tmonkery

Kai at play

2010-10-31T11:37:00.001-04:00

Kai at play
Originally uploaded by tmonkey

Converting the Stimulus Bill to HTML

2009-02-15T13:08:00.003-05:00

I'm in the process of converting the Stimulus Bill to HTML, first delivered as a document generated in Word, printed, then scanned as a PDF. Terrible. It's semi-searchable, but there's tons of cruft in the text version. I am also contributing my work to the StimulusWiki, which is a far better way of parsing this information.

Here's the page. I'll be updating it over time, and probably adding things to make it easier to read etc.

88 out of 100 ain't bad

2008-08-28T18:29:00.003-04:00

From The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Here's the list of things I haven't eaten yet:

2. Nettle tea
6. Black pudding
16. Epoisses (may have had this -- not sure)
46. Fugu
59. Poutine
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
68. Haggis
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
89. Horse (probably have eaten this but not knowingly)
93. Rose harissa (though I have had harissa, just not with roses)

5 Things I Miss About Japan

2008-08-04T23:07:00.004-04:00

Moist towelettes, steaming hot or deliciously cool, given to you by your server at any restaurant (from high-end more-French-than-French restaurant to humble ramen joint) to wash your face and hands before eating.
Common cleanliness. Barely a stray piece of paper litters the Tokyo Underground, even with all public trashcans removed after the Aum ricin attacks. People are expected to keep their trash and dispose of it in private. You get the distinct impression that even the thought of littering will be met by psychic flogging by thousands of passers-by.
Common courtesy. Sadly, from an American perspective, the Japanese are uncommonly courteous. The bowing might seem to us as somehow forced or strange, but I would bet that 80-90% of the time, when Japanese bow it is earnest. And even if it isn't completely so, it is impossible to execute the movement without feeling some form of humility. I would argue that this is of considerable social value in that it generally elevates the level of discourse. By contrast, here in America, we cling to our guns and bow to no one.
Pushbutton toilets, a sure sign of advanced civilization.
Standard (Toto) toilet interface in Japan
Perfection of Craft, in all things. Something as mundane as wrapping a simple purchase at the grocery store with careful, neat folds of some elegant tissue, speaks to an appreciation for the ephemeral quality of beauty (for which I am sure there is a word in Japanese).

unpatriotic

2008-02-25T01:59:00.001-05:00

unpatriotic
Originally uploaded by tmonkey

The GOP grasp yet again at straws...

Quick Scene Change

2007-09-19T11:05:00.000-04:00

http://view.break.com/368159 - Watch more free videos

A Bangkok market/train thoroughfare.

Attention is the new Pageview

2007-09-13T12:54:00.001-04:00

http://blog.compete.com/2007/02/05/compete-attention-200/

Compete.com is making the first real attempt to establish "Attention" as a metric to measure engagement, displacing the unreliable "pageview". This is their "Compete Attention 200".

I've tried to highlight very quickly the sites I recognized and categorize them by type.

Social Networking
Dating
Virtual Environment

I would argue this is finally the TRUE picture of the competitive landscape, closer than any pageview based metric might have painted, and the good news is that, at least one of the sites I work for is the powerhouse we thought it was. I was actually surprised at just how strong it stacks up to the competition.

In terms of Social Networking Sites, Blackplanet is 4th at #55! after Myspace, Facebook, and Bebo, the usual suspects. Hi5, Tagged, and Friendster are eating our dust.

Some surprises:
blackpeoplemeet is at #176, and asiantown is at #188.
adultfriendfinder is huge at #19.
runescape leads the Virtual Environment category, proving SecondLife to be possibly way overhyped. Gaiaonline is also a major player in the virtual space. We need to learn from these guys.

And what is going on with fanfiction.net and literotica.com? Transmedia at work.

Compete Attention 200™
Attention Rank	Site	Attention Share™
1	myspace.com	11.9%
2	yahoo.com	8.5%
3	msn.com	3.7%
4	ebay.com	3.7%
5	google.com	2.1%
6	aol.com	1.7%
7	pogo.com	1.6%
8	facebook.com	0.97%
9	amazon.com	0.67%
10	craigslist.com	0.64%
11	go.com	0.59%
12	youtube.com	0.56%
13	live.com	0.49%
14	bankofamerica.com	0.37%
15	wikipedia.org	0.35%
16	walmart.com	0.34%
17	mapquest.com	0.29%
18	neopets.com	0.25%
19	adultfriendfinder.com	0.24%
20	aim.com	0.24%
21	runescape.com	0.24%
22	comcast.net	0.23%
23	microsoft.com	0.21%
24	photobucket.com	0.21%
25	sportsline.com	0.21%
26	paypal.com	0.20%
27	cnn.com	0.20%
28	target.com	0.19%
29	gaiaonline.com	0.18%
30	apple.com	0.18%
31	match.com	0.18%
32	wellsfargo.com	0.17%
33	chase.com	0.16%
34	fanfiction.net	0.15%
35	bestbuy.com	0.15%
36	bebo.com	0.15%
37	nfl.com	0.15%
38	wildtangent.com	0.15%
39	iwon.com	0.14%
40	overstock.com	0.14%
41	ask.com	0.13%
42	netflix.com	0.13%
43	careerbuilder.com	0.13%
44	about.com	0.12%
45	dell.com	0.12%
46	monster.com	0.12%
47	jcpenney.com	0.12%
48	literotica.com	0.11%
49	imdb.com	0.11%
50	usatoday.com	0.11%
51	weather.com	0.11%
52	foodnetwork.com	0.11%
53	circuitcity.com	0.11%
54	toysrus.com	0.10%
55	blackplanet.com	0.10%
56	cingular.com	0.099%
57	foxsports.com	0.099%
58	cartoonnetwork.com	0.098%
59	qvc.com	0.097%
60	blogger.com	0.095%
61	excite.com	0.095%
62	citibank.com	0.095%
63	millsberry.com	0.091%
64	xanga.com	0.089%
65	autotrader.com	0.089%
66	realtor.com	0.088%
67	singlesnet.com	0.087%
68	verizonwireless.com	0.085%
69	smashits.com	0.085%
70	sears.com	0.084%
71	capitalone.com	0.082%
72	expedia.com	0.082%
73	plentyoffish.com	0.081%
74	eprize.net	0.081%
75	bellsouth.net	0.080%
76	americangreetings.com	0.080%
77	earthlink.net	0.079%
78	fidelity.com	0.079%
79	livejournal.com	0.078%
80	ancestry.com	0.077%
81	universalnightlife.com	0.076%
82	wachovia.com	0.076%
83	nytimes.com	0.076%
84	everythinggirl.com	0.076%
85	worldwinner.com	0.075%
86	meandmytravel.com	0.075%
87	windowsmedia.com	0.072%
88	eharmony.com	0.072%
89	nick.com	0.072%
90	wamu.com	0.071%
91	pbskids.org	0.071%
92	nextag.com	0.071%
93	victoriassecret.com	0.067%
94	myway.com	0.066%
95	hi5.com	0.066%
96	starware.com	0.064%
97	univision.com	0.063%
98	adobe.com	0.063%
99	gamehouse.com	0.062%
100	youravon.com	0.062%
101	tagged.com	0.062%
102	hsn.com	0.061%
103	travelocity.com	0.061%
104	usps.com	0.060%
105	miniclip.com	0.060%
106	ups.com	0.060%
107	reference.com	0.060%
108	wwe.com	0.059%
109	usbank.com	0.059%
110	lycos.com	0.059%
111	bbc.co.uk	0.059%
112	southwest.com	0.058%
113	kohls.com	0.058%
114	nickjr.com	0.058%
115	classmates.com	0.058%
116	gamefaqs.com	0.058%
117	mcafee.com	0.057%
118	addictinggames.com	0.057%
119	webmd.com	0.057%
120	mywebsearch.com	0.057%
121	t-mobile.com	0.056%
122	foxnews.com	0.056%
123	hp.com	0.055%
124	whitepages.com	0.055%
125	hotfreelayouts.com	0.055%
126	true.com	0.054%
127	bigfishgames.com	0.053%
128	macys.com	0.053%
129	blockbuster.com	0.053%
130	ticketmaster.com	0.052%
131	manhunt.net	0.051%
132	mlb.com	0.051%
133	overture.com	0.051%
134	pch.com	0.051%
135	marketwatch.com	0.051%
136	deviantart.com	0.050%
137	nba.com	0.050%
138	popcap.com	0.049%
139	clubpenguin.com	0.049%
140	orbitz.com	0.048%
141	oldnavy.com	0.048%
142	att.net	0.048%
143	cox.net	0.048%
144	ign.com	0.048%
145	kodakgallery.com	0.047%
146	userplane.com	0.047%
147	scout.com	0.047%
148	stardoll.com	0.046%
149	mypoints.com	0.046%
150	shoplocal.com	0.046%
151	cabelas.com	0.046%
152	nbc.com	0.045%
153	sprintpcs.com	0.045%
154	rivals.com	0.045%
155	americanexpress.com	0.045%
156	weatherbug.com	0.044%
157	netteller.com	0.044%
158	voyeurweb.com	0.044%
159	adam4adam.com	0.044%
160	flickr.com	0.044%
161	funbrain.com	0.043%
162	phoenix.edu	0.043%
163	hornymatches.com	0.043%
164	rr.com	0.043%
165	real.com	0.043%
166	allrecipes.com	0.043%
167	ezboard.com	0.043%
168	xnxx.com	0.043%
169	kbb.com	0.043%
170	webshots.com	0.042%
171	discovercard.com	0.042%
172	download.com	0.042%
173	alt.com	0.042%
174	hallmark.com	0.041%
175	ca.gov	0.041%
176	blackpeoplemeet.com	0.041%
177	aa.com	0.041%
178	icoke.com	0.040%
179	barnesandnoble.com	0.040%
180	llbean.com	0.040%
181	verizon.net	0.039%
182	invisionfree.com	0.039%
183	scottrade.com	0.039%
184	walgreens.com	0.039%
185	lowes.com	0.039%
186	directv.com	0.039%
187	liveperson.net	0.038%
188	asiantown.net	0.038%
189	friendster.com	0.037%
190	geocities.com	0.037%
191	macromedia.com	0.037%
192	babycenter.com	0.037%
193	cars.com	0.037%
194	verizon.com	0.036%
195	ameritrade.com	0.036%
196	gamespot.com	0.036%
197	legacy.com	0.036%
198	gottahavetickets.com	0.036%
199	bmgmusic.com	0.036%
200	fedex.com	0.036%

So Rone-ry

2007-08-27T09:20:00.000-04:00

From the Times:

Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation for months, said this morning: “It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new readership.”

Wait -- wha? Has Chuck Schumer been watching Team America?

"Puff Graham"*

2007-08-23T21:06:00.000-04:00

First of all, who knew that Woody Allen had his own talk show and second, that he once interviewed Billy Graham, whose charm and manner of speaking, by the way, reminds me of a certain Bill Clinton**...

(I love the part where Woody says he will try to convert Graham to agnosticism by the end of the show.)

(from VillageVoice's blog via Robotwisdom's deliciousness)

There is apparently some controversy surrounding the Reverend 's depiction on the cover of TIME this week:
See the horns? Though, I was expecting to learn that he was yet another hypocritical preacher but upon further research, he is remarkably unimpeachable. Quite an amazing guy. (He was even a registered Democrat, for what that's worth. He is apparently quite apolitical.)

* "Graham received assistance from powerful news mogul William Randolph Hearst, whose interest in Graham is a mystery; the two never met. Most observers believe that Hearst appreciated Graham's patriotism, appeals to youth, and thought that Graham would be helpful in promoting his conservative anti-communist views. Hearst sent a telegram to his newspaper editors reading "Puff Graham" during Billy Graham's late 1949 Los Angeles crusade. The result of the increased media exposure from Hearst's newspaper chain and national magazines caused the crusade event to run for eight weeks--five weeks longer than planned. Henry Luce put him on the cover of TIME in 1954.
-- From the Wikipedia entry on Graham

** Speaking of Clinton, when then-First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton invited him to lunch as he arrived in Little Rock for a crusade in 1989, Graham declined and said, "I don't eat with beautiful women alone" and met her in a hotel dining room instead.

The Commissar Vanishes

2007-08-21T21:39:00.000-04:00

Wow. Scary, ingenious, creepy, awesome.

And as if on cue, the Commissar's waistline vanishes:

Sort of. This pic is after Sarkozy's love handles were removed with the "magic wand" tool in Photoshop by a buddy at Paris Match. Yeesh.

Excuse me??

2007-08-11T11:18:00.001-04:00

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - Thomas Jefferson

2007-08-02T19:40:00.000-04:00

April 19, 1995

At dawn on April 19, as he drove toward the Murrah Federal building, McVeigh carried with him an envelope whose contents included pages from The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of modern-day revolutionary activists who rise up against the government. He wore a printed T-shirt with the slogan Sic semper tyrannis ("Thus ever to tyrants", the phrase shouted by John Wilkes Booth immediately after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln) and "The tree of liberty must be refreshed time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" (from Thomas Jefferson). As the truck approached the building, at 8:57 a.m. CST, McVeigh lit the five-minute fuse. Three minutes later, still a block away, he lit the two-minute fuse. He parked the Ryder truck in a drop-off zone (incidentally situated under the building's day-care center), locked the vehicle, and headed to his getaway vehicle.

(from the Oklahoma City bombing entry in the Wikipedia)

August 2, 2007

TIME: Were you then completely repulsed by the idea of war at that point?

MCVEIGH: I was taken aback by what I had been told. We all thought we were doing this for your country and these people are terrible, every single one of them. You get over there and you realize two things, they're not so terrible and how is this helping my country?

A Look Back in TIME: Interview with Timothy McVeigh

Oh, and btw, McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

U.S. Foreign Policy is Apocalyptic

2007-07-26T17:39:00.000-04:00

This Max Blumenthal, he's good. Don't know how long he can last since he gets thrown out of every right-wing conference he investigates (first the College Republican Convention, and below, at the Christians United for Israel's annual Washington-Israel Summit.) Awesome and scary.

Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour from huffpost and Vimeo.

Oscar n' Alberto

2007-07-26T16:01:00.000-04:00

Oscar curls up next to Alberto:

Staring Down the Mouth of a Gift Horse (UPDATED)

2007-07-17T00:27:00.000-04:00

This post began as three pieces I saw of a growing sentiment around an issue I felt needed to be heard. Namely, the tendency for college-educated Western liberals to act out of pity and (let's admit it) guilt, when most of the time, the people we think we are helping would rather not be pitied, would rather make their way on their own than be the instruments by which our consciences are cleansed. Plus, throwing dollar bills or GM corn out of a plane very likely does more harm than good.

1. "For God's sake, please just stop."
James Shikwati is a 35 year old Kenyan economics expert. His interview in Der Spiegel begins thusly:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...

Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.

His interviewer goes on to plead with him, half in jest (I think), saying "We just want to help!" The interviewer goes down the list: AIDS, poverty, hunger...who do we write the check to?

And Shikwati, speaking on behalf of an entire continent, says again and again, in so many words, that the artificial welfare mentality created by the NGOs and the Western development in Africa is paradoxically doing more harm than good. In example after example, he shows how compassion can kill: AIDS ("Africa's biggest business" and "a political disease here") , the United Nations World Food Program, ("a massive agency of apparatchiks" which actually puts African farmers out of business with cheap, subsidized corn), clothing (stop killing the African garment industry by sending those damn free t-shirts!), and on and on.

"These days," he says, "Africans only perceive themselves as victims..."Believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn't do all that poorly either." Damn.

2. "Biogas"
I was reading Harper's and came across this item by Binyavanga Wainaina (of whom I have become a newly minted fan), excerpted from the excellent new magazine, Bidoun:

I was twelve years old, in a small public school in Nakuru.

One day, the whole school was called out of class. Some very blond and very serious people from Sweden had arrived. We were led to the round patch of grass next to the parade ground in front of the school, where the flag was. Next to the flag were two giant drums of cow shit and metal pipes and other unfamiliar accessories. We stood around, heard some burping sounds, and behold, there was light.

This is biogas, the Swedes told us. A fecal matyr. It looks like shit-it is shit-but it has given up its gas for you. With this new fuel you can light your bulbs and cook your food. You will become balanced dieted; if you are industrious perhaps you can run a small biogaspowered posho mill and engage in incomegenerating activities.

We went back to class. Very excited. Heretofore our teachers had threatened us with straightforward visions of failure. Boys would end up shining shoes; girls would end up pregnant.

Now there was a worse thing to be: a user of biogas.

3. Investment is different from aid
Here it is, phrased a little more politely to an audience of smart compassionate movers and shakers, some of whom might have been a little guilty of this mindset of victimizing Africa. Ngozi Okonji-Iweala was the first female Finance Minister in Nigeria, who fought against Nigeria's most damning stain, corruption. Here, she argues that reform is happening, and we in the west would do well to invest in Africa (rather than, say, unwittingly victimize it with "developmental aid").

4. China and Africa
"An African revolution that needs noticing: 'The Chinese are the most voracious capitalists on the continent and trade between China and Africa is doubling every year.'"
"We Love China," by Lindsey Hilsum, Granta 92: The View from Africa

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0627/p01s05-woaf.htm

5. Africa doesn't want to be "saved"

-- Uzodinma Iweala, in the Washington Post.

"It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption."

"Never mind that the stars sent to bring succor to the natives often are, willingly, as emaciated as those they want to help."

6.

Femi Kuti, in the LA TimesM:

What’s your take on Bono and concerts like Live 8 that campaign on behalf of Africa?

Bono doesn’t need to tell us that we are poor. We know we are poor. All these concerts come and go and nothing changes in Africa.

Flight Patterns

2007-07-15T00:46:00.000-04:00

I don't know about the blogs but this reminded me of Stamen's taxicab patterns in SF.

The Virtual Made Real

2007-07-14T21:55:00.000-04:00

Reality Desktop

What a pain it would all be...

The Future of Advertising

2007-07-10T19:43:00.000-04:00

It's like painting your logo on the side of a barn, seeing as they are gold farmers.

Social Networks around the world

2007-06-29T12:11:00.000-04:00

Some points:

Colors were chosen by predominant site's main color

They forgot Mixi in Japan

Huge untapped markets apparently in Africa and China

The Splasher Manifesto

2007-06-26T18:03:00.000-04:00

Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.

Apparently, the Splasher reads Gothamist. And uses gmail (ifwedidit@gmail.com, a take off on the never published OJ Simpson tell-all). Still processing...

What rough beast, its hour come round at last

2007-06-26T08:25:00.000-04:00

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

The above is Cheney's own special "secret" classification which applies to things that aren't TOP SECRET or CLASSIFIED, but that he still wants to keep under wraps.

Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."

Jon Stewart sums it up best:

From an incredible four-part behind the scenes look on Cheney in the Washington Post.

OMG LOLCATS FTW!

2007-06-24T12:09:00.000-04:00

Web 5.0

2007-06-15T16:14:00.001-04:00

Melted Keyboard

2007-06-13T10:22:00.000-04:00

Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.
Via MFC

The State of Poetry, Part I

2007-05-31T16:01:00.000-04:00

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

Gotten from QuickMuse, a kind of speed chess poetry slam Iron Chef type thingy.

The Theater of War

2007-05-28T14:54:00.000-04:00

A fitting action for Memorial Day.

The Iraq Veterans Against the War, dressed in full uniform, engaged in a series of street theater actions around the New York City area yesterday. Actual veterans of the Iraq war played American service members and local volunteers played the civilians. The event was treated like a military operation with squad patrols, searches, detentions, and crowd control. An IVAW member, Adam Kokesh, said, "By reenacting what we've been through in Iraq, we hope to inspire more of our fellow Americans thttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifo act to end the war now."

From .

Keeping up with the Boyz

2007-05-23T11:14:00.000-04:00

Remember these guys? They now have a Wikipedia entry, which is illuminating as usual. (Heroes had an homage to them! That's it. I'm downloading all of the first season...)

Hell: 32ºF

2007-05-21T02:29:00.000-04:00

1. Rupert Murdoch goes green?

2. FOX NEWS: 'Sicko' Shows Michael Moore's Maturity as a Filmmaker
Sunday , May 20, 2007
By Roger Friedman

"Filmmaker Michael Moore's brilliant and uplifting new documentary, "Sicko," deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity."

3. FOX NEWS: Bush's Grandfather Directed Bank Who Funded Hitler

4. FOX NEWS: Paul Has a Point

WTF???? Is Fox News eating itself?

My head a-sploding!
(This man's head imploded looks like. But I'm sure Cronenberg would dig it.)

Overheard on the shuttle back from Flushing

2007-05-20T15:35:00.001-04:00

"You know he's an alien, right? He's an alien who came here and created a digital past. Seriously, he goes and implants that shit into vivian's brain."

Stephen Colbert Interview at JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard

2007-05-20T10:18:00.000-04:00

Real men know how to tie a bowtie.

The New Atheists

2007-05-18T01:28:00.000-04:00

That's "New" as in "Where the hell have you all been this whole time?!?!"

Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris (I thought for a while that atheism was a British thing), Daniel Dennett. It's a holy war against holiness, and what these men bring are brass balls and rhetorical brilliance (that British thing) and an impunity that is courageous and breathtaking. They make me realize, oh, I've been holding my breath for all this time -- really, holding my tongue.

It's not just these men, either. I blame it on the Internet, as a force that spreads reason, the truth (alongside complete and utter idiocy -- the trick is knowing how to read it), and all manner of data, because now, among the web channels I surf (Digg, Del.icio.us, reddit) there are more and more links to anti-Scientology sites (this one today was particularly good) and pro-atheist blogs every day.

Must watch: Christopher Hitchens goes off on Hannity and Colmes, who dared to have him as a guest on their show.

Caricatures

2007-05-16T02:04:00.000-04:00

For some reason, I am a sucker for these website community caricatures. It really helps remind me of the virtual company I keep.

* shiver *

(^_^) v. :-)

2007-05-12T20:16:00.000-04:00

I always wondered why Japanese emoticons evolved to be so different from American/Western ones. This report suggests that in Japan it's all about the eyes, whereas in America, it's what your mouth is doing.

The Prince (Rakeem, aka RZA, aka Bobby Digital) on Fresh Air

2007-05-12T15:58:00.000-04:00

Amazing interview.

Sen. Whitehouse of R.I. Using Information Visualization to Bust Gonzo

2007-05-05T12:20:00.000-04:00

The Ad Generator

2007-05-03T14:49:00.000-04:00

"The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly."

The ad generator was created by Alexis Lloyd as a component of an MFA thesis project in the Design and Technology department at Parsons The New School for Design.

Narrative Complexity and Condensation

2007-05-01T10:09:00.000-04:00

WHEREIN THE DROLL BLOGGER CONTEMPLATES THE WAXING AND WANING OF NARRATIVE FORMS

My friend Randy gave me a ride home last night and we somehow got on the topic of Joost and, well, the future of television. He told me that Sony was starting to offer old Starsky & Hutch and Charlie's Angels episodes on the new "tubes", but -- and here's the kicker -- with each episode edited down to 3 to 5 minutes!

That's when I almost dropped my falafel sandwich. An hour down to five minutes? (I later found the NYTimes article which confirms this. Apparently they're called "minisodes".) Then I started to think about how this might be possible.

Television (in that era) was formulaic, to say the least. But then again, isn't that what narrative structure is all about? Beginning -> Middle -> End. A random sampling of taken from the Charlie's Angels episode guide affirms this adherence to the form:

Consenting Adults
Episode Number: 10
Season Num: 1
First Aired: Wednesday December 8, 1976

(Beginning) A prostitute supplied by a computer dating service keeps an antique dealer preoccupied while his store is burglarized of priceless art objects. One of the stolen items is a ceramic frog, stuffed with smuggled diamonds - belonging to a ruthless crime syndicate boss. Thinking he is lying about the thefts, the enraged kingpin kidnaps the antique dealer and Charlie's Angels enter the case. (Middle) Jill infiltrates the dating service posing as a hooker but finds that the prostitute involved in the burglary has led the crime boss to the diamonds. In a last ditch effort to gain evidence, Angels Sabrina and Jill disguise themselves as veterinarians and steal the syndicate chieftain's championship racehorse. The chieftain agrees to meet the Angels in the park and turn over the diamonds in exchange for his horse. (End) In the exciting climax, Angel Jill must make a getaway with the evidence on her skateboard - chased by a syndicate hit man.

So if it was so formulaic, why were we glued to the teevee back then?

Hypothesis 1:
Quoth Farah Fawcett (Majors): "When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra." (They had computer dating in 1976?)

Hypothesis 2:
We are suckers for resolution. We like things tied up neatly in a bundle. Closure.

The Field Paradigm: How to Write a Movie in Three Acts
Anyone who's tried to write a screenplay should have heard of Syd Field. Here is his algorithm for a basic moviefilm:

In this structure, a film must begin with about half an hour of 'setup' information before the protagonist experiences a 'turning point' that gives him or her a goal that must be achieved. Approximately half the movie's running time must then be taken up with the protagonist's struggle to achieve his or her goal: this is the 'Confrontation' period. Field also refers, sometimes, to the 'Midpoint', a more subtle turning point that should happen in the middle (approximately at page 60 of a written screenplay) of the Confrontation, which is often an apparently devastating reversal of the protagonist's fortune. The final quarter of the film depicts a climactic struggle by the protagonist to finally achieve (or not achieve) his or her goal and the aftermath of this struggle.
(from the Wikipedia entry on Syd Field)

My former boss at FEED Magazine, Steven Johnson, laid out a more comprehensive theory in his book (Everything Bad Is Good For You, and in the NYTimes Magazine) about how narratives on television are getting more novelistic, ie, more complex, and he shows their change over time by plotting their storylines visually. (Each row is a storyline.)

Starsky and Hutch

Hill Street Blues

The Sopranos

BTW, here's the "Seven Minute Sopranos", a brilliant work of editry and narrative condensation (which essentially validated the "minisode" idea to the Sony execs) and is a time-based visualization of the above graphic (70 hours down to 7 minutes):

Not exactly straightforward. It's more of a refresher rather than a digest, since it's pretty impossible to consume this without having some familiarity with the characters and setup. (Can somebody please do this for Six Feet Under? Great. Thanks.)

Which reminds me, in Wolf's Rain, the next anime series that Aya and I have moved onto, the entire 3rd DVD (called "Recollection") is essentially a re-hash of all of the action up until that point, with each episode a different re-edit from the perspective of a different character told in voiceover. It smacked of either a writer's strike or some sort of behind-the-scenes turmoil, though it is de rigeur in most anime and long serial television to do the occasional quick recap to bring the audience up to speed. But four entire episodes of recap (for shame!) felt like the time in seventh grade I cobbled together a five page book report, two pages of which consisted of direct quotes from the book. BAD.

The Right Length
I agree with Steven's argument, which he puts forth in his "Snacklash" piece in the "Snack Attack" Issue of Wired, that "freed from the time restrictions of traditional media, we're developing a more nuanced awareness of the right length for different kinds of cultural experiences." We've been doing this kind of narrative condensation ("snacking") for a long time now with print media (Cliff's Notes, Readers' Digest).

Is it a surprise that the most complex narratives are found in the least complex of media (the book)?

Narrative, in three dimensions
Yesterday Kottke pointed to this collection of images of Will Self's writing room, which is an explosion of post-it notes and maps:

It reminded me of William Faulkner's room in Rowan Oak:

The legend is that, in writing A Fable, the plot became so entangled and intricate that Faulkner had to resort to scribbling the chronology of the seven days over which the novel took place on the walls of his office in Rowan Oak, his antebellum house in Oxford, Mississippi.

(At this point the blogger had to return to his day job and close out this post.)

UP NEXT!

CRINGE as a publisher makes short shrift of the classics!

MARVEL as Tristram Shandy tries to visualize its own narrative structure!

"Life creates conditions condusive to life"

2007-04-29T17:42:00.000-04:00

This incredibly inspiring presentation by Janine Benyus almost reduced me to tears. She is a science writer, innovation consultant, conservationist, but I'll call her a "mimeticist" because she looks at nature and shows us how we can learn from billions of years of R&D, millions of examples of beautifully elegant solutions to the problems which plague our current human-inflicted ecosystem -- most of which can be boiled down to waste management and terrible inefficiency.

What a great speaker and impassioned advocate for sustainability.

One of her slides had in it a gorgeous electron micrograph of a spider's spinnarets (if you were wondering how Spiderman got his inspiration for his):

Why wasn't Seung-Hui Cho on MySpace?

2007-04-27T20:17:00.000-04:00

Or was he? Was he on Facebook? Does anyone know if he had an online profile anywhere in one of the gazillion social networking sites? (Has anyone checked on Cyworld?) How could he, in this day and age, NOT have been?

I realize it sounds facetious, but I have difficulty coming to terms with the fact that his isolation was that complete.

Here is Danah Boyd in her essay "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace":

Every day, we dress ourselves in a set of clothes that conveys something about our identity - what we do for a living, how we fit into the socio-economic class hierarchy, what our interests are, etc. This is identity production. Around middle school, American teens begin actively engaging in identity production as they turn from their parents to their peers as their primary influencers and group dynamics take hold.

Youth look to older teens and the media to get cues about what to wear, how to act, and what's cool. Most teens are concerned with resolving how they perceive themselves with how they are perceived. To learn this requires trying out different performances, receiving feedback from peers and figuring out how to modify fashion, body posture and language to better give off the intended impression. These practices are critical to socialization, particularly for youth beginning to engage with the broader social world.

Because the teenage years are a liminal period between childhood and adulthood, teens are often waffling between those identities, misbehaving like kids while trying to show their maturity in order to gain rights. Participating in distinctly adult practices is part of exploring growing up. Both adults and the media remind us that vices like sexual interactions, smoking and drinking are meant for adults only, only making them more appealing. More importantly, through age restrictions, our culture signals that being associated with these vices is equal to maturity.

The dynamics of identity production play out visibly on MySpace. Profiles are digital bodies, public displays of identity where people can explore impression management [2]. Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being [3], profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reactions to their online presence offers valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation. Of course, because imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them.

Also, a good read about how the generation that grew up with the Internet comfortably blur the line between public and private:

Say Everything
As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.
by Emily Nussbaum in New York Magazine

Narrative retelling of April 16, 2007

2007-04-20T02:56:00.000-04:00

'That Was the Desk I Chose to Die Under'

By David Maraniss
Washington Post Staff Writer

The roommates crossed paths near the bathroom door at 5 in the morning. In the Monday darkness, another school week at Virginia Tech was about to begin. Karan Grewal had pulled an all-nighter to finish his accounting paper. His eyes were bleary as he saw Cho Seung Hui, in boxer shorts and T-shirt, moving around him to get into the bathroom. No words were exchanged, but that is how it always was with Cho, the silent stranger among six guys in Suite 2121 of Harper Hall. Cho, or Seung as his suitemates called him, never looked you in the eye, rarely changed expression, would just walk right on by.

Grewal returned to his room and collapsed on his bed, falling into a deep sleep. He would not stir until mid-morning, awakened by an uncommon sound on campus, the wail of sirens...

Read it. It's worth it.

Disintermediation

2007-04-19T22:14:00.000-04:00

Let me first react to these quotes from Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist and ABC News consultant, on "Good Morning America":

"I think that's very important for the viewing audience to understand. This is not him.These videos do not help us understand him. They distort him. He was meek. He was quiet. This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character," Welner said. "This is precisely why this should not be released. Parents, you should cut the pictures out of the newspaper. Do not let your children see it. Take them out of the room when these videos are shown. Because he's paranoid and his agenda of blaming the rest of the world is unedited."

We understand that this is a distorted view of him. How do you know he was meek? How do you know he was quiet? Were you close to him? It is of the utmost importance that we be able to judge for ourselves how he chose to present himself.

"There's nothing to learn from this except giving it validation. If this rambling showed up in an emergency room, my colleagues and I would listen carefully and, when we reflected that it was delusional, would go see the next patient and start the medication," he said. "This makes it sound like he was tormented. He wasn't."

Um, I think this is exactly how he got to this state. His psychiatrist made a snap judgement, threw some meds at the problem, and...NEXT! I love it when psychiatrists tell people how they don't feel.

"He's a weak link. He needs to create and produce his own picture in order to give himself a sense of power. Nobody saw him that way. He didn't see himself that way and that's why he set this up and he did this to achieve immortality. We have to stop giving him that and we can do it now."

Um, who doesn't need to create and produce their own picture in order to give themselves a sense of power? I have just one word for you, Mr. Welner: MySpace. Identity Production. It's a fact of life. It's not a sign of weakness. The use of guns is a sign of weakness.

I'm not trying to defend the Question Mark Kid. I just want to hear his voice at long last. And this shrink wants to "protect" us from seeing it. Pshaw. I guess I'm in the minority on this.

Now, I was sitting here wondering why Mr. ? took the trouble to export all of his digital manifesto to a DVD and send the bits to NBC via snailmail? If he hadn't done this, just from his perspective, he would have had a clear, unmediated broadcast of his thoughts onto the web, either via YouTube or some other site.

Instead, we are left to the condescending judgement of Mr. Brian Williams of NBC, his boss, Steve Capus, and I suppose the FBI, to wonder about the full extent of Cho's thoughts.

The Language of Violence

2007-04-18T17:29:00.000-04:00

Apparently, in the couple of hours after shooting Emily Hilsher and Ryan Clark, Cho sat down and made a package (a "multimedia manifesto" according to NBC's Brian Williams), went to the mailbox, and dropped it in (guess he had adequate postage), before proceeding onto Norris Hall.

The package, timestamped in the two-hour window between Monday's shootings, was sent to NBC News head Steve Capus.It contained digital photos of the gunman holding weapons and a manifesto that "rants against rich people and warns that he wants to get even," The Associated Press quoted an unidentified New York law enforcement official familiar with the case as saying.

In an interview with MSNBC.com, Capus said Cho talks to the camera in the videos. In one instance, he makes a vague reference to the massacre, Capus said. "This didn't have to happen.""The statement is hard to follow, kind of rambling. He speaks about hatred," Capus said, adding that it was "disturbing, very angry, profanity laced."

Finally, we get to hear his voice. I'm tired of guessing. Does he have an accent? I do find it strange that he had the calm to make a package, and that such a seemingly quiet person would want to broadcast his message with video. Was he used to doing this (recording himself talking into a camera)?

I'm sure he was media-savvy enough to know that he would be entering the pantheon of mass murderers, that with what he was about to undertake, he would enter the house of fame, and by recording his justifications, he would address the larger force at work, the world which made him do it, so there would be no second-guessing his motivations.

The last thing he wants it to seem is senseless.

Emptiness

2007-04-18T11:14:00.000-04:00

Before I sicken myself further in the process of trying to come to terms with this mass murder, here I will (progressively) dump the thoughts that have been eating at me the past two days.

Things I have in common with Cho Seung Hui

Asian

Male

Immigrant parents (he was first generation, I was second, born here)

Grew up in the South

English major

All this amounts to is that, on the surface, we both faced the same set of circumstances growing up, and the way we dealt with these "cards" made us who we are/were. For those who can't imagine what this means, let me suggest a one significant factor.

The Immigrant's Dilemma
Pick one:

The reality created by your parents at home

or

the world you face when you get dropped off to go to school

This is the dilemma faced by every first and second generation immigrant. Do you hold on to the values of your motherland, or do you embrace the values of the land to which you have come? For children of immigrant parents this is particularly difficult. The motherland is a distant memory compared to the overwhelming power of the here and now.

Who am I? Seung Hui asks himself. Where do I fit? In one world,

Grades are a matter of life or death

Filial piety is paramount (if you don't understand what this means, you probably aren't of this world)

Self-expression is not important or encouraged

Personal happiness is secondary to academic/financial success

Sex? Forget about it.

Dating is not even an option (it'll happen after you're rich)

Studying is the only thing you should be doing with your time outside of school

Friends are fine, as long as they are not miscreants and they do not interfere with your studies

In addition to this obvious desire to make your parents happy, is the fact that they have sacrificed everything to get you the opportunity to succeed in this beautiful country (mei guo). The path has been laid out for you before you were even born.

There is a price for embracing this path, however. You will be ridiculed (for having good grades, for studying all the time, for looking different, for wearing dorky clothes, for having an idiotic haircut, for not having any social skills). You will be emasculated. Your ego will be crushed on a daily basis. You might die without ever having sex.

The world outside taunts you
Middle America: a world and a worldview reinforced daily on television and in the social battlefield of the classroom and the schoolyard. It is a world you can only hope to be accepted in. You have, after all, been dealt the worst possible cards for survival in a world that is:

Muscular

Highly sexed

Violent, aggressive

Emotive

Christian

Righteous

I hear you, whispering about me. I see how you look at me. I will not open my mouth to respond. Instead, I will respond with violence. You make fun of my voice, of what I say, of how I say it? I will learn your language and twist it with vengeance to release my wrath.

Regardless of your race or ethnicity, in every human being's genetic material is the desire to survive, to fit into the collective, to do whatever it takes to achieve security. His seething rage overruled this primary instinct.

Everything that has surfaced about him convinces me that he was empty, that's the only word I can find to describe it.

I can see him not speaking to anyone, knowing that if he opened his mouth to speak, his bile would spill out uncontrollably. So he shut his mouth tight, and vomited, first, onto the page, in his room, alone, and later, in the world outside, he would perform his final act of expulsion.

Dark Matters II: Virtual rubber-necking

2007-04-18T10:35:00.000-04:00

Two days after the shootings:

The Wikipedia entry on the VA Tech Shootings is the best "news source" right now. Just reading through the timeline is riveting.

Hotair.com has the some interesting (and questionable) leads, one of which is this:

"ISMAIL AX" or "ISMAIL AK" (a Professor of Psychiatry at a university in Turkey, apparently one of the world's leading experts on the psychiatry of antisocial and suicidal behavior, psychotic and bipolar disorders, psychopharmacological therapy). UPDATE: Or now, "Ismale Ax". What is going on here? Identification with Islam?

Cho and Emily Hilsher apparently did not have a thing, says her best friend. He was probably stalking her. The question is, what put him over the edge, to get his gun out and shoot her and Ryan Clark?

Incredibly disappointed with Digg, del.icio.us, and Reddit's readerships. Most popular links there are already back to search engine optimization, laughing at fat people, Microsoft. Even more sickening are the comments left by ~~readers~~users who generate content.

Ismail Ax, and other Dark Matters

2007-04-17T12:21:00.000-04:00

The alleged shooter, Cho Seung-Hui

The first two victims, Emily Hilsher, 18, and Ryan Clark, 22

UPDATE:
Thesmokinggun.com has posted a play that Cho wrote called "Richard McBeef".

Does this look like Ryan Clark? I found this on a MySpace page for Ryan Clark, 22, in Blacksburg, VA. It says he's bi. (There's another Ryan, 22, Blacksburg, VA, whose profile says he's "gay".) I know, this is how rumors get started...

Collecting my readings and thoughts on the VaTech shootings. Here are some "facts" trickling out less than 24 hours after the shooting:

The shooter appears to be Cho Seung-Hui (조승희)

born in Jan 8, 1984, in South Korea

came to the States (Washington D.C.) with his parents when he was 8 (September 1992) and was a permanent legal resident

a senior majoring in English, but his disturbing writings raised some concern with his teachers:
Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this." (Yahoo! News)

His family runs a dry cleaning business and he has a sister who attended Princeton University

reported to have been taking meds for depression

from what I can surmise, the first two people he killed were his supposed girlfriend or object of his stalking, Emily Hilsher (link to her MySpace page) and Ryan Clark, her neighbor on fourth floor of the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory. The implication is that Clark, an RA, came to mediate an argument between Cho and Hilsher, and whether Clark and Hilsher were romantically involved is another supposition which might have sparked their murder. My armchair speculation is that Hilsher and Clark weren't involved. They were probably just friends. Clark just happened to be consoling her.

After the first two murders, Cho went back to his room to reload, and left a "disturbing note" criticizing "rich kids", "debauchery", and "deceitful charlatans"

He also had written on his arm in red ink "Ismail Ax"

Some sources:
Wikipedia page on Cho Seung-Hui

"You caused me to do this." (ABC News)

Newsday story

Article on a London site, "Jealous lover who killed 32 in college massacre named"

FOX Facts: Alleged Virginia Tech Gunman Cho Seung-Hui (I know, I know, FOX "Facts")

Additional links:
Jo Ann Beard's essay on Gang Lu, a Chinese PhD grad student who went on a similar killing spree in Iowa University.
"The Fourth State of Matter"

A WashPost piece on the VA killings entitled, Dark Matter: The Psychology of Mass Murder (that strangely has no reference to the Gang Lu killings)

All a-Twitter

2007-04-13T00:55:00.000-04:00

I love watching my friend Kev's Twitterstream. It's a Joycean account of thoughts while ______-ing, names of cab drivers, apprehensions and epiphanies. I've been trying to figure out why the Twitterbox is so meaningful to the right people right now -- people I trust -- and it wasn't until I read this interview that I realized what it is:

"I think the real power of Twitter is its ability to channel over
different mediums at the user's whim. IM, SMS, email, and the web
are just transports as far as Twitter is concerned."

Says Alex Payne, right after the part where he admits that Ruby is slow, something else that's been bothering me instinctively. But this is interesting. It's what I was trying to get developed at CCI for the longest time. The thing is, I envisioned it differently. I mean, at its core it's the same, but the human-computer-human interface feels a little different to me.

In my view:

1. I want to send a message out to a bunch of friends, or whoever's listening.
2. I write the message (short) with whatever keypad I have handy (phone, computer) and more importantly, whichever one is online.
3. I label it "mundane but worth saying just for kicks" (ie, Third Class).
4. I send it.
5. The message gets to the people based on what priority they have declared at the moment, or whatever the default preference they have set for that time of day/week (ie, I'm at work, route all classes of message to my inbox, or I'm running about, route all 1st class messages to my mobile).

I think the last part, step 5, is where Twitter is a little opaque. And I realize it would be a lot of hassle to "classify" your texts or posts, esp from your phone, but there's plenty of room between "OMG I want to know every single thing you send out at any given moment" and "mundane but worth saying just for kicks to whomever is out there". (I just stopped following Darth Vader after one too many dorky dork posts.) Should be able to, on the user side, change the reception more easily. Like "Hold all my calls, I'm blogging!"

The Trouble with Podcasts

2007-04-03T01:21:00.000-04:00

I was trying to listen to this sci-fi podcast/reading of a short story by Benjamin Rosenbaum called "Start the Clock" on the recommendation of Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. It started out with some host guy talking about his son who just started to learn how to talk, and he spliced in words spoken by his son into his little soliloquy, which was ostensibly to introduce the actual reading, but I couldn't help thinking, man, I wasted my bandwidth downloading this? And then, to top it off, the woman reading the story was, well, terrible. It's like printing a perfectly good short story on newsprint, flanked by an ad for Tylenol and set in Comic Sans.

I like to think I'm as hip and open-minded as the next web2.0 dork, but podcasting hasn't quite gotten me all hot and bothered yet like, say, RSS (I <3 netvibes) or Widgets or whatever. There are some podcasts that are pretty great, like TEDTalks, which I can't get enough of, and Ze Frank (who actually vlogged -- god, can we get a better word for that? Geez). I guess you can tell I'm not that ~~psycho~~avid a follower of podcasts.

Actually, I shouldn't discriminate against podcasteurs. I mean, I probably should, but really what I mean to say is, audiobooks have the same problem. And that is: some things are not meant to be read out loud. Some things are written in silence and should stay that way. Cormac McCarthy probably did not dictate The Road to his secretary who then typed it up for him. Plus, it doesn't help that most "professional readers" have a way of rendering most things they read puerile and artificial, like a newscaster or something. I'm not saying I could do any better. I'm just saying maybe these words were not meant for saying. Out loud. For 27 hours. In my earbuds.

I'm just saying...

Descent

2007-03-28T10:20:00.001-04:00

Test

Ontology of the Mii

2007-03-27T01:36:00.000-04:00

Excellent close reading of the Life and Death of a Mii. (on G4tv)

The Best Soup Dumplings in Manhattan

2007-03-25T02:19:00.000-04:00

And I've been to quite a few places in Manhattan, mostly Chinatown. Every time I go here, I am reminded of just how superior this place is. In so many ways...

(BTW, the decor and lighting in this place is very Hong-Kong/"2046" style, so that's why the pictures are tinted. But that's one of the charms that contribute to the overall excellence of this establishment and the dumpling eating experience.)

Next up: the best ramen in Manhattan...

Urban vs. Suburban

2007-03-16T17:12:00.000-04:00

This video of an a capella singing group's spontaneous performance in the Paris Metro made me think about how this interaction was a truly "urban" performance, that could only happen in the subways of a large metropolitan area. What was it really? A spontaneous performative act for a captive, transient audience. What was different about this from, say, a pop up ad for an album, or a blow-in in a magazine, or some other intrusive form of advertisement? Not much, except it surprised many people and engaged them, and I daresay it warmed some of their hearts.

Concert sauvage dans le métro !
Uploaded by lapapsprod

And then I thought, some people (say those visiting from the suburbs) would have found the interaction off-putting and a violation of their desire for peace and quiet, a difference pointed out to me by my mother when I sent her this article recently about a suburban couple moving to a big city (Seattle) and loving it.

Urban living, as I see it, widens the spectrum of human encounters and by nature increases our tolerance for our fellow man, whereas the suburbs enforce a kind of retreat by making people withdraw into cars, limiting daily interaction with the world, and creating unnatural echo chambers that shut out the din of the real world.

The Monster with 21 Faces

2007-02-01T19:28:00.000-05:00

I've been obsessed with a particular anime series right now: Ghost In the Shell Stand Alone Complex, and more specifically, the subplot which involves something called the Laughing Man Incident. (If the non-sensical naming makes you cringe, then you probably can't get down with imported Japanese culture much.)

The series is set in 2024, and is a pretty excellent extrapolation of a potential future in which, among other things, certain humans are "cyberized". Sometimes the augmentations are believable, sometimes they're cartoonish. But it's a possibility we can't ignore, and GItS deals with how this would affect our everyday reality. The parts that interest me the most are the depictions of a very active and fleshed out Web that these augmented humans (ie, cyborgs) can jack into, yes yes, there are jacks in the backs of their necks that allow them to surf while, say, driving a car. Hey, if there's a metaverse like Gibson or Stephenson or GItS describe, I'd think about getting a jack installed in the top of my spine so I could...well, anyways. Maybe I should start with Lazik first...

What was I talking about? Oh, right. The Laughing Man Incident. The Wiki entry on it is pretty good. I don't have time to recap the whole thing for you but let's just say the recent events in Boston (in my mind anyways) were prefigured by The Laughing Man Incident.

As I dug a little deeper to write this pathetic little post, I learned that there was more to this than I had suspected. The Laughing Man Incident took as its inspiration an event that occurred in Japan in 1984, an event which was a watershed moment in Japanese society because it shattered the myth of a well-behaved crimeless society, much like the Lindbergh kidnapping in America.

(*) The Glico-Morinaga Case - On March 18, 1984, two masked men with a cap on carrying a gun and a rifle stormed into the house of Katsuhisa Ezaki, president of the giant food maker Glico Corporation. The two men held Ezaki for ransom of 1 billion yen. Ezaki escaped three days later, but this was only the beginning. In May, blackmailing started with letters sent to the newspapers telling that they had laced some Glico products in the Nagoya-Okayama region with potassium cyanide. The letter was signed by "The Monster With 21 Faces", after the villain in Edogawa Ranpo's popular detective novels. Glico products disappeared from the stores, with a loss of more than 5 billion yen. In June, Japanese newspapers received a new letter from the group: "We forgive Glico." But then The Monster With 21 Faces shifted the target from Glico to other food companies, Marudai Ham, Morinaga and House. However, after one last message, dated February 27, 1985, nobody heard from The Monster With 21 Faces ever again. The identikit of thttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifhe "fox-eyed man" as the police called the prime suspect of the Glico-Morinaga Case, was on all papers and TV channels, becoming one of Japanese crime history icons. In March 1994, the statute of limitation ran out for the abduction of Ezaki, leaving the case unsolved and without explanation. The Glico-Morinaga Case, or Case 114 as it is officially designated, has been the highest on the Japanese Police priority list for 10 years.

-- Footnote in an interview with Kenji Kamiyama, director of Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex

Wanna quit smoking? Here, allow me to smack you upside the head.

2007-01-25T23:19:00.000-05:00

It works! Really!

Scientists studying stroke patients are reporting today that an injury to a specific part of the brain, near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit. People with the injury who stopped smoking found that their bodies, as one man put it, “forgot the urge to smoke.”

The Next Colbert

2007-01-25T00:13:00.000-05:00

Well, maybe it's a stretch (since he only has one video yet), but for production value and delivery, Donnie Davies is up there. Found via Ftrain's excellent blog.

Gastro-visualization

2007-01-22T10:18:00.000-05:00

Whenever I eat a big meal, I sometimes imagine the whole contents of the plate(s) inside my stomach. Then I'm always amazed at my metabolism. (Sorry, that's just how my body is. Someday I will all of a sudden explode into a corpulent blob.)

Don't know how I found this site (at first I thought "Becks and Posh" was a reference to David Beckham and Posh Spice -- who are, as you know, are coming to America) -- but apparently it's cockney slang for "nosh" which is slang for "food". Anyways, this cute couple started a food blog and Sam photographed what she ate for a whole week (imagine doing this before digital cameras) and was soon joined by a whole raft of others e-sharing the contents of their gullets. Yum!

Come to Mama!!!

2007-01-21T09:40:00.000-05:00

"Cooking Mama" -- a cooking game for the Wii. What?!?!

UPDATE:

Dude making hamburger patties with a wiimote. Surreal.

Where Immigration Happens

2007-01-19T08:52:00.000-05:00

Ie, the places I'd rather be...

Bill O'Reilly on the Colbert Report

2007-01-19T01:04:00.000-05:00

Made my head spin...

La Jetee 1962

2007-01-16T11:46:00.001-05:00

I'd heard of this short 26-minute film but had forgotten about it until I stumbled upon it on my new favorite site, smashing telly. It's a photo-roman, completely made with still bw photographs and a voice over. I think the quality of the writing (script here) and just the way people spoke then (it was made in 1962) made it somehow acceptable. Supposedly this was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.

Gettin' Haptic

2007-01-10T11:14:00.000-05:00

Well, that's it then. We're officially in the midst of an interface revolution.

The Nintendo Wii

The first real, big-time graduate from the school of keys. For me the killer game was Tennis. The very first time I picked up a Wiimote to play, I noticed I was turning my entire body to hit the ball, as I would in real tennis. Sold. That, a little force feedback and sound cues, and you're in the game. What's even more amazing is how simple the technologies at play are: accelerometers, IR, and Bluetooth.

NYTimes article on how the Wiimote works.

Another observation in the field: I was at a party where there was a Wii (where there's a Wii, there's almost certainly a party), and my friend Ellen who has probably never picked up a console game in her life, grabbed a Wiimote and started playing with a young pimply 19-year old kid who had obviously played console games his whole life. It was clear that Ellen had played tennis from her excellent swing and use of her whole body (more than once whacking her opponent's arm) while the kid stood stationary, almost motionless except for the flicking of his wrist -- he had pared the interface down to its bare minimum (see Christopher Alexander).

The iPhone

Steve Jobs deserves the Design Medal of Honor for single-handedly (in a manner of speaking) showing the business world what happens when good design values get instilled from the top. You get what most people think we should be carrying around in our pockets. He's right to devote a slide in his Keynote presentation to the current limitations of the hardware interfaces:

Most interfaces are never quite right (some worse than others), but we get used to them. We deal. But the touch-screen multi-touch interface does seem like a nice solution to the "how the hell do we fit 50+ keys onto this palm-sized space" problem. Wash your hands and get ready to use all them digits!

Star Trek The Next Generation had the right idea, though I don't remember if the interface changed contextually like the iPhone will. The design problem: we carry around (most of us at least) two or three gadgets. Wouldn't it be great if we only had to carry around one (and sync our data to our computer at home). The problem is: a multi-function device has multiple modes which require multiple key-sets or button-sets. For phone usage, you need the numeric keypad. For music usage, you need to pick songs, play them, stop, and adjust the volume -- the wheel interface on the iPod was the huge ease-of-use revolution (though it took three generations to get it to where it is today -- see John Maeda's observations and a small debate). For SMS, email and calendering, you need a real keyboard -- a true bugger because our alphabet has 26 letters. (Though texting in China and Japan is wildly popular. The Japanese even have a word to describe the generation that thumbs: oyayubizoku, or "thumb-tribes".)

One thing I have noticed teaching my class at Parsons is, since everyone has to have a laptop and since they're all young designers, they have Macs naturally, but what surprised me was that a good half of them did not use a mouse. When I inquired about this, thinking that the mouse offers the highest precision instrument for doing detailed design-work, they shrugged and said, we don't like carrying around the extra equipment. We just use the trackpad.

Jobs rightly dismisses the stylus as an unnecessary piece of equipment because, hey, we've got 10 styli on our hands, the best pointing devices in the world. But look at the size of your finger. No, really. It's a pretty blunt pointing device, say, about a 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch in diameter. It's huge in comparison to the size of a pixel. On top of that, the resolution of the iPhone screen is 160 pixels per inch, which is incredible for clarity and crispness of images and text, but now with touchscreens the problem becomes not the resolution of the display, but the resolution of our pointing device on the screen. Viz:

The white circle is your cursor.

On a device like the iPhone, this is probably fine, but
pixel-pushing with that thing (even manipulating 12px-high letters) is a little like manipulating the world wearing foam fingers.

So what's the big deal with the iPhone's UI? Multi-touch.

Le Pinch (sizing a picture using two fingers)

Basically, it's creating a gesture language that the computer can interpret and translate into functionality based on context. This idea is already in play with your trackpads on OS X. You can use two fingers to scroll a page or double-tap to bring up a contextual menu. Jobs says they patented it, but Jeff Han has been doing the coolest research with it for awhile.

Also, the Lemur is pretty awesome too, from Jazzmutant in France. Always expect DJs to be on the forefront of technology, and to be using the hell out of it. (There's even a question on their site about whether sweat affects the touchscreen, something I'm sure the first users of the iPhone will worry about.) And it makes sense too, because musicians play with keyboards all the time, and they practice chording, which is what multi-touch really means -- using two or more fingers in concert to manipulate the interface. As Steve Jobs said selling the iPhone: "Touch your music."

What does it all mean?

Stay tuned...

Déja Gu*

2007-01-06T23:50:00.000-05:00

I went out to Sunset Park on this gorgeous (though disturbingly warm -- it was 65 degrees!) day to fetch my new videocamera which I bought on the occasion of my unclehood, whose delivery I missed (the camera not the baby) because who really can be home all day to sign for a package if you are gainfully employed? (People with doormen, okay. But still, there's got to be a better way.)

Anyways, the hinterlands of Sunset Park/Bayside near 1st Ave are quite interesting architecturally -- lots of quiet, massive warehouses on the outskirts of a right cozy mixture of Mexicans and Chinese (I've still yet to go on my taco crawl out there). So there I was, walking down 51st towards the DHL facility, when I pass this completely burned out truck parked amongst all the other cars on the street, and I immediately thought Falluja or some war-torn area in which cars are routinely hit by the occasional rocket launcher.

And then I remember the page I came across as I was googling for the exact address of the DHL spot I was heading (query: "dhl sunset park 51st brooklyn 1st ave"). The top link was to this ABC news story of 2 years ago, August 2005, about a mysterious transformer explosion that set a truck on fire. Could it really have been the same one from two years ago? I asked a guy standing out on his front step right in front of the charred carcass, "What happened?" He just shrugged his shoulders, probably from every other passer-by asking him the same question every single day for two years. Or, it just appeared there and he really had no idea. Anyhow, it was strange having seen the article "randomly" and having the adjacent knowledge from the Google search result.

This reminded me of a term Kevin coined to explain his experience of having become so intimately familiar with the streets of Tel Aviv from playing Counter Strike that when he found himself in the actual city he experienced what he called "ludic proxy" -- or, this phantom architectural knowledge gained from a computer model -- which allowed him to "know" to duck into various sidestreets because he knew where they would lead.

* I know there's a council in France which decides which words get officially added to the French lexicon, and if they ever decide to add "googler" this might be how it plays out:
Je google
Tu googles
Il google
Nous googlons
Vous googlez
Ils googlent

Q.E.D.: déja gu

New Word of the Day: infamation

2007-01-04T15:13:00.000-05:00

infamate (v) to make one's private life/thoughts public, usually in blog form, in order to attract attention, gain fame (and revenue from Google AdSense, or a book deal or modeling contract)

ex. Like, Melinda is totally infamating her break-up with Roger in order to humiliate him publicly as well as to let the world know she is now single.

infamation (n) any text, photos, video, or other digital ephemera conspicuously published onto the World Wide Wire (also called, the Interweb). See also blogorrhea.

infamationista (n) one who obsessively infamates for personal gain

Kim Jong Il, Master Dictator

2007-01-04T14:23:00.000-05:00

This CSMonitor story looks at the incredible piece of work that is Kim Jong Il.

Fun Facts About "Dear Leader":
He chain-smokes, loves Ferraris, goes gaga over gourmet food, has 30 homes, wears 12-centimeter high (4.7 inch) platform shoes, kidnaps the occasional South Korean actress, and is crazy about karaoke, James Bond films, and the Internet.

And he apparently has stage fright, odd for someone who relies on the cult of personality to pay for his 30 homes. He has spoken a total of 9 words to the North Korean people: "Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People's Army."

Milo Alfred Chen, Welcome!

2007-01-03T12:16:00.000-05:00

Bienvenidos!

Now you can make dorky jokes like: "Uncle Irwin! This R2 unit has a bad motivator!"

Study: Cro-Magnons make better long-term mates

2007-01-02T19:59:00.000-05:00

In the study, 854 male and female subjects viewed a series of male head shots that had been digitally altered to exaggerate or minimize masculine traits. The participants then answered questions about how they expected the men in the photos to behave.

Overwhelmingly, participants said those with more masculine features were likely to be risky and competitive and also more apt to fight, challenge bosses, cheat on spouses and put less effort into parenting. Those with more feminine faces were seen as good parents and husbands, hard workers and emotionally supportive mates.
from "How Women Pick Mates vs. Flings"

File under: pseudoscience, eugenics, mii

Swift Justice for Saddam

2006-12-29T22:23:00.000-05:00

I was getting some juice at the deli down the street, run by a Palestinian family, previously the fathers and now the sons (who happen to be huge Giants fans), and they were watching CNN report that Saddam had been executed. (CNN developing story link here.) One of the guys behind the counter said to me, "That's a wrap!"

I thought for a moment he said, "That's Iraq!"

"Do they have pictures?" I asked, in the "Photo, or it didn't happen" vein.

"I don't know. Should they show that sort of thing?" he replied.

"I guess not."

The next day...

Ski masks? My god. How horrible. From the Times:

His executioners wore black ski masks, but Mr. Hussein could still see their deep brown skin and hear their dialects, distinct to the Shiite southern part of the country, where he had so brutally repressed two separate uprisings.

Sunday night now, a day later, and new images are surfacing.

Someone shot the actual hanging with his cellphone and posted it on Google Video.
UPDATE: Apparently, this someone was apprehended by Iraqi authorities after the hubub his cellphone video caused. (msnbc)

The New York Times on Wednesday reported that al-Faroon told the newspaper “one of two men he had seen holding a cell phone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein’s last moments up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki’s national security adviser.”

Those damn camphones. You can never tell when they're on the phone or shooting video. I mean, what were they supposed to do? Stop the execution and tell everyone to turn off their cellies?

An interesting nugget from this piece: "Saddam was put to death in an execution chamber used by his own security men for years." How's that for poetic justice?

The WikiNews page on the execution is evolving, complete with annoying "Digg"-esque commentary:

"Saddam's death was filmed in HDTV but it is thought that the footage will only be available on [Blu Ray] media so it could be some time before the footage is seen as nobody in the world has a [Blu Ray] player as yet."

This is why Wikipedia has a bad rap.

Anyways, fascinating these days to read about a man's last words before he goes to his (very public) death. (The NYTimes has published quite a good account. These are times for good old-fashioned journalistic writing.) His official last words:

"Down with the traitors, the Americans, the spies and the Persians."

I guess, in that order. The Persians seemed kind of an afterthought, or the furthest back in his memory.

The Times' obituary (by Neil McFarquhar) is a good read too. His favorite wine was a Portugese Mateus Rosé, his favorite snack (in prison), Doritos (according to his guards). He was OCD about germs and keeping an immaculate desk. With all the Godfather-esque offings of family members and advisors, I can't wait for the TV movie of his life.

I did a poster for a play one time in college. The play was called "Our Country's Good" and since it involved a hanging, I decided to make a noose and use it on the poster as a graphic and typographic element (as an "O"). Well, I did some research into how to tie a proper hangman's noose and recalled being fascinated that the number of loops can make the difference between literally life and death, or at least, a slow, agonizing death and a swift cracking of the neck. How to tie a proper hangman's knot, courtesy of the U.S. Army:

A proper noose should have 6 to 8 turns (more would create too much friction and less would not be tight enough to kill) and the first thing I did when I saw the photos of Saddam at his execution was to count the turns in his rope:

7 turns. Well, that's a wrap.

Patterns in the snow

2006-12-24T13:46:00.001-05:00

Snowstorm
Originally uploaded by ashleyniblock.

The snowed-in Denver Airport seen from above.
The carved out routes remind me of the a circuitboard or Stamen's cab route tracker.

Steven Leavitt on the Economics of Gangbanging

2006-10-29T21:15:00.000-05:00

On the Edge of Blade Runner

2006-10-29T19:56:00.000-05:00


Documentary on the Sci-Fi movie, Blade Runner. Great background, explication, behind the scenes, and Rutger Hauer.

2006-09-01T11:21:00.000-04:00

Frank Lloyd Wright in Half Life 2

Amazing machinima simularchitecture. Fallingwater done up in Half Life 2.

2006-08-28T10:43:00.000-04:00

Publication Design (CD2320)

Parsons Communication Design and Technology

Irwin Chen

irwin.chen@gmail.com

Overview and Objectives

The original promise of the Web to radically democratize publishing has only recently begun to be realized with the explosion of blogging, online journaling, and social networking sites like MySpace and Flickr. This course will explore the historical roots and evolution of publishing technologies, markup languages (HTML and XML), and style sheets (CSS) through a wider examination of the revolution of movable type to the on-going development of the Web. Students will learn the fundamentals of typography, page layout, and image treatment with current web browsers in mind, how to create semantically correct HTML in combination with current stylesheet techniques. Prerequisites: Type 1, Communication Design 1. Rudimentary knowledge of web coding, and familiarity with modern operating systems will be assumed.

On completion of this course, students will have learned:

How to write semantically correct, accessible markup (HTML, XML)
Control typography, styling, and layout with CSS
The history of writing and printing technologies
Fundamentals of typography
A process for working collaboratively to develop a product
Basic Web publishing concepts and methods

Evaluation

Students will be expected to attend every class, and will be graded on the completion and quality of two projects.

Attendance: 20%

Midterm Project: 35%

Final Project: 40%

Syllabus

Sept 7, Week 1

LECTURE: Overview: What is Publishing?

WORKSHOP: Survey of skills/background

Sept 14, Week 2

LECTURE: Technologies of Writing: Pre-Gutenberg

READING:

“What is writing and who needs it?” A History of Writing, Albertine Guar, 1992.
“Reading and Writing”, From Script to Print, H. J. Chaytor, 1945.
"Evolution of Writing", Dean Allen, http://www.textism.com/writing

WORKSHOP: Establishing a Process

Sept 21, Week 3

LECTURE: Technologies of Writing: Gutenberg's True Contribution to the Enlightenment

READING:

“History and Development of Typesetting”, Printing Types, Alexander S. Lawson with Dwight Anger, 1990.
“Enlightenment Origins”, Modern Typography, Robin Kinross, 1992.

WORKSHOP:

Semantic Markup Exercise
View Source

Sept 28, Week 4

LECTURE: From Print to Hypertext

READING:

Wikipedia: Hypertext, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext
As We May Think, Vannevar Bush, July 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush
The Elements of Typography Style Applied to the Web, Richard Rutter, Brighton, 2005, http://webtypography.net/

ADDITIONAL READING:

ENQUIRE WITHIN

WORKSHOP:

Hyperlinking
Controlling Typography with CSS

Oct 5, Week 5

LECTURE: The Separation of Data and Display

READING:

WORKSHOP:

Controlling color and images with CSS

Oct 12, Week 6

LECTURE: The Page

READING:

Wikipedia: Jan Tschichold
Grid Systems In Graphic Design, Josef Muller-Brockmann
Designing Grid Systems for the Web, Mark Boulton, http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_steps_to_designing_grid_systems_part_1/

WORKSHOP:

Controlling position with CSS
Designing a Grid System

MIDTERM

Oct 19, Week 7

LECTURE: The Display Layer

READING:

CSS Zen Garden

WORKSHOP:

Thirteen ways of looking at a web page (one data source, multiple style sheets)

Oct 26, Week 8

LECTURE: The Web and the Expansion of the Public Domain

READING:

Project Gutenberg FAQ
“Scan This Book!”, The New York Times Magazine, Kevin Kelly, May 14, 2006

WORKSHOP:

The Reader Project: The Ground Rules

Nov 2, Week 9

LECTURE: The Death of the Page

READING:

“Industrialization and new technology,” A History of Writing, Albertine Gaur
"A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design", Jesse James Garrett, March 6, 2002, http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/

WORKSHOP:

Basics of Information Architecture
Modularization
Reader Project

Nov 9, Week 10

LECTURE: The Browser Wars

READING:

WORKSHOP:

Coding for Compatibility
Reader Project

Nov 16, Week 11

LECTURE: Data and Meta-Data

READING:

“Web 2.0: Data, Metadata, and Interface”
“A Really, Really, Really Good Introduction to XML”, Tom Myer, August 24th, 2005

WORKSHOP:

Writing XML
Reader Project

Nov 23, Week 12

LECTURE: Google and The Deep Web

READING:

“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
Deep Web

WORKSHOP:

Along came a spider...Search Simulation Exercise
Reader Project

Nov 30, Week 13

Final Project Presentation

2006-08-23T01:02:00.000-04:00

Hey Ya

Incredible post-modern live mash-up. Mat Weddle of Obadiah Parker covers Outkast's "Hey Ya". It's a huanting re-casting of the tune, one the makes you reconsider the song altogether, and admire the re-casting for making us do so.

Crossing the Uncanny Valley

2006-07-31T09:19:00.000-04:00

"[The uncanny valley] was coined in the 1970’s by Masahiro Mori, the Japanese robotics specialist, as he sought to describe the emotional response of humans to robots and other nonhuman entities. He theorized that as a robot became more lifelike, the emotional response of humans became increasingly positive and empathetic — until a certain point at which the robot took on a zombie-like quality, and the human response turned to repulsion. Then, as the robot becomes indistinguishable from a human, the response turns positive again."

A fascinating read in the Times about Contour, which is one of those "why the fuck didn't I think of that goddamn" ideas -- screw using goofy ping pong balls to do motion capture; instead, why don't we use phosphor powder so we can have a resolution of up to 200,000 pixels? A pixel for each particle. Long hair is still a problem (unless it's a movie about, say, Shaolin monks who all have shaved heads).

Also, I love the quote at the end from the digital media consultant referring to other companies that are developing similar technologies as "upstarts" rather than "start-ups". I think I'll use that turn of phrase from now on.

Revenge is a dish best served...

2006-07-26T23:56:00.000-04:00

katakiuchi
Originally uploaded by up in a tree.

on a huge billboard in midtown, apparently. Or, hell hath no fury...

"Hi Steven,
Do I have your attention now? I know all about her, you dirty, sneaky, immoral, unfatihful, poorly-endowed slimeball. Everything's caught on tape.
Your (soon-to-be-ex) Wife, Emily
p.s. I paid for this billboard with OUR joint bank account."

FOOD FIGHT!!!

2006-06-25T18:29:00.000-04:00

More and more, the current world is echoing the past -- perhaps I've been watching too much Deadwood. These epistles, one from John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, in which he tries to scold (though with a certain degree of respect) Michael Pollan for having spanked Whole Foods throughout Omnivore's Dilemma, and Pollan's riposte, I would like to hear read with the Ken Burns effect turned on.

DIY mosquito trap - steps 1-3

2006-05-24T09:51:00.000-04:00

DIY mosquito trap - steps 1-3
Originally uploaded by Naruwan.

Ingenious. It's a DIY Dyson vacuum cleaner for mosquitoes.

What's the opposite of Melting Pot?

2006-02-28T09:50:00.000-05:00

Identity Soup, apparently.

"Made with smoked bacon, pigs' ears, pigs' feet and pigs' tails together with assorted vegetables and sausages, the soup is meant to make a political statement: 'Help our own before others.'

The 'others,' Ms. Bonnivard explained, are non-European immigrants who she and her colleagues on the far right say are sopping up scarce resources that ought to be used for descendants of the Continent's original inhabitants. In other words, the soup is meant to exclude those who do not eat pork — for the most part, Muslims and Jews."

At least America doesn't have a monopoly on far-right bigotry, racism, and ignorance.

Gael Greene Does Elvis

2006-02-27T23:21:00.000-05:00

No, really. Listen.

The Freshman

2006-02-26T08:47:00.000-05:00

Sometimes great article on Afghanistan's "roving ambassador" for the Taliban and how he got to Yale. There's something gentle about his face, which belies his ability to say some pretty mind-boggling things in defense of the Taliban. Some wonderful moments in the story though (the land mines and the intellectual debate of Mike Hoover).

File Under: OpenGL Abuse

2006-01-25T09:43:00.000-05:00

At FEED (about 5 years ago in the heyday of the Boom) we used to joke about "flying through your bank statement" whenever we saw a gratuitous use of 3-D. Well, this is for real. It's like, AnaLog meets The Sims!

Sigh.

Adscape

2006-01-22T21:31:00.000-05:00

Brilliant project by Parsons MFA candidate Alexis Lloyd.

"Advertising data was recorded from three neighborhoods in New York City: East Harlem, a historically poor, primarily Latino neighborhood; SoHo, a downtown shopping district; and the Upper East Side, a wealthy residential area. In each neighborhood, ads were recorded in a five-block section that consisted of two avenue blocks and three adjacent street blocks."

The results are quite telling.

Left Coast Dining

2006-01-14T12:20:00.000-05:00

I didn't make a reservation for the French Laundry this time, but I did go to two California culinary institutions during my business trip out to San Francisco at the start of the year.

Zuni Cafe
First I ordered two oysters -- Kumamoto and Malpeque, the only two I'd heard of -- beautiful with lemon juice. A glass of Pinot Blanc from Santa Barbara(?). The Ceasar Salad (which they are renowed for) -- excellent romaine with a slightly overly tangy dressing, I guess I'm not used to such an acidic bite when I eat regular old Caesar Salads, but I appreciated the anchovies. OK croutons. Next, and finally, the yellowfin tuna quickly seared on the grill, fleshy and raw on the inside, lots of flavor probably from a marinade, with white beans, also well-seasoned, olive oil, and I think some fennel if memory serves me right. Nice textures in the mouth. My waiter was a very elegant, cheerful and handsome asian man whose service was perfect -- well-timed, attentive but very respectful and aware. The vibe he radiated added a warmth to my whole experience that lifted the food up out of being routine. I mean, if you just glance at the menu, it's a restaurant that serves oysters, ceasar salad, burgers, roast chicken, and tuna. Big deal, right? Well, they are cliches for a reason.

Actually, where it ("it" being new American cuisine) all started was at...
Chez Panisse
where I went tonight with four good friends. Our reservation was for the upstairs Cafe, which was the "junior varsity" to the downstairs "varsity" kitchen, which I guess serves a tasting menu for a fixed price. I was underwhelmed actually, but I blame it on the JV squad. And my lofty expectations. I felt when I arrived there in Berkeley, I was making a pilgrimage. There's this East Bay thing where some of the restaurants have these steps you go up, like up to a porch, before you go in the front door. It feels almost like you're walking into a home. The architecture, as Christine told me, was characteristic East Bay style, which to me looked like a kinder, gentler Frank Lloyd school of ornamentation, kind of like Savoy if you've ever been there. Cherry wood, mirrors, brass plating on fixtures, early 20th Century French posters.

Again, looking at the menu, you'd think that what they're doing is "old hat", or as they say in classical music, they're playing the old war horses. And I suppose you can't go into Chez Panisse expecting the creative flair of Wylie Dufresne or the perfectionist wit of Thomas Keller. This is New American which is now Classic New American. It's classical in the sense that Alice Waters created a radically simple movement, and it worked, and as a result, Chez Panisse has to keep doing what made her famous. (The New Yorker I think was making fun of their particular style of menu-writing in this Talk of the Town piece. Like giving a shout-out to the actual farmer who grew the particular varietal of the fruit or vegetable you're about to devour.)

Anyhow, I ordered a duck breast and arugula salad to start, which was unmemorable -- good, but not astounding which I routinely expect from duck. That's the operative word: routine. Perhaps my palate is not so refined to pick up on the reverential treatment of things I don't eat every day (or grow). Anyways, three out of the five of us, sadly, all ordered the quail, which was butterflied and roasted, also with a nice, thick piece of pancetta, smoky and tender from the roasting, and placed on a bed of polenta. Nice, but again, routine. The best part of the meal was dessert, not mine unfortunately, which was a dutifully executed apple tart with vanilla ice cream. I gotta give mad props to Jim Mitchell's kishu nectarines, which were unbelievably tiny, about the same diameter as a quarter, but with tiny jewels of fruit inside that exploded with flavor in your mouth. Marvelous. Now that is what Alice Waters is talking about.

The Case for Contamination

2006-01-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

Brilliant and thought-provoking essay by Kwame Appiah in the Times Magazine about Cosmopolitanism, which might need a little branding help (it's like painting your AK-47 pink or something), but whose ideas I agree with wholeheartedly.

Learning From NashVegas

2005-12-25T19:21:00.000-05:00

Growing up in the boondocks of Nashville, TN, I witnessed the slow creep of modernity towards our quiet neck of the woods, first, as we got re-zoned out of irrelevance into Nashville proper, and second, as we had a mall plopped down in Bellevue around the time I was in high school (about 15 years ago). If we build it, the high-rollers will come, they thought. So they did the deal with higher end stores like Banana Republic, Gap, and Williams-Sonoma, speculating that there would be a market for them by the time they got there.

Fast-forward to 15 years later, and those stores are gone. A new, second- and third-tier of tenant has moved into the husk of the Bellevue Mall, a different species inhabiting the host -- gyms, mortgage lenders, discount booksellers and clothing bin stores, a church, and small-time shopkeepers and restaurants. The real estate is so cheap there's even a baseball training center complete with batting cages!

The other strange architectural phenomena are the vending machines that have sprouted up, creating a middle aisle in the corridors built wide for the maddening crowds that never came. The Mall finds its own use for things...

Filmstrip kung fu

2005-12-24T21:21:00.000-05:00

1.Film, Seite 61
Originally uploaded by bogeyscigarette.

Hen Hao! Most excellent photo set on flickr from bogeyscigarette of books of old kung fu movie stills.

The Bruni Digest

2005-12-23T19:27:00.000-05:00

In which I sit on a dirt mound somewhere in Brooklyn with my ears pricked, waiting for New York Times head restaurant critic Frank Bruni, who I imagine to be a Venetian count in a huge ruffled collar, to dole out stars from the inside breast pocket of his brocaded chamber robe. This blog is predicated on the suggestion that every Wednesday, in the Times Dining Out section, Frank lays a huge faberge egg of hilarity.

OMG. Must read. The Bruni Digest. Hilarious.

Don't Be Evil (Please?) Part Deux

2005-12-05T21:11:00.000-05:00

Fony Sony Graffiti

2005-12-03T21:30:00.000-05:00

I blame Sony America for giving a once-reputable and innovative company a bad name, what with the DRM crap, the PSP crap, and now, this "fake" graffiti crap. I'll take a benevolent dictatorship (Steve Jobs at Apple) over a globlized, overextended megacorp that happens to make good electronics anyday.
(Photo by Ryan Singel.)

Datingbytes

2005-11-29T13:33:00.000-05:00

Whitney breaks down the online dating scene and sites. Great analysis. Tell it, girl!

One less Asian male in the media. :-(

2005-11-25T11:26:00.000-05:00

Pat Morita, dead at 73. R.I.P. man. You were one of the few actors who resisted typecasting because you didn't speak "engrish" on Happy Days (though you dipped into that well for Karate Kid, I'll forgive you for that one).

Oh, and Sulu came out too, a propos of, well, one less Asian (heterosexual) male sex symbol.

"Don't be evil." Please? Pretty please?

2005-11-22T21:14:00.000-05:00

I guess it's only a matter of time.

"I wouldn't be opposed to a fling."

2005-11-13T21:46:00.000-05:00

What a line. From a surprisingly frank account (from the woman's perspective) of dating online.

Schott through the heart

2005-11-13T19:03:00.000-05:00

Interview with Ben Schott, of Miscellany fame. I highly recommend the Food and Drink Miscellany.

Funny quote:
"Google is about as good as going into the street and saying, 'Does anyone know how much the registration threshold for VAT went up?' And someone goes, 'I think it's 49,000.' And you go, 'Oh, 49,000, great.' That's Google."

Chilean Wine

2005-11-05T01:29:00.000-05:00

Me, I'm no wine expert, but I like to think I have, at least, good taste. And it's nice to make a discovery on one's own, not guided by a book or anyone else. I mean, tons of people already know about the Colchagua Valley in Chile, but when you taste something for yourself, you remember it better.

Two wines clued me into the fact that Chileans can throw down with France and California. First, Los Vascos used to be such a bargain back like 8 years ago when nobody was really paying attention to Chilean wines (ie, I got it cos it was dang cheap but real good), and more recently, I was reminded of how awesome Chilean wines actually were when I started drinking this wine called Laura Hartwig (it's named after the vintner's wife, kind of like a Chilean Aunt Jemima, but, uh, white, and uh, wine instead of syrup -- ok, bad analogy). First the chardonnay got to me, it was so buttery and had a beautiful finish. Plus it had this pretty wrapping paper around each bottle. And tonight I got the CabSav which was (and still is) excellent -- rich, well-rounded, a little jammy, nice to drink alone or with Mona and Heather's new chocolate, Vere, because it (the chocolate) has fructose instead of sucrose so it doesn't leave that aftertaste. Anyways, nice wine, nice chocolate.

Here's more on the history of Chilean wine:

"Grapevines were planted in the north of Chile in the 16th century, in the wake of Spanish conquistadors.

Production expanded rapidly and the country was soon exporting to Peru, challenging imported wines from Spain. The Echenique family, of Basque origin, planted vineyards in the Peralillo area of the Colchagua province around 1750 and in the 19th century, the same family was part of the rapid expansion that took place in Chilean wines, at the initiative of a handful of pioneers who were inspired by the French model.
The first French grapes were planted in the Cañeten Valley of Colchagua in 1850 but when phylloxera ravaged Europe’s vineyards, Chile’s production increased dramatically. The vinerie area went from 9,000 hectares in 1870 to 40,000 hectares in 1900. The first exports of wines to Europe took place in 1877.

...Domaines Barons de Rothschild-Lafite took over the Los Vascos estate (Los Vascos meaning The Basques, in honour of its Basque origins) in 1988."

(From the Lafite website.)

I think also that there's something about Chile being in the same climate zone as the best grape-growing regions in France.

Faugh!

2005-11-03T00:19:00.000-05:00

Great little piece in the Times this Sunday City section about New York personal ads from the late 19th Century. Plus ca change...

Hello, My Concubines!

2005-11-02T07:57:00.000-05:00

"Research into an unusually high prevalence of a particular set of genes in China has suggested that 1.5 million Chinese men are direct descendants of Giocangga, the grandfather of the founder of the Qing dynasty.

Giocangga's extraordinary number of descendants, concentrated mainly in north-east China and Mongolia, are thought to be a result of the many wives and concubines his offspring took."
Giocangga...is it just me or does this pimp daddy sound Italian?

Pas de Smartcar!

2005-11-01T07:59:00.000-05:00

I heard about this on NPR this morning: a battery powered, dent-proof electric car designed by an Indian engineer who did his graduate work in Detroit. It costs only $6000. Sounds great for India and it would be perfect for New York (minus the luxury factor and the fact that most Americans aren't able or used to doing yoga while driving).

It is reminiscent of the SmartCar which Austin and Ben and I drove when we were vacationing around the south of France. The funniest moment on that trip was Ben on the phone with a car rental place in Cassis. His side of the conversation consisted of him yelling "Pas de SmartCar! Pas de Smartcar!" It offended our American big-car sensibilities.But the funny thing is, we ended up tooling around the whole region with a SmartCar, and grew to love the little things by the end of the trip.

I was so there...

2005-10-26T17:20:00.000-04:00

The rest of the blogosphere discovers the two Chinese boys, now aptly named, the Back Dorm Boys.

Here's my original post from August 15th.
I emailed them back in August 19th telling them I knew someone at MTV blah blah blah and here's what I got back in response:

既然你是台灣人,那我還是用中文交流吧,我英文太次.其實那些模仿的mtv都不是我製作的,我只是收藏和分享而已.那兩個人自稱"後舍男孩".
如果你可以幫他們出名,我會幫你聯繫他們.

Right. Well, I tried. I guess I'm not cut out to be a blood-sucking A&R exec.

Overheard in New York, 10/21/05

2005-10-21T11:05:00.000-04:00

I knew there was something off when I got on the A at Lafayette this morning. When we slowed to a crawl before Hoyt we heard through the fuzz on the intercom that there was smoke at the W.4th stop. A half hour later, I got out and switched to the 2 at Hoyt.

A Jamaican woman gets on, intoning in a loud, raspy voice, talkin' 'bout "After ye die, the Bible says ye either gwine ta Heaven or ta Hell. Is any one here Satan's follower? Are ye gwine ta Heaven or Hell?"

Everybody stares further into their newspapers and books, reading the same words over and over, trying not to make eye contact. There is one fellow looking up, the bright-eyed and earnest young man who was helping out a woman and her baby earlier.

"Where are ye gwine? Heaven or Hell?"
That's it? That's all we get? No Limbo? No Purgatory? No reincarnation as mosquitoes?

She looks the fellow in his bright eyes.
"Where are ye gwine? Heaven or Hell?"

"Uptown!" says the bright-eyed fellow in all earnesty.

And the woman continues pushing on through the car like a hurricane, and in her wake, a collective sigh of relief.

Pastafarian Relic

2005-10-19T15:26:00.000-04:00

The oldest noodles in the world were found in the Yellow River in China, definitive proof of the existence of The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

I wonder if you could, like, pour some boiling water over them and have a taste of a bygone era.