Talking to myself

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I went with a crew from work to see I Am Legend on Friday night at Mann's Chinese Theater. I love the sound system there. Somewhere along the way they decided to solve that instead of offering the hearing impaired separate earphones they'd just kill two birds with one stone and crank the volume up to such ear-splitting levels that you walk out of the theater with your hair sticking back as if you'd been riding on the highway in a convertible with the top down. We even caught the new CGI-plant THX trailer (not up on the THX website yet), and there are few theaters better suited to demo a THX trailer in than the Chinese.


[I've never met anyone who enjoys THX, Dolby Digital, and DTS trailers more than I do. Of all of those, the THX trailers are my favorite. I whooped when it was over, embarrassing some of the people sitting with me. Another random thing that gives me an bizarrely disproportionate thrill: when Phil Collins goes all falsetto to sing "crying at the top of my lungs" in "In Too Deep" off of Invisible Touch; I have no idea why I just thought of that]


The "dark seekers" in I Am Legend did not achieve THX certification, if such a thing existed for CGI creatures. They looked like something out of a video game. It's a compliment to say that something in a video game looks like it came out of a movie, but the reverse is not so flattering. The last man on earth may not be alone, but it feels like he is because the bad guys chasing him are so poorly rendered.


Will Smith spends a lot of time wandering around Manhattan with his dog Sam, and, in the absence of other human beings, talks to everything he can: his dog, store mannequins, computers, and himself, in the grand tradition of Tom Hanks speaking to his volleyball in Cast Away. I don't think it's just a device to keep the movie interesting (though it does serve that convenient purpose).


In 2003, while on sabbatical, I wandered around South America for five weeks by myself. While in Torres del Paine, I went on a three and a half day trek by myself. I expected to see other people on the trail, but it was the middle of winter, not exactly peak tourist season. For three days, I didn't see a single person, not even way off in the distance. I didn't even see a trace of another person save for a piece of trash at one of the campsites.


In my childhood, I was fine going long periods without conversation, but after a day and a half on the trail I began talking to myself. I'd use the royal "we" in verbalizing my thoughts.


"Okay, what do we feel like eating?" I'd say, rummaging through my backpack for energy bars. "Do we want chocolate chip or peanut butter crunch?"


"Where the hell am I?" I'd say, unfolding my trail map and gazing up at the sky as if I had the ability to circumnavigate by the orientation of the sun.


Later, in the evening, as I lay shivering in my sleeping bag, I'd mutter, "Who the hell thought it was a good idea to trek through a Patagonian wilderness in the dead of winter?"


Bad WOM

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Heard from a couple folks who saw The Golden Compass Friday...extrapolate from just those few data points and the prognostication for this expensive fantasy epic is poor, despite the studio spending many years sanitizing the movie of the book's more overt religious content in an effort to appeal to the masses. Will Smith and I Am Legend are going to eat this movie for breakfast next weekend.


How to turn off Beacon in Facebook

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Facebook has been beaten up a lot this past week about its Beacon product, and rightly so. I heard the company had backed off on this feature, but when i checked my account last Thursday I had still been opted into this feature. Here's how to turn it off:



  1. Log into Facebook

  2. Click on "privacy" in the upper right (the link should read "lack of privacy," no?)

  3. Click on "External Websites"

  4. Check the box that says "Don't allow any websites to send stories to my profile"

  5. Click the Save button


Lifehacker Australia has a note about how to block Facebook's Beacon from tracking your offsite activity even if you've turned off Beacon notifications in privacy settings.


I don't think this controversy itself will cause Facebook to jump the shark as others have prognosticated, but it does solidify my impression of the brand of Facebook as ethically questionable, a site you have to keep a close eye on. It's the same discomfort you experience when you register at a site and it opts you in by default to receive e-mails from partners, instead of leaving that box unchecked. Facebook has always been aggressive in opting people into features that reveal a lot of what that person is doing (a lot of the site's appeal, beyond its clean design, is the voyeuristic nature of the news feed), but this Beacon affair implies how far they're willing to take things as a default, that ad revenue comes above user privacy. Facebook needs an ombudsman.


This week Hulu was temporarily dinged by Kevin Maney for sharing his Hulu surfing activity with Facebook, something we'd never never do. This is another of the insidious side effects of Beacon, the negative halo it casts on other websites. For a few days, when I heard that one's Amazon purchases would be displayed on Facebook, I thought perhaps Amazon had participated in Beacon. But having worked there, I just couldn't believe that Amazon would have changed so much. And it turned out they hadn't: Amazon does not participate in Facebook's Beacon program. But plenty of people implied that they did. Kevin Maney and other sites can issue retractions, but plenty of readers will see just the first negative post and never come back to read the retraction.


Facebook is still useful for monitoring what some of my friends are up to, especially younger ones. But I've past my point of peak usage. Facebook is the gossipy friend who shares all your personal details the moment you confide in it, and I'm cutting it back to "need-to-know" basis.



The power of process

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Atul Gawande writes in the New Yorker about the impact of the checklist in the world of medicine. Process is helpful in complex tasks. Having worked at more than one startup now, I've seen this evolution before. The early days, when a company is understaffed, so many massive projects depend on the willpower and energy of a select few. One or two strong and talented personalities drives work to completion. There are so many places something can go wrong or be dropped, but when projects are pulled off, heroes are made.


Over time, though, the scalable route is to hire more specialists and systematize workflows. There are fewer heroes, work becomes more routine, and those who thrive on flying without a checklist move on in chase of the next adrenaline rush.


Two articles from the Sunday NYTimes

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AIDS has peaked. It's not cured, it still afflicts millions of people worldwide, but the number of new infections seems to have peaked in 1998.


***


The joys (or lack thereof) of a green Christmas.



...the 2.6 billion holiday cards sold each year in the United States could fill a landfill the size of a football field 10 stories high, or that those conventional lights on the Christmas tree contribute up to nine times as much greenhouse-gas emissions as the leaner-burning L.E.D. models; or that some Christmas-tree growers use as many as 40 different pesticides, as well as chemical colorants, on their crops.

I found this amusing:



Ms. Perla said she read her children her book — in which Santa’s home at the North Pole is melted by global warming — before bed...

Some easy ways to go green this holiday season, though they might not seem as festive as usual:



  • Don't mail holiday cards and photos. Use e-mail and digital photos instead. With the money you save on cards and postage, purchase a carbon offset and divide it among all your usual card recipients, making a note of it in your e-mail.

  • Use L.E.D. Christmas tree lights, or, if you're willing to do without, just use ornaments.

  • Instead of a real tree, use a fake one. Miss the real tree smell? Buy some pine tree scents. Or make a popcorn strand which will give your living room a pleasant if different scent for the holidays.

  • Instead of cranking up your heater, wear a sweater (something I heard from my mom many a time in my HVAC-deprived youth; she was way ahead of this green movement).

  • Save paper; don't giftwrap or use lots of packing tissue which will just be tossed after being torn up. Instead, use toilet paper which can be re-used afterwards in the bathroom (your lactose-intolerant grandfather will appreciate it after he has one Christmas cookie too many).


One of my coworkers has suggested on more than one occasion that the perfect carbon offset is to kill someone roughly the same age as you who has a similar carbon footprint. Somehow I don't think that passes the "peace on earth and goodwill towards men" holiday theme, but maybe file that away for the new year, when you're making resolutions.


Leica

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In this week's New Yorker, Anthony Lane examines the cult of Leica.


Cult is a good word to use to describe Leica's. I've always coveted one of the M-Series rangefinders, maybe an M3 or an M6. I also have always wanted to own a copy of Cartier-Bresson's out-of-print The Decisive Moment, used copies of which sell for a pretty penny. Cartier-Bresson was to Leica as Michael Jordan was to Nike.


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A tabless Amazon

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Amazon.com has begun the transition away from tabs as a navigation interface. They're probably testing it on some subset of sessions, and I'm actually still not seeing the tabs when signed in, but if they've gone so far as to create an entire page explaining the new navigation then I don't see them changing back.


It's not as large a leap as it once was. Amazon has been down to 3 tabs for a long time now. The first iteration of Amazon was text only. When the music store came along, tabs were added along the top, a green tab for books, a red tab for music. Then came the DVD and Video (VHS) stores, combined in one purple tab. And tabs continued to be added to the right as stores were added. Here's a snapshot from the Internet Wayback Machine from October 1999. Most retail sites with a similar variety of product selection copied the leader and put tabs across the top.


At some point, there were too many stores and not enough room for tabs along the top. Some designer mocked up an Amazon homepage with three rows of tabs as a joke; I probably have a copy of that somewhere in my old work e-mail archives. It looked like the bottom half of some toothy monsters mouth, or a crowded graveyard of retail tombstones. This led, eventually, to a design that aggregated all stores under a single tab that would fly out a list of store links inline.


Even when it was just a bookstore, Amazon's customers started their interactions with the site through search more than any other site feature. It makes sense when the catalog of books is some 2.5 million items long. Now that they've got who knows how many items in their catalog, search must account for some 60% to 70% of how customers dive into the store.


Mostly, though, the end of the tab navigation signals, for me, the passage of time, not just in my life, but on the web.


Leave Nothing

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Michael Mann was supposed to come speak to one of my film school classes spring quarter. The day he was supposed to show up, our instructors told us he'd been pulled off to do a commercial for a high profile company. We were all disappointed and a bit surprised. A television commercial?


Well, now we've all seen that commercial. And you know what? It's not bad. Personally, I'd like to see a director's cut which intersperses this on-field footage with Steven Jackson and Shawn Merriman sitting down at a diner, having a chat.



Merriman: You know, we are sitting here, you and I, like a couple of regular fellas. You do what you do, and I do what I gotta do...But I tell you, if it's between you and some poor bastard whose wife you're gonna turn into a widow, brother, you are going down.


Jackson: There is a flip side to that coin...we've been face to face, yeah. But I will not hesitate. Not for a second.






Seven soldiers

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7 soldiers just back from a tour of duty in Iraq write an op-ed in the NYTimes about the state of the counterinsurgency. Their assessment:



To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)



And more:



In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.


Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.


We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.



Field Notes brand notebooks available for order

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Those Field Notes Brand notebooks I mentioned a while back are available for pre-order. I ordered two sets to test out as companions to my Moleskines for note-taking.


I filled about 7 Moleskines taking notes for class last year, and I was refining my system for using them as I went, adding page numbers and an index to important content in the front.


For sheer portability and durability, a paper notebook still bests a laptop. I'm getting old and need to write down more and more.




Wired to Win: Surviving the Tour de France

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How did I not hear about this movie sooner? Maybe being a film student has really insulated me from the world.


This IMAX movie, five years in the making, follows riders Jimmy Caspar and Baden Cooke in the 2003 Tour de France. But instead of focusing only on cycling or the Tour, the movie uses the two riders experiences to study brain science. I'm interested mainly in seeing IMAX footage from inside the race. The images of cyclists flying through the French countryside will no doubt evoke in me a near spiritual ache to be back in France, crawling up the side of an Alpine mountain like an ant on roller skates. I felt a related longing recently when the "camera" rose up over a rooftop to reveal Paris laid out before me (Ratatouille).


The movie's website includes a podcast you can download and listen to on your portable music player in the movie theater though how many viewers will watch the movie a second time to take advantage of that?


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Medical mystery

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Two articles on a remarkable Nairobi prostitute named Agnes Munyiva who has had sex with hundreds of HIV infected men yet has remained HIV free: a short article at Time and a longer one from a month back in The Observer. Agnes and 24 other Nairobi prostitutes are being studied to try and understand how they remain HIV-free despite behaving no differently than other prostitutes. Do they have a natural immunity?


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Optical Heterodyning

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Researchers at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs have developed a prototype of a heterodyne light field camera that allows you to change the focus point of an image after it's shot. Essentially, if you didn't set the DOF focus range on the right portion of the image, you can adjust it in post. It does this unblurring by increasing the DOF by 10X.


I imagine that in the future, consumer point-and-shoot digital cameras will have all sorts of features like this built in. With memory growing cheaper by the month, future point-and-shoots will allow even the worst photographer in the world to take an in-focus, properly exposed photo. I foresee camera in the future snapping multiple exposures of an image so you can simply select the right exposure afterwards (you can do this to some extent by shooting RAW today, but most photography novices shoot JPGs).


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