, a rate which has me contemplating a reversal just thinking about it.

No one, even Chestnut or Kobayashi, had cracked 60 hot dogs in 12 minutes before, so clearly they're pushing each other, and the grand sport of competitive eating, to new heights.

Joey Chestnut is a great name. If he weren't a competitive eater he could be an adult film star.

Technorati Tags: food, eating

Pepper

Lots of good stuff in this week's New Yorker:

• James Surowiecki gives an overview of prediction markets which he is qualified to do since he wrote The Wisdom of Crowds
• Alex Ross on Sibelius
• A short piece by David Sedaris
• A short story by Stuart Dybek
• Louis Menand reviews Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
• Anthony Lane reviews The Transformers and Rescue Dawn

MacArthur Grant winner Luis von Ahn is using online games to allow humans to help solve computing problems. For example, he's using human evaluations of photos to give computers an aesthetic judgment sensibility. The games, when they're show ready, will be online here.

Taiwanese director Edward Yang died yesterday of complications from colon cancer. He was 59. His film Yi Yi is humane and moving, not to mention a fascinating specimen of Asian long-shot cinema.

AllofMP3 now officially dead, shut down by the Russian government. It seems, however, to have arisen from the dead under a new URL.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, music, newyorker, tech

Colossal squid caught in Antarctica

As a huge giant squid fan, you'd think I knew of the even larger species Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni or colossal squid. Well, now I do because fishermen captured a male in Antarctica. Is the colossal squid really a different species, or did some overzealous scientists just catch one and decide to one up their predecessors?

This specimen weighed about 990 pounds, and, added a New Zealand professor, "would yield calamari rings the size of tractor tires." That sounds like a Chili's appetizer.

Technorati Tags: giant, nature, science, squid

iPhone--it was who we thought it was

David Pogue publishes the first official iPhone review I've seen yet in the NYTimes. Very comprehensive and worth reading for all who want a balanced report from someone who's tested it firsthand. Some highlights and lowlights:

• the glass screen doesn't scratch easily though it smudges
• the software is fast and beautiful and simple to use
• the phone is fun to use; once you buy the phone, you choose your phone plan at home in iTunes
• call quality is average and dependent on your AT&T signal strength
• e-mail and the web browser are great, and so is the battery life (Pogue suspects you'll recharge once every other day); however, someday the battery loses its charge and will have to be sent to Apple for replacement
• no chat program, voice dialing, or memory card slot
• you can't install programs from anyone other than Apple
• web browser can't handle Java or Flash
• the 2MP camera is good, but only for motionless, well-lit subjects, and it doesn't capture video or send MMS photos (i.e., picture messages). =(
• a biggie: typing on the screen keyboard can be frustrating, and Pogue doesn't see it besting the BlackBerry on that front
• the biggest issue all along for me is confirmed, to my dismay: AT&T's network is lousy
• the EDGE network is super slow; web browsing will be painful

After the crush of hype, it turns out most of what was rumored and suspected about the device turns out to be true. Since I always carry my iPod and cell phone with me, the iPhone is attractive as a way to consolidate gadgets, and it sure would be great to get the real-time traffic reports via Google Maps here in eternally-congested LA. However, I had such a lousy experience with AT&T (in its Cingular guise) that I feel comfortable not waiting in line on Friday. I really wish Apple had found a better partner for this venture.

UPDATE: Walt Mossberg has his review of the iPhone up now as well. Here are some of his thoughts, which confirm my worst fear, that the iPhone is held back by being tethered to AT&T's network (when it isn't connected via wi-fi). Overall, he still liked it, but like Pogue, notes that it isn't a grand slam:

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.
The Apple phone combines intelligent voice calling, and a full-blown iPod, with a beautiful new interface for music and video playback. It offers the best Web browser we have seen on a smart phone, and robust email software. And it synchronizes easily and well with both Windows and Macintosh computers using Apple’s iTunes software.

It has the largest and highest-resolution screen of any smart phone we’ve seen, and the most internal memory by far. Yet it is one of the thinnest smart phones available and offers impressive battery life, better than its key competitors claim.

It feels solid and comfortable in the hand and the way it displays photos, videos and Web pages on its gorgeous screen makes other smart phones look primitive.

The iPhone’s most controversial feature, the omission of a physical keyboard in favor of a virtual keyboard on the screen, turned out in our tests to be a nonissue, despite our deep initial skepticism. After five days of use, Walt — who did most of the testing for this review — was able to type on it as quickly and accurately as he could on the Palm Treo he has used for years. This was partly because of smart software that corrects typing errors on the fly.

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won’t come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can’t use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile’s network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T’s coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan.

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can’t run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

The iPhone compensates by being one of the few smart phones that can also use Wi-Fi wireless networks. When you have access to Wi-Fi, the iPhone flies on the Web. Not only that, but the iPhone automatically switches from EDGE to known Wi-Fi networks when it finds them, and pops up a list of new Wi-Fi networks it encounters as you move. Walt was able to log onto paid Wi-Fi networks at Starbucks and airports, and even used a free Wi-Fi network at Fenway Park in Boston to email pictures taken during a Red Sox game.

But this Wi-Fi capability doesn’t fully make up for the lack of a fast cellular data capability, because it is impractical to keep joining and dropping short-range Wi-Fi networks while taking a long walk, or riding in a cab through a city.

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Short interview with Atul Gawande in the Freakonomics blog.

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Today is the day of silence for Pandora and other Internet radio sites to protest the increase in licensing fees for online radio (a move driven in large part by the RIAA). Save Net Radio!

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The Beastie Boys' are on Flickr.

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Paul Shirley, having played with both Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, assesses the possibility of the two of them playing on the same team:

Having spent a similar amount of time in the semi-intimate company of both men, I can say confidently that two people couldn't be more different. Kevin Garnett is one of the most impressive humans I've ever been around.

Kobe Bryant isn't.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, camera, flickr, gadgets, gawande, medicine, mobile, music, NBA, nytimes, phone, photography, pogue, puppy, radio, review, sports

Good Cop, Baby Cop

Another Funny or Die skit starring Will Ferrell and that strangely precocious baby Pearl in her final performance. Who the heck is operating that camcorder? Easy on the zoom button amigo.