People no longer have to buy computers that overserve

A Mac or PC is a superior experience for traditional computing activities, at least according to traditional measurements like speed or efficiency, but an iPad is simpler and more approachable, and it does other things as well.

(This, of course, is why Macs aren’t going away. In fact, as Phil Schiller noted at the end of this great Macworld piece marking the Mac’s 30-year anniversary, the iPad has freed the Mac to focus even more on power users going forward.)

Ultimately, it is the iPad that is in fact general purpose. It does lots of things in an approachable way, albeit not as well as something that is built specifically for the task at hand. The Mac or PC, on the other hand, is a specialized device, best compared to the grand piano in the living room:2 unrivaled in the hands of a master, and increasingly ignored by everyone else.

So writes Ben Thompson in The General-Purpose iPad and the Specialist Mac. I agree. For a long time, one of the debates was whether an iPad was just a consumption device. While I think it's silly to argue that you can't create on your iPad, I do largely use it for consumption purposes. I'd much rather do many things on my desktop or laptop than my iPad: write, build spreadsheets, wireframe, create presentations, edit video.

But there are plenty of activities which the iPad and iPhone are far better devices for the job because they are portable, light, sensitive to touch, and, not to be underestimated, always on (while I leave my laptop on most of the time, it still takes longer to wake it up and get it going than my iPad or iPhone). Browsing web pages. Reading books. Reading my email, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Messaging.

For some activities, the interaction method of finger on screen is both more intimate and simpler. For example, dragging my finger across the screen to adjust brightness of photos in Snapseed is more pleasurable than taking my mouse and finding a tiny slider handle with my cursor and then moving it in tiny increments. Double tapping and having mobile Safari zoom a column of content on the web is wonderful, I wish I could do that on my laptop.

It's clear that for many years, my desktop and laptop have been too much computer for many jobs. For many people, all they needed a desktop or laptop for was reading email, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching streaming video. For those tasks, a desktop or laptop computer overserved their needs, but those were the only types of computers we had so we used it as such.

Now that the world has more choices in computing devices for the job, many are choosing a tool that doesn't overserve, and that is more often than not an iPad or smartphone. For the average household, those are much cheaper to purchase than a laptop or desktop.

I still love sitting down in front of a giant monitor hooked up to my old Mac Pro in my office at home, but the sales figures don't lie. That's now the minority.

California's silly food handling law

A great sushi chef in another state once complained to me about a health code violation he'd received for making sushi without gloves. "Making sushi with gloves is like making love with a condom," he said. "It just isn't the same." Well, as of Jan. 1, California's law has changed so that there can no longer be any bare-handed contact with foods that won't be cooked. That means baked goods, salads - and yes, even sushi. 
 

More here. Offensive to both libertarians and sushi fans.

I'm all for hand washing in restaurants, and I do so at home before prepping food, but I would hate having to wear single-use gloves to cook. The tactile feedback from touching and handle ingredients with your fingers and hands is very useful. By feel I can grab the same pinch of salt each time, sense how ripe a vegetable is, feel whether a steak is medium rare. A glove removes some of that sensitivity.

There's a meaningful debate to be had on California's foie gras ban, but this new law is just silly.

I Want Sandy

Does anyone remember I Want Sandy? It was one of the first virtual assistants out there, launched in 2007, I believe, but it shut down just a short while later after its creator moved on to another job.

I really loved I Want Sandy, and no other virtual assistants that have popped up since have captivated me the same way. Watching the Spike Jonze movie Her, I was reminded of why I was so taken by I Want Sandy: it was the method of interaction.

You used the service by sending Sandy emails in human readable language: “Sandy, remind me to pick up the dry cleaning at 6:50pm tonight.” Sandy would respond with a confirmation, and if I remember correctly you could have Sandy set up to either email you a reminder, text you, or both.

It was essentially a command line interface, and yet the fact that you had to write an email to use it was subtly and critically different. Though I knew it was just software on the other end, interacting with it in a manner typically reserved for interacting with other humans created a powerful illusion of intimacy and humanity. Email isn't even the most efficient way of interacting with software, you have to wait for a reply email confirmation, and sometimes if Sandy didn't understand my command she'd reply asking me to clarify and I'd have to change my command and resend it. With an AI built right into one's calendar, you could fix such an issue immediately, and yet my brain converted the muscle memory of writing emails into a sensation of conversing with another person.

The most efficient way to do something is not always the most human. My first short in film school had to be shot and edited on film. It was a giant pain in the ass to use the giant and ancient K-E-M flatbed editing machines to edit our film. I spent several all-nighters one of the UCLA's editing rooms splicing and taping together strips of my 16mm black and white film, running the new cuts forward and backwards.

Our next short we edited on Final Cut Pro on the computer, and it was a magnitude of order faster and easier. However, editing a digitized abstraction of the actual film itself put a mental barrier between me and my movie that removed some of the intimacy from the process. I felt more detached from my movie than I had when I had been manipulating it with my own fingertips. It was so fun, using a scroll wheel to ramp up the speed at which my film played forward or backward, even if the machines often broke down.

The shift from mouse and keyboard interfaces to touchscreen interfaces is another example of a method of interaction that feels more human, and if voice interaction ever gets to the point where we're speaking to our computers like Joaquin Phoenix speaks to his operating system in Her, that will be an even larger leap towards more human (humane?) interfaces and interactions.

Apple and Google are taking steps in that direction with Siri and Google Now, but I'd love a few more human touches. I think they'd make users much more tolerant of the current defects of those systems. Creating an illusion of personality is difficult, of course, but tiny flourishes go a long way. One time I recall sending IWantSandy an email at 3 in the morning asking “her” to remind me of something the next morning. Her reply began with “Wow! You're up late! Get some sleep soon” or something like that. Simple to code, powerfully effective.

When I get reminders on iOS or Android of meetings, they always come in cold and flat. Instead of just “1 on 1 with Joe at 1:00pm” popping up with a chirp on my phone, what if it were phrased “Eugene, don't forget you have a 1 on 1 with Joe in 10 minutes!” What if it came in via a text message, as if a person were texting me? What if there were a smiley emoji at the end of the text?

I know some folks would hate that type of false anthropomorphism, but perhaps you could choose whether to turn it on or off.

I still miss Sandy. For a short period it seemed as if some folks might resurrect her, but nothing came of it. I keep thinking one of these days I'll find a note from her in my inbox.

The genius of Greg Maddux

Growing up a Cubs fan, Greg Maddux was my favorite Cub ever, and the day Larry Himes let Maddux slip away as a free agent to the Atlanta Braves over a few million dollars remains one of the great stains on a heavily bloodied Cubs flag. I was so angry I sulked for weeks like a child whose parents have divorced.

One of the reasons I loved watching Maddux pitch was how unconventional his style was. Standing just 6'0" and weighing only 170 lbs, he didn't throw hard, and perhaps none of his pitches would be graded by scouts as an 80 (though his changeup was exceptional). His greatest strengths were his brain and his poise.

Many stories have been written about his understanding of both pitching and the hitters he was facing, but a recent article by Thomas Boswell in the Washington Post pinpoints a fascinating insight that might hold the secret to his mastery.

First, Maddux was convinced no hitter could tell the speed of a pitch with any meaningful accuracy. To demonstrate, he pointed at a road a quarter-mile away and said it was impossible to tell if a car was going 55, 65 or 75 mph unless there was another car nearby to offer a point of reference.

“You just can’t do it,” he said. Sometimes hitters can pick up differences in spin. They can identify pitches if there are different releases points or if a curveball starts with an upward hump as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. But if a pitcher can change speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.

“Except,” Maddux said, “for that [expletive] Tony Gwynn.”

Because of this inherent ineradicable flaw in hitters, Maddux’s main goal was to “make all of my pitches look like a column of milk coming toward home plate.” Every pitch should look as close to every other as possible, all part of that “column of milk.” He honed the same release point, the same look, to all his pitches, so there was less way to know its speed — like fastball 92 mph, slider 84, change-up 76.

From reading The Sports Gene by David Epstein earlier last year, I learned that much of what a professional baseball hitter does is predicated on being able to read the motion of the pitcher and the rotation of the baseball. It's why major league hitters flailed helplessly against Olympic women's softball pitcher Jennie Finch despite the fact that her pitches reached home plate in the same amount of time as major league pitches and came with the larger hittable surface area of a softball.

It seemed that Maddux knew that long before the studies mentioned in Epstein's book. Amazing. But that's not all.

Then he explained that I couldn’t tell his pitches apart because his goal was late quick break, not big impressive break. The bigger the break, the sooner the ball must start to swerve and the more milliseconds the hitter has to react; the later the break, the less reaction time. Deny the batter as much information — speed or type of last-instant deviation — until it is almost too late.

But not entirely too late: Maddux didn’t want swings and misses for strikeouts, but preferred weak defensive contact and easy outs. He sought pitches that looked hittable and identical — getting the hitter to commit to swing — but weren’t. Any pitch that didn’t conform to this, even if it looked good, was scrapped as inefficient.

It's another secret of pitching that he seemed to have understood long before others: the batter must commit to swinging or not before a major league pitch has made it halfway to the plate, so after a certain point any unanticipated break in that pitch is not something the batter can react to. On TV, his sinking fastball with armside tailing action was a thing of beauty to watch, like spherical frisbee that always toppled to one side, but to the batter it must have been even more infuriating, like trying to swat a fly with chopstick.

Maddux was so good at inducing the weak contact he discussed above that he had a stat named after him: a Maddux is a complete game shutout requiring no more than 99 pitches.

Let's hope he writes a book about pitching someday, the pitching version of Ted Williams famous tome on hitting.

Will Federer adapt?

In the past six months, Federer has beaten Juan Martin del Potro and taken sets from Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic. But he's also had some shocking results. He's not only losing now to guys who are younger and stronger. Hewitt, after all, is 32, the same age as Federer — in fact, a few months older than Federer. Tommy Robredo, who beat Federer at the U.S. Open in September, is 31. The problem isn't just that Federer has more days now where he wakes up with a stiff back or in need of an extra cup of coffee. The problem isn't just that his movement is a microsecond slower, or that he doesn't quite have the flexibility he once did, or that he doesn't anticipate as well as he did when he was dominant. It's not just his body. It's his head. The shanks are what you notice; that whiff is what you remember. But the shanks aren't why he lost that first set to Hewitt — nor why, after settling down, playing decently, and winning the second set, he went on to lose the match. He has lost because he bunted his returns and tried to rip his groundstrokes, and it was hard to see any purpose, any plan. The standard advice, almost always, for almost anyone, is to be aggressive, but the way he tried to be aggressive was bizarre. He took big risks at strange moments, unloading on forehands that should have been defensive shots. He mistook pace for boldness, ran through standard forehands, and seemed to have no clue what he wanted to do with the ball next. He lined up a rally ball and hit it two feet long and five feet wide. He hesitated before charging the net and then hit approach shots that turned him into a sitting duck. I'm being unfair — sort of. In the second set he found his range. But it wasn't enough. And when the pressure was on most, when he had break points on Hewitt's serve, his shots once again broke down.

Louisa Thomas in Grantland on Roger Federer.

Federer is old for a tennis player, and he also plays in one of the most competitive ages for men's tennis. What's difficult for an athlete, I imagine, because I am not one, must be facing up to the fact that one must change one's strategy because of the a decline in physical skills. Federer is not the tennis god he once was, and yet the memory of those days must still be so vivid. He's only 32, after all, he's not that many years removed from making the semifinals of every Grand Slam with frightening regularity.

But tennis is a game of slim margins. Winners of matches usually win by the slightest of margins on total points. In last year's U.S. Open, for example, in which Nadal beat Djokovic in four sets, Nadal won 121 points, Djokovic 102, and it was one of the more decisive Nadal wins versus the Djoker. Often just a few points separate the winner from the loser.

Federer's declining hand-eye coordination, stamina, and foot speed all mean that he can't beat other top players just by trying to outplay them in long rallies. The longer the rally, the more his physical deficits are likely to factor into the point's outcome. He has to be more clever, take more smart risks, try to shorten points.

In the past I've been skeptical that Federer would be willing to shift his strategy significantly, but he's at least said some of the right things following the worst year of his career since he ascended to the tennis elite. He's promised to serve and volley more this year. He hired serve and volley great Stefan Edberg as his coach. He's committed to using a larger 98-inch racket from Wilson this season.

I'm skeptical that attacking the net in the modern game is a winning strategy. With modern racket and string technology, it's much easier to pass than in previous ages of tennis, and Djokovic in particular has a devastating return. However, I'm glad to hear Federer acknowledge that he has to try something. I'd love to see him run around more backhands on his return and try to seize the advantage on points using his forehand which remains his most dangerous stroke, albeit not as reliable as in years past.

Changing one's strategy after achieving some level of success, to speak nothing of the historic greatness Federer put on his resume, is so difficult. Perhaps embracing his role as the underdog now will loosen him up to be a more dangerous opponent.