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Yesterday, our dear friend Suzette was complaining about people who say that New Jersey is a Zone 6 climate. She says it's more like Zone 7, similar to the weather found in North Carolina.
Today, Joe at bookofjoe has a post about the northward creep of the hardiness zones from 1990 to 2006, which seems to prove her point. It might be a little hard to see in that picture above, but if you look at a larger version, you can see that much of New Jersey has seen a +1 change of zone.
Eastern Massachusetts has remained a Zone 6 area (the warming effect of the ocean making our climate much milder than the rest of New England), but over the last 16 years the rest of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have also warmed up to Zone 6, and now even much of New Hampshire and Vermont have warmed up to Zone 5, which is more typical of the Upper Midwest...or what used to be typical 16 years ago, I guess.
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Steve Crandall, who writes one of the "smart" blogs I read regularly called "tingilinde", posted a factoid I had never heard before: polar bears can count to five...but that's it. Polar bears are known to attack groups of hunters, but only if there are five or fewer in the group. More than that, and they will run away. It's a well-known fact...at least among the locals in the Arctic areas where people and polar bears co-exist.
Here's a close-up of a polar bear's paw, which has five toes. Eventually those bears are going to figure out how to use more than one paw to count.
Permalink | Comments (0)Wired has a link to an auto industry blogger who is maybe a little too enthusiastic about what he says is The Next Big Thing in cars: hard drives.
Yes, that's right. The incredible innovation of yesterday's technology tomorrow! Great big fat hard drives to hold all of your MP3s, videos, even store applications that will run on a dashboard GUI that will provide you will assorted data like mileage, GPS data, and what-have-you.
As the Wired post and several commenters on the blogger's site point out, he's looking in the wrong direction to be singing the praises of spinning platters when flash storage is expanding by leaps and bounds, plummeting in costs, and doesn't have the physical shock and environmental conditions issues that traditional platter drives have. But maybe he read this post at ITWorld about Sony's new "airbag" shock-protection system for hard drives.
After all, Detroit went for airbags once, so surely they'll do it again. Of course, that'll push the timetable for adoption off by 25-30 years.
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Once again the wonderful Spanish blog Fogonazos comes through with a great post full of amazing photos of an observatory high atop a mountain in the Jungfraujoch region of the Alps.
It is the highest structure in all of Europe, and you don't even have to strap on your lederhosen and crampons to get there -- you can take a train inside the mountain.
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A-list Blogger Anil Dash has some tips for those of you considering making your first visit to New York City. They're mostly common-sense and offered with the perspective of someone who actually lives in Manhattan and is forced to encounter skyscraper-gawking, fanny-pack wearing tourists everywhere he goes.
And if, for some reason, you eschew his sage advice to leave the car at home, Asad Raza at 3QuarksDaily has some first-hand suggestions on how and where to park in Manhattan
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Grant McCracken at "This Blog Sits..." has a good post about the new HBO comedy series "Flight of The Conchords". It caught my interest because I really like the show and have been trying to convince some of my online buddies to watch it.
McCracken is dead-on to call the show a "second-look" series. The humor in the show can be bone-dry at times, and there's a lot of background information to process. As a result, it's the sort of television show that's difficult to appreciate at the superficial level that most of us use when evaluating a new show. And that makes the show a very difficult sell. In fact, though McCracken doesn't mention it in this blog post, the show was actually pitched to at least one "traditional" network, which passed on it. Which is probably just as well, because it probably would not have survived more than a couple of episodes on ABCNBCCBSFOXGW.
As he notes, by landing on HBO, the show gets a completely different model for distribution than a traditional television series gets. HBO runs their programming at a wide variety of times throughout the week, making it possible for a viewer to watch an episode more than once (if they haven't already recorded it). They also make entire episodes of their series available online for the week following the first on-air broadcast. (McCracken mentions a sort of "digital divide" between viewers who "get" the idea of watching online and those who don't, and this turned out to be relevant in my group with regard to enticing people to watch this show)
What he doesn't consider in this post is the effect of the emergence of BitTorrent and the vast P2P sharing of television shows. It's trivial to find almost any television program on any network in almost any country that isn't uploaded to a BitTorrent site within moments of it being aired. The effects of this "underground" redistribution are several: by significantly increasing the availability of a program, it invites even the most casual viewer to watch one or more episodes with a very low threshold of investment. Thus it's even easier to get that "second-look" viewing which might be necessary to get a viewer to make the on-going investment in watching. Unfortunately for HBO, though, this series of investments happens completely outside of their control -- it probably will not bring new viewers to HBO itself, even if the fan base of the show grows and grows. However, there is probably some spillover effect: if the show is popular enough among the "digerati", there is likely to be enough interest to entice more traditional television viewers to watch the show. HBO surely knows this and wisely does not do much to limit the digital redistribution via BitTorrent (which, frankly, I'm not sure they could anyway).
I'm not much for repeat viewing, personally, but I didn't really need it to develop an interest in this show. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but by the end of the first episode I was hooked.
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Try to say that five times fast, I dare ya!
Though I have never been a morning person, preferring to spend the first couple hours of my day in a bit of a stupor, today I was even more dazed and confused than usual for reasons unknown. It didn't help that I'd managed to not leave my usual accoutrements in their customary places -- I had to go searching for my shoes, wallet, cellphone AND car keys.
Though I suppose it's not a technical term, I think we're all familiar with the notion of the "brain fart": the inexplicable total loss of memory and cognition that usually hits at EXACTLY the wrong moment. For most of us, brain farts are just temporary glitches, even if they get to be a little too regular as we get older. But, as the always-amusing folks at Mental Floss point out, sometimes a brain fart screws you up for good.
Here's their list of noted individuals who never quite recovered from a brain fart. (Mostly it's athletes who psyched themselves out of their A-game, but comedian Robin Williams somehow winds up on the list too.)
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Very nice blog post at Serious Eats yesterday about using vermouth in cooking, and why vermouth gets such a bad rap.
The poster says that the bad reputation comes from vermouth sitting on the shelf without being used. Vermouth is actually fortified wine and not a distilled spirit, so, like wine, it does suffer from oxidation and will spoil over time. Consequently, it only makes sense to keep wine the way you keep wine -- pump out the extra air with a tool like a Vac-u-Vin, and don't keep it hanging around for a long time. If you don't use vermouth much, then the best bet is to buy as small a bottle as you can, so that you have a better chance of using it up, or at least you won't be throwing so much away.
As it happens, I use vermouth a lot in cooking. In fact, unless a recipe calls for a specific sort of white wine for one reason or another, vermouth is my "dry white wine" of choice for recipes. As a result, I don't find that I have to contend with worn-out-tasting vermouth. I have to admit that I don't use a vacuum-pump stopper on my vermouth, though after reading this I probably will, but I do buy the smaller bottles and probably buy a new one once a quarter.
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On his blog "Marginal Revolution", economist Tyler Cowen links to this 2006 speech given by former Soviet Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar about the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gaidar says it can all be summed up in three words: oil and grain. The grain problem dated all the way back to the 1950s as the Soviets struggled to increase grain production in the face of a population boom. They failed and went from becoming the largest exporter of grain to one of the largest importers of grain. Meanwhile, over time the Soviet government had come to rely heavily on revenue from selling oil, and even though Soviet oil production had diminished substantially over the years, the high market price of oil in the 1970s kept the overall revenue picture satisfactory.
Gaidar is direct in his analysis:
The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.
The collapse of the oil market was directly responsible for the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy -- without oil revenue, the Soviets could not pay for grain imports, could not continue to funnel cash into the war in Afghanistan, and could not bludgeon international lenders into bailing them out. By 1989, Gorbachev had no choice but to start bargaining away political concessions to the West in hopes of attracting money. By 1991, the political state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was extinct.
Um, I don't see much mention of The Gipper in that analysis. You remember The Gipper, right? The guy who "won" the Cold War? Yes, the same guy who turned down the ultimate political concession -- total nuclear disarmament -- when Gorby offered it, hat in hand, in Reykjavik.
Good links -- the Gaidar speech is illustrated with some useful graphs and is very accessible even to those of us who aren't economists.
Permalink | Comments (0)Is it a sex toy or an exercise machine? See if you can tell the difference between these contraptions over at The Good Reverend.
And once you've figured out the difference between an elliptical trainer and a BDSM rack, go over to 10 Zen Monkeys and consider how Hollywood manages to turn everything into an opportunity to to ogle starlets' breasts (and other assorted naughty bits).
Bonus points if you can match up the buxom movie star to her favorite exercise machine/sex toy.
(This post totally safe for work, just in case you're worried)
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A few years ago, we were all very impressed with the guy who created this incredible chart comparing the sizes of various well-known spaceships from science fiction.
But even though that chart has a few contemporary buildings on it to offer some sense of scale, they're so dwarfed by some of the spacecraft that you don't really get to appreciate the effect. So this guy has boldly gone where no nerd has gone before by superimposing scaled images of the Enterprise-D over Google Map images of well-known American landmarks like the Pentagon, the White House, the St. Louis Arch, and others.
I particularly like the picture of the Big E looming over the Seattle skyline (the Manhattan one is good too).
(via a Friend of Torrez)
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I have to admit a fondness for sad songs. The more lugubrious and lachrymose the better. I mean "get out the razor blades and start shredding your wrists" sad. It's the Irishman in me, I think.
Hanan at growabrain has a link to this feature of the so-called "Twenty-Five Most Exquisitely Sad Songs In The Whole World".
Because it comes from a rock music blog, which probably doesn't employ a single person over the age of 25, the list is a little too heavy on songs written in the last five years to really be a comprehensive list. Still, they pick out a few winners: Frank Sinatra singing "In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning" absolutely belongs on this list, though probably a few notches higher than #12. And Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" really ought to be the top choice, but #4 is respectable.
Some of the omissions are glaring. Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey", cheesy as it is, has got to be one of the saddest songs EVER. Dion's "Abraham, Martin and John" instantly recaptures the confusion and grief of the spring of 1968 and makes it fresh all over again. Eric Clapton's "Tears In Heaven", sad enough as it is, is actually a song I haven't been able to bear listening to since I became a father. Mike And The Mechanics "The Living Years" is another one that is hard to listen to without a Kleenex handy.
What are your favorite sad songs?
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No, not THAT stupid evil bastard, I mean THIS stupid evil bastard, a very interesting fellow named Les, who actually does not seem the least bit stupid or evil.
Aaaaaanyway, the other day Les (or SEB as he is sometimes known) had a post about a C&D letter he got from Visa to take down a picture he had p'shopped of a "World Of Warcraft"-branded credit card. Seems that Les had figured that it would be a perfect branding opportunity for Visa to offer a credit card with a "rewards" program that paid you back not in dollars but in in-game currency. There's a lot of interest (no pun intended) about the viability of in-game currency having a valid exchange rate with real-world currency.
Les was just a little bit ahead of the Visa folks themselves, it seems, because a couple of days later BoingBoing pointed out that, sure enough, Visa was rolling out just such a card. Given the buzz these days about Second Life and its very robust economy, where in-game currency is already convertible, I give it less than three months before an SL branded card is available.
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I found an interesting blog this morning, courtesy of Hanan at Growabrain. The blog is called "The Good Reverend", and a quick perusal of the front page should remind you of a blog written by a rotund little fellow who lives in a big red house. Growabrain was linking to a post called "A Thinly-Veiled Allegory", but the post right before it caught my interest a lot more.
In it, "The Good Reverend" considers the idea that teenagers should be granted status as legal adults if they can demonstrate competency. At the end of the post, he comes down against the proposition, but the post links to a book by psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein which argues in favor of the idea (as well as a similar magazine article that considers the historical context of the birth of "teen culture and a Time article that argues against Epstein's propositions). I am leaving the links out of this post to get you to go read his post, which does link all this material. The blog post is further enhanced by a comment from Epstein himself, who refutes the way The Good Reverend characterizes his ideas and points readers to his own website so they can read about it first-hand.
In his rebuttal, Epstein asserts that his interest is not in giving adolescents legal equivalency to adults, but to acknowledge that by the time most people are teenagers they do indeed possess abilities and competencies suitable for adult behaviors and roles, and, more importantly to use this acknowledgement to break away from our society's infantilization of adolescents. Treating adolscents as incompetent, helpless children undercuts the further development of their adult faculties -- a phenomenon spreading into our culture in general as young adults take longer and longer to assume "mature" responsibilities and roles.
Not long after I read through all the links this morning, I went out for lunch and arrived at a nearby Wendy's to find it overrun with middle-school-aged adolescents out of school for a half-day. With all of this freshly in mind, it was interesting to watch all of these kids and their interactions. I presume the average age of the kids I saw was 13, given that they came from the middle school across the street, and even at 13 they do indeed blur a lot of distinctions between adult and child. One observation I almost always have about adolescents in general is their ease at jumping back and forth across this border as the situation requires -- behaving more childlike for parents and behaving more like adults when on their own. It's not hard to see Epstein's rationales when they're played right in front of your face -- the business of parents keeping their children trapped in childhood teaches the adolescent the value of duplicity and sends harmful messages about the inevitability of adulthood.
The criticism being levelled at Epstein is really aimed at the libertarian political nature of some of his arguments, I think. In the end, I don't think I would agree with formalizing an institutional process for legally recognizing adolescents as adults simply on the basis of competency exams, but I do agree with the idea that our culture as a whole should seriously revisit the way we deal with our older children in a way that stops isolating them and pushing them into maladaptive behaviors that linger into early adulthood.
Permalink | Comments (1)Last week I told you about my decision to bail out on Vonage and switch over to Comcast for our home telephone service. Subsequently, I've come across a couple of things here and there that illuminate the subject, so I thought I'd share them with you.
Over the weekend, Slashdot had a link to this forum thread at Broadband Reports, wherein people are complaining about AT&T's VoIP service. Apparently, AT&T has decided to dump its VoIP service and summarily informed thousands of their customers that the service was being cancelled. However, AT&T is blocking those customers from transferring their phone service to another provider, and they are unwilling to provide a forwarding message for those customers who have abandoned their VoIP phone numbers to sign up with other providers. In essence, AT&T is holding all of their VoIP subscribers hostage.
Meanwhile...today Comcast has announced that they're rolling out a service called SmartZone that will integrate their e-mail and voicemail services. Ooh. Straight out of 1999, you guys. This is a standard feature with most VoIP services. The announcement also goes on to tell us that they won't be charging any extra for this...well, that's mighty kind of you guys. Of course, they always say that at first and then a year or two down the road discover the sudden need to start charging a fee...which then goes up every year.
Meanwhile, telco expert David Isenberg has a post this morning considering this announcement. Isenberg's take is that this is Comcast's lame attempt to re-imagine themselves into a competitor for the likes of Google in the realm of offering value-added services rather than just as the "series of tubes" that gets the services to you.
Isenberg's assessment is that tying services to the tubes is exactly the wrong thing to do. Google, Yahoo, et.al. are not limiting themselves to subscription-only customers and to a single method of distribution. As he says, why limit yourself to 12.5 million customers (Comcast's present install base) when you can market to "1,000 million" customers.
On Thursday, I have to spend my entire afternoon at home waiting for a Comcast tech to show up to connect their VoIP device. I suspect it's just a router, just like Vonage's, but the CSR on the phone who got me to sign up had no clue. When I signed up for Vonage, they just mailed me the router and told me to plug it in. I have no idea why they need to make me miss half a day of work for something I can do by myself in three minutes.
Still no warm-and-fuzzies for me.
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Back In January, I posted this NYT graphic which demonstrates how George Bush has managed to squander away $1.2 TRILLION dollars with his unnecessary war.
Today at Dangerous Intersection, Erich Vieth posts about some of the other things that could have been done with all that money, such as giving every single man, woman and child in the United States $3,000.00 to reinvest in the economy, or, better still, giving EVERY HUMAN BEING ON THE PLANET $150.00. While $150 might be thought of as chump change in this country, the average Bangladeshi only earns $380 a year, and the average annual income in Ethiopia is only $141.00.
In the comments of that post, "grumpypilgrim" (one of the other regular authors of that site) has a collection of factoids about trying to imagine the sheer amount of one trillion dollars. A one-trillion stack of dollars, he tell us, would weigh more than BOTH of the World Trade Center towers and would be 55,000 miles tall (about 20% of the distance from the Earth to the Moon). One trillion dollars would build more than 200 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers (the U.S. Navy has 10).
Meanwhile, over at the Boston Globe, there's this photo essay that considers what you could do with $456 billion, which is what this group says the war has cost so far. Considering that it's only about a third of the amount John Allen Poulos is citing, the possibilities are still staggering: nearly 3000 first-class high schools, free gasoline for every car in the United States for fourteen months, 30 civil engineering projects of the scale of the Big Dig, feeding and educating the world's poor for FIVE years.
The mind boggles.
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Last week's "Masshole" post at Universal Hub drew a lot of visitors (here as well as there, and probably at the original poster's blog, too), so Adam revisited the concept yesterday with a post called "Ask Dr. Masshole".
(The picture above comes from an earlier post at UH where a local blogger snapped a pair of photos of Massholes parking at the Atrium Mall in Chestnut Hill, a prime gathering spot of spoiled rich SUV-driving bitches if there ever was one).
While the blogger in yesterday's UH post engaged in a little smackdown in the truest Boston tradition, there are other methods of retribution: the Urban Asshole Notification Card not only lets you provide a written reminder to Those People about their parking, but about a whole range of anti-social behavior. Or, if you're not quite up to that level of revenge but still need to get it out of your system somehow, you can take a picture and submit it to YouParkLikeAnAsshole.com, who are more than glad to share your grief with the entire world.
(Frankly, I think you could save a lot of time by just mailing one of those cards to every resident in Massachusetts pre-emptively, because eventually we'll all be guilty of at least ONE of those offenses.)
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This great photo of Manhattan as seen from an airliner on its landing approach comes from the blog of another mutual Friend of Torrez, a fellow I only know as "Vidiot". Here's a larger version of the picture on his photo blog.
As I said on the flickr page for this picture, when I used to fly back and forth to New York on the Delta/USAir shuttles, my favorite part of the flight was when the landing approach took us directly over Manhattan like this, getting lower and lower past the skyscrapers as the plane made it's last big turn over the southern tip of Manhattan.
I stopped making that regular trip to New York in 1999 and didn't fly into New York again for several years, during which time the world changed drastically. Apparently it's possible once again to have this view flying into the city, but I personally can't help but think of 9/11 and the people on those planes that morning, flying the same route. Vidiot pointed me to this 2003 Salon "Ask The Pilot" column, where the columnist, Patrick Smith (a former airline pilot) talks about his own impressions of flying this approach.
(Oh, and Vidiot also makes a mean pot of chicken stock)
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Blogbuddy "Kate" at Cider Press Hill points us to this story, which had me almost in tears from laughing so hard.
It's a good thing he needed it for his hen and not for his...ahem...rooster. THAT would have sent this story in a whole 'nother direction.
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MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has turned his Murrow-esque rants into a regular element of his program. Not surprisingly, this takes some of the effect out his words -- powerful rhetoric is only diminished by making it commonplace -- but he can still get a good stemwinder going when he wants to.
If you have not already seen the clip of his piece from earlier this week where he slices and dices Rudy Giuliani like just so much Kobe beef at a Japanese steak house, it is definitely worth watching. The political blog Crooks And Liars is good enough to post downloadable versions in both WMV and QuickTime formats.
I was almost out of my seat and cheering by the time he got to the end of this one. It would do my heart good if just one Democratic presidential candidate would get behind a talking point like this and shut up these bullshit artists once and for all.
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The author of this blog, a fellow named Robert Rittman, has a few things to say about the five kinds of Massholes he encounters on his daily commute. (via Universal Hub)
I can think of a few other types he didn't include:
I'm sure there are other examples.
Oh, and I also really liked his post called "101 Ways To Tell If You're From Massachusetts". I think I need to start reading this guy's blog.
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Daylight Atheism is a blog I follow on a regular basis. The blogger, who goes by the nom-de-web "ebonmuse", is an extremely thoughtful writer and clearly has given much consideration to explaining atheistic thought in a context that broaches the rather difficult barrier between us and "believers". He's working on a book based on the essays he's posted online, and it should be one to look forward to when it's published. He's significantly less confrontational and condescending than Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, without seeming apologetic or pimping atheism as just a "different kind of religion".
A couple of days ago, he posted this essay, which he entitled "Through A Glass Brightly". It takes on the question of faith, which I personally feel is one of the most destructive elements of religion. He very pointedly refers to the well-known biblical passage "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." Most people, believers and non-believers alike, interpret this to mean that humans cannot understand "God" except vaguely, as though through a blurred window, and this is how religious people generally deflect a lot of the specific arguments offered by atheists about the lack of evidence of a deity.
"Ebonmuse" comes up with a really nice response, which I think goes a long way to addressing the shortcomings of "faith":
Paul of Tarsus himself is long gone, but his words survive and have led countless millions to follow a similar course, wandering through life with a head in the clouds. How many more benighted souls are there who recognize that their knowledge of the world is poor, that their ability to predict and control it is even poorer, but believe in faith that one day all will be made clear? What they do not realize is that it is faith itself, eclipsing reason and blocking out enlightenment, that causes them to see the world dimly, as if in a darkened mirror.It doesn't have to be this way. Beyond the gray clouds of mysticism, there is a brilliant sun shining out. Those who walk in the clouded vision of faith are unaware that all around them is a beautiful, glorious world, byzantine in its complexity, rich in its diversity, capable of inspiring more awe and wonder than even the most wildly imaginative fantasies of humans. We stand on the shores of galaxies, we map the countless branches of the tree of life and find our own small leaf among them; we write down the harmonies and symmetries that govern the cosmos on a piece of paper. Compared to the vast sweep of natural history, all the pantheons of the past seem like pale shadows. Who needs the small mythologies of a bygone age when we have the entire universe to study and explore?
As always, I remain taken aback as to why anyone would prefer a worldview shrouded in mystery, held in place by the stubborn denial of the reality around them in the name of ancient superstition and ignorance, and falsely represented as the "compassion" of an impossible creator. It's hard in these times not to be angry and confrontational with the loud and terribly misguided people who insist on claiming their ignorant and harmful behavior in the name of higher causes, so I'm glad at least one person is writing in such an illuminative way.
Permalink |To follow up a little bit on my post about the French presidential elections the other day, I really enjoyed this post from Grant McCracken, who has just returned from doing some ethnographic work in Paris. He makes some very interesting observations about how the French view their own society versus his outsider's observations with regard to class and status. He also visits the particular French conceit that their culture remains at the pinnacle of Western Civilization and how this affects their view of the rest of the world (Hey, Fellow Americans, pay attention, because we're on this same path). This worldview also finds itself slamming hard against the realities of the 21st century (another point Les Americains ought to take to heart).
Permalink |Chef Anthony Bourdain occasionally guest posts at the blog of author Michael Ruhlman (the guy who spent a year shadowing students at the CIA and wrote about it in the popular book The Making of A Chef).
Today he's got quite a rant going about the execrable "Food Network Awards" that aired last night. I didn't watch them (I was actually too busy cooking all evening to watch TV), but it doesn't sound like I missed much.
Bourdain is generally very critical of the Food Network, but maybe he really has pinpointed the beginning of the end for what used to be a really great cable network.
Permalink | Comments (1)Last week, Harvard scholar and telco industry expert David Isenberg posted about an NYT article that focuses on the decrepit state of the national infrastructure in the United States. Since the article is behind the NYT's stupid pay-wall, Isenberg was good enough to excerpt a big chunk of the piece.
Though it seems like road construction projects are never-ending, roads are only one element of our national infrastructure. Here in Massachusetts, at least 50% of the bridges are structurally deficient and need to be repaired or replaced (link goes to a PDF). There have been 29 significant dam failures in the U.S. since 2004 (link goes to PDF), including one here in Massachusetts in 2005 that threatened the entire downtown of the town of Taunton. Similar reports can be found for sewer and water systems in many large cities, deteriorating or outmoded public facilities, and just about every other form of physical infrastructure one can think of.
Much of the vast network of infrastructure in this country was built in the period between 1950 and 1970, but there are siginificant portions that are even older than that -- subway systems which date back to the 19th century, for example. Because we see road crews every day, or find ourselves briefly inconvenienced by a public works project here or there, our attention to the overall situation remains diverted, and so this critical issue goes unrecognized.
We're plunging headlong into becoming a Third World nation -- poorly educated, poorly serviced, and poorly governed.
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Yesterday at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow had a link to this recent post by computer security expert Bruce Schneier commenting on an FBI notice sent to state and local officials saying that "terrorists might try to get jobs as school bus drivers". Not that there were any actual reported cases of this happening, merely that someone thought this was something terrorists might try.
So Cory added a few of his own suggestions for things to warn people about. I liked this one especially:
Terrorists could infiltrate the world's car companies and manufacture large, fuel-inefficient vehicles like Hummers. Once America has gone all SUV, the resulting carbon emissions would contribute to polar melting and global warming, causing devastating hurricanes through the southwest, killing and displacing millions of Americans. Ban car companies now, or the terrorists have won.Permalink |
One of my favorite bloggers, BusyMom, is just back from a somewhat lackluster getaway weekend with her girlfriends and has some advice on what NOT to name your new business.
(I would hasten to add at least one more, particularly for those of you opening a shop somewhere here in New England: Enough already with the "Ye Olde Shoppe", please.)
I have linked to the blogger at Violent Acres previously, as well, even though I don't ordinarily read her site. This was her rant recently about giving your employer as good as they give you back.
I agree with her in principle -- on the whole, most employers expect something akin to blood-oath loyalty in return for a mere paycheck, meanwhile they have no problem imposing absurd and arbitrary rules and conditions on people and cutting people off at the knees when it suits their short-sighted purposes. Redefining the employer-employee relationship in a way that balances the power a bit more fairly is something I think both sides need to address in a positive way.
I do think she's trying to excuse herself from some bad behavior in the way that she actually quit that terrible job. I shouldn't be pointing any fingers, to be sure, but she didn't even tell them she actually quit, and then sent her husband to collect her final paycheck. Even if you just up and quit on the spot (which I have done more than once, by the way), you should at least tell them that. I don't think two week's notice is necessary at all -- I completely agree that if an employer wanted to fire someone or lay them off they wouldn't feel obliged to give notice, so turnabout is fair play -- but you have to at least acknowledge what you've done.
This post resonates with me because my last job was so dysfunctional in so many ways, and yet that employer is routinely classified as a "best place to work". It makes you wonder who makes those judgments and if they ever actually talk to people who work "in the trenches" or if they just get a bunch of smoke blown up their asses from PR flacks armed with bullshit HR propaganda.
My friends and regular visitors probably know that I've recently started working an IT job again, but as a contractor rather than as a permanent employee. The company where I am right now is immensely bureaucratic (in part out of necessity, but in part just as a function of their culture) and not terribly employee-friendly as far as I can see. Being a semi-autonomous contractor goes a long way to leveling out the inherent inequalities in the employer-employee relationship. I highly recommend it.
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The picture above is what the current-day version of the classic Easy-Bake Oven looks like. I happen to know this from direct experience, since Charlotte is the proud owner of her very own toy appliance. She has become a master of the bite-sized sugar cookie with sprinkles, though I have to say that the little cakes need a bit of work.
As I have just learned from perusing that Hasbro site, the Easy-Bake Oven has been around since 1963, just like me. Anyone whose childhood encompassed the 1960s and 70s will remember the original design of the toy, which somewhat resembled a long countertop with an oven, and sometimes a (decorative, non-functioning) stovetop and was frequently re-styled to match the popular kitchen color schemes of the day. The earliest ones were turquoise blue, but by the 1970s came in the ubiquitous avocado green. In the 1980s and 90s, the toy was remodeled to look like a microwave oven.
The current model abandons all of that to take on the look of the typical standalone range-oven that lives in the majority of our homes, and comes in a pink-and-purple color scheme that probably does not exist in most kitchens (at least I hope it doesn't) but is de rigeur for modern-day girl toys. But the real significant change about this latest Easy-Bake Oven is that Hasbro (which bought out Kenner Toys years ago) has eschewed the 100-watt lightbulb that has baked a zillion cookies and cakes for the last 43 years and replaced it with a low-power electrical heating element. The new design of the toy not only looks like your oven, it works like your oven, too. In fact, I think it's safe to suppose that the new design of the toy is as much about safely enclosing the heating element as it is adapting to appliance styles.
The heating element is well-insulated from the outside world. While we were waiting for Charlotte's oven to heat up enough to bake cookies, both Bridget and I touched the case and found that, though it did get warm, it was never anywhere close to being hot to touch on the outside. The toy also makes use of a special tool for removing the hot baking pans that keeps the pan inside a compartment. The child is not able to touch the pan directly while it is inside the retrieval tool, and a heat-sensitive sticker lets you know when the pan has cooled enough to be safe to touch.
Anything that piques Charlotte's interest in cooking and baking is A-OK with me, even if I have to eat more than my share of quarter-sized sugar cookies and overbaked teacakes.
Knowing that the Easy-Bake no longer uses a lightbulb, though, makes it somewhat wistfully ironic that MAKE:Zine is co-sponsoring a DIY lightbulb-powered mini oven contest. Scrupulously avoiding the "Easy-Bake" brand name, they're calling it a "Dorkbake". It's still not too late to enter -- the deadline is next Friday (Feb. 3), but you have to deliver the oven to the contest holders in Los Angeles. Once all the ovens have been received, they'll be judged by Mark Frauenfelder from BoingBoing and an editor from Craft (a sister magazine of MAKE:Zine).
Permalink | Comments (3)Via Marginal Revolution, here's a post on Time Magazine's China blog wherein the blogger reminisces about his childhood in Beijing and his family's use of ginger ale as a cold remedy. Nice to know that there are some universals, eh?
But the real point of the post is his description of being introduced to a "tea" of sorts made with hot Coca-Cola and fresh ginger, also intended to be a health tonic. He says the drink is "cola-neutral", so feel free to substitute whatever cola you prefer -- he prefers the local blend of Coke one finds in Beijing. Personally, I think you'd want to find a cane-sugar-based cola instead of a high-fructose corn syrup version. Lately some Coca-Cola bottlers are starting to switch back to the cane-sugar syrup, and I have also seen Boylan's Cane Cola here and there.
Using ginger to settle your stomach or treat other symptoms of minor illnesses is very traditional. I would guess that heating up the Coke to a slightly syrupy consistency works out all the carbonation so as not to introduce more gas into your stomach, and adds the soothing effect of the syrup. Ginger ale does not have the same sort of caramelized sugar syrup, so you probably can't boil it down to the same consistency. Plus, there's the energy boost from the caffeine.
And, if you have any left over, you can use it to glaze a Sunday ham!
Permalink |3Quarks Daily has been a regular read of mine for a while, but I generally pay more attention to the links they offer than the original essay posts by the various contributors.
This essay, written by Alon Levy (scroll down through the contributor list to find his bio), offers some very good insight into the context of religion as an element of conflict, particularly in the Middle East. As he points out, in our multicultural society in America, we see religion as a sort of ideological division, but in other countries religion is virtually inseparable from racial determinations, and thus humanity's neverending ability to invest hatred against "the other".
Most of the contributors to 3Quarks are foreign nationals living in America -- Arabs, Indians, Israelis, etc. -- and so they are able to write from outside our somewhat blinkered American perspective. While that makes, at times, for essays that I find it hard to bgecome too involved in, at other times, like this one, it's like a shaft of light on a particular subject. The present debate on religion in America is decidely ideological, even as we find ourselves becoming far too involved in conflicts where the issue of religion is wrapped up in issues of race and culture. But even our own debate has the tinge of racism about it when you begin to look a little closer at the rhetoric from the religious right (and now also beginning to come from the secular left).
Worth reading.
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All things dull and ug-ly,
All creatures, short and squat,
All things rude and na-sty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their prudish venom,
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid,
Who made the spiky urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!
All things scant and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
Amen.
If you are my age or older, you probably remember the British television series "All Creatures Great And Small", which ran seemingly forever on public television in the 1970s and 1980s. You might also remember the books, which were very popular and which I first encountered as Reader's Digest excerpts as a young teenager.
I think most of us recall that "James Herriot" wa actually a pen name for the author, who was himself a Yorkshire vet for many years. Pop culture queen Gael at Pop Culture Junk Mail had a post yesterday that tells us that "Herriot" was actually a fellow named Alf Wight, and also reveals the real identities behind Siegfried and Tristan Farnon and what actually happened to all of them in real life. The tale is a bit poignant, not unlike a few episodes of the show that I can recall.
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Because we had to photograph everything we made at cooking school, I got into the habit of regularly photographing just about everything I cook at home as well. Along the way, I progressed from some very unflattering snapshots of dishes to taking fairly competent food photos and the occasional excellent one. I happen to be extremely proud of this particular picture. I even put together a calendar featuring my food photos via CafePress as a bit of schwag to go along with Out Of The Frying Pan. (If you missed it for 2006, you can order one now with all the same photos for 2007)
As with a lot of endeavors, I have been able to teach myself some of the basics of food photography without any sort of reference beyond looking at pictures in food mags, cookbooks and online. What I'd really like to do is take an adult-ed sort of class that was strictly about food photography, but I haven't found one around here. It's the sort of thing I think Cambridge School of Culinary Arts ought to offer as a seminar for its students and also as a recreational class, but they don't. Meanwhile, I ran across this post from a food blogger who is also a fabulous photographer and offers up some of his rules-of-thumb that should help enormously. Even better, he links to this blog by a woman who specializes in food photography and food styling (another thing CSCA is missing the boat on).
My cooking life is about to take another sharp turn, but I expect to continue with food photography as part of whatever direction that turn takes me in.
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My friend Mig shares his dreams of the shit weasel with his little girl.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Permalink |The title of this post comes from the well-known "Darmok" episode of Star Trek:The Next Generation. I'll leave you to find the translation yourself.
Another blog I've picked up reading recently is "The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society". Just as I often do "theme" days where all my posts revolve around a core idea, this blog likes to do theme weeks, and this week's theme has been "language".
All the posts this week have been top-notch (as they almost always are). Today's post presents the story of a philosophy professor who can speak backwards fluently, and I also really liked yesterday's post about alternative alphabets.
Permalink |As I mentioned a few days ago, I've started reading an interesting blog by an anthropology and economics professor named Grant McCracken. His professional interest is the economic aspect of culture (or possibly the cutural aspect of economics), which is one of my pet topics from my own previous life in academia.
His post today is sort of a digest of a number of earlier posts he's made about some interesting topics. I particularly like the posts about Rachael Ray, how department stores could make a big comeback, and how Disney almost screwed up their #1 box office bonanza "Pirates Of The Caribbean" by replacing Johnny Depp.
The always-interesting blog tingilinde has some factoids you might be interested in WRT casualty figures in Iraq:
As of Thursday, there are 2,884 DoD-confirmed deaths of American troops. That's pretty common knowledge.
Steve (the blog author) says that the Environmental Protection Agency values one year of a human life at $172,000, and overall the EPA values an average human life at $3.7 million ($2.3 million if you're over 70, but we're talking about soldiers here). By the way, that's marked down from a previous government estimate of $6.1 million. However, Steve has extrapolated the $172K figure out to $7.7 million per soldier based on an average age of 30 and an average lifespan of 75.
Using Steve's numbers, he comes to the figure of $22.3 billion as the total worth of the lives of troops lost so far in Iraq. Based on estimates that the war costs the American taxpayer roughly $250 millon per day, the cost of those 2884 lives is equal to about 90 days of operations (even less if you use the standard $6.1M figure). As of Sunday, the duration of the war surpassed the total length of American engagement in World War II, and today makes the 1,354th day of the war.
The dead are a drop in the bucket. Unless, of course, they happen to be your loved ones. But tell that to the Decider-In-Chief.
Permalink |We've all done it: bought someone a "gift card" from a retailer to give as a Christmas or birthday present. It's less tacky than handing someone cash, easier than trying to shop for someone whose taste you can't predict, doesn't cost a lot to ship, and so on. Just about every imaginable retailer has them now; even the venerable McDonald's holiday gift certificates we used to love to get as children have been supplanted with gift cards.
The retailers love them too. It's a pure profit center for them. You give them money, they give you a card. Okay, so far so good. But what happens next is this: the person who received the card takes it to the retailer and goes looking for something to spend it on. One of two scenarios then plays out: either they find an item (or items) that doesn't quite add up to the full amount of the gift card and they're left with some unspendable amount on the card which the retailer gets to keep because you already gave them the money OR they find something that costs more than the gift card and decide to pay the difference themselves, earning more money for the retailer. Either way, the retailer is making out like a bandit.
One of the blogs I read regularly, bookofjoe.com, had this post yesterday featuring an article from the Wall Street Journal about gift cards. Among the factoids in the article is the news that retailers make an estimated $8 billion per year on unredeemed gift cards. Think about that -- EIGHT BILLION DOLLARS that people spend on gift cards that never get used to claim merchandise. Why, that's enough to pay for the War in Iraq for almost a whole month!
(and a big thanks to Joe himself for reprinting the WSJ article in full in his blog post, because the WSJ site keeps the good stuff locked away)
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Actual screen cap of an AP story about soon-to-be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in which whoever wrote the caption felt obliged to mention her outfit. (via Jack at TPRS)
Excuse the hell out of me, but when was the last time it was considered necessary to mention who made George Bush's suit or what color shirt he wore? Are we really not over the need in our society to define women by their clothing? What single bit of difference does it make if Nancy Pelosi wears an aqua Armani pantsuit or a red polyester dress from K-Mart? Does it matter if Bush wears Hermes neckties or suits off the rack from Men's Wearhouse? Of course not.
When Katie Couric debuted on the CBS Evening News a couple of months ago, there was a lot of scrutiny given to her choice of wardrobe, too. On one hand, I can understand this to some degree because she's more celebrity than authority figure, even though she finds herself in a role we've traditionally granted "gravitas" to. What celebrities wear is part of the whole cult of celebrity in the first place. But even in Katie Couric's case, dishing about her outfit seems woefully out of place in the context of her role vis-a-vis Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson, and certainly in relation to the way we talked about news anchors like Cronkite or Jennings.
Part of the problem, I suppose, is that we've reduced politicians to celebrities (indeed, the line is so blurred that we're entirely willing to accept celebrities as politicians, so why not the other way around?), but the double standard is unnecessary.
Permalink | Comments (1)For the last week or two I have been following a blog called "This Blog Sits At The Intersection Of Anthropology And Economics". Not the catchiest blog name I've ever come across, but it is descriptive. Grant McCracken, the blog's author, writes about popular culture, its economics, and its sociology -- all topics once very near and dear to me.
Yesterday, for example, he set out to parse the underlying cultural significances behind the "artisanal" or "slow" food meme. He does an exceptionally good job of laying bare the shift in cultural value of the notions of "artificial" and "authentic" -- it is not that long ago that our culture placed a higher value on "artificial" as symbolic of man's mastery over the natural world and his distance from his uneducated agrarian past. In the context he lays out for us, the aesthetic of "artisanal" food is unmade into its own version of snobbery and need to distinguish between the common and the uncommon, managing somehow not to see its own ironical position in the process.
Worth reading and considering, especially among the foodie types.
Permalink |The thing I like the most about BusyMom is that even when her life is at its most challenging (and believe me, her life is plenty challenging, especially compared to mine), she keeps her incredible sense of humor and ability to see things with her own unique point of view.
Today's post that had me chortling:
I was in line for breakfast this morning here at Minor Medical Center (home of the greatest made to order omlettes, evah!, btw) and I noticed the lady in front of me ordered bacon AND sausage, a biscuit, gravy and eggs.Permalink | Comments (1)When she turned around, I saw the embriodered logo on her shirt that said, "Cardiovascular Surgery".
John Tolva at Ascent Stage writes that his oldest son has found a novel use for their TiVo: he's teaching himself how to read and spell by using the TiVo's "Search By Program" feature.
Charlotte is still mastering how to use the TiVo remote and is doing a good job with entering numbers. She hasn't quite gotten to the point of sight-reading yet, though she can sometimes tell what's what on the "Now Playing" menu by the first letter of the title. As she starts to develop some real reading skills, I'd bet that she'll be able to puzzle her way through the search feature, too.
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MAKE:Blog has a post this morning about a fellow who bought a Bluetooth headset for his cell phone and embedded it inside a styrofoam banana.
Lucky for him it's an artificial banana, or it would get pretty nasty after about a week, unless he also has a recipe for Bluetooth Banana Bread.
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Clotilde, the pre-eminent food blogger, occasional NPR commentator, and soon-to-be cookbook author recently dined at the most acclaimed restaurant in the world, Ferran Adria's showplace El Bulli near Barcelona.
The thirty-five course degustation menu lasted six hours and ranged from a frozen cucumber gin tonic prepared tableside with liquid nitrogen to "Parmesan air" (her least favorite dish) to chocolate bites with mandarin orange sorbet. Her blog post has photographs of every single course, because some of Adria's creations simply defy explanation in words.
This isn't really food, it's art cuisine, meant to delight and intrigue and dazzle rather than nourish and satisfy. Very few chefs really pull this off at all, and no one at Adria's level of creativity. Definitely an experience to add to the Life List. If you're interested, you can submit a request for a reservation for next year beginning in October. If they accept your request, they'll tell you when you can dine there, so don't buy the plane tickets until you hear back.
Permalink | Comments (2)A bit of follow-up to the post from last week about David Sifry's analysis of blog links:
Here's a post from a blogger who tried to track blogs way back in the beginning. He lists the 50 Most-Linked Blogs from September 2000. These wer the blogs we used to call "The A-Listers" once upon a time. If you've spent any time reading blogs at all, you'll probably recognize many, perhaps even all of them -- I would say that I probably read somewhere close to 90% of these on a regular basis at one time or another.
Several years ago (2002, to be exact), I went to a blogger meetup in Harvard Square. The party was organized to welcome Christine Selleck, the blogger who writes Big Pink Cookie, who was visiting Boston with her son and then-fiancé-now-husband. Christine was someone I had connected with through our blogs (as well as that Unmentionable Site), so I went to the meetup to meet her and to meet Jennifer of The Working Mom, whom I had also gotten to know a bit online. It was, in fact, at that meetup where I first met my friend Shelley and also got to put faces to names of a few other Boston-area blogfolk.
I remarked on that occasion that it would probably be the last time that bloggers would have such personal connections. Christine had become an "A-List Blogger" at that point herself, and it was at that time when blogs were still mostly about people connecting to other people about their personal lives, though the events of 9/11 had already begun to change the face of blogging. I was right in a sense, though wrong in another -- bloggers continue to meetup all over the place, but the feeling that bloggers as a group were going to be a small and fairly homogenous crowd of logorrehic geeks has been obliterated, as Sifry's stats point out. Who, after all, would have imagined in 2002 spam-blogs, blogs that exist only to trap adclicks, corporate shill blogging, and the rise of the political blogs?
Here, again from Technorati, is a list of the 100 Most-Linked Blogs now (note that this is different than the Most-Linked Sites from the other day, which had only a couple of blogs on the list). Most of them are either corporate blogs, news blogs, or political blogs. There are only a couple of blogs from 2000 that are still on the list -- MetaFilter and Scripting News -- neither of which are personal sites. Out of these 100 blogs, I read about 10% of them and mainly as sources for my own blogs, not out of any personal connection.
Not to sound too much like an old fart, but I liked it better the other way.
Permalink |My friend Ben has trotted out one of his favorite bits of statistical analysis again: it's a little animation of a series of graphs that demonstrate the relative voting patterns in the U.S. Senate going all the way back to the 1st Congress. The graphs define an axis that shows whether or not any given bill was voted up or down due to its economc impact or its social one, and, as Ben likes to point out, social issues are invariably just noise in the legislative agenda, which boils down to economic interest again and again. In this model, our "liberal versus conservative" paradigm gets interpreted as "popular interests versus corporate interests", and I'll just bet you can guess how that manifests itself.
How the Republicans have ever managed to convince anybody in this country that they're looking out for "the average American" remains an utter mystery, but, then again, most people in this country believe in an invisible Grand-Dad In The Sky and his son the Zombie, so anything is possible.
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David Sifry, the guy behind the popular blog-tracking site Technorati.com collects statistical information on blogs and occasionally reports about them on his own blog. His latest report says that there are now AT LEAST 50 million blogs online and that the number doubles just about every six months (200 days to be precise). That means by the next time he does one of these analyses, there could be 100 million blogs (and, yes, that does not count "spam blogs")
He also has a number of other terribly interesting factoids in his report, but the bit I found the most interesting is that of the 30 websites most frequently cited by blogs, only two are blogs themselves, and only of of them is an English-language site: BoingBoing And at that it is #24 on the list. Some other heavy hitters like Slashdot, MetaFilter, and even Instapundit do not even make the list of the Top 90 (although several liberal political blogs like Huffington Post and DailyKos do).
Oh, for those cozy bygone days of 2000, when there were just half a million or so of us, eh? Looking at this graph reminds me of the scene in "Hitchhiker's Guide" where Arthur goes inside the device that shows you your exact significance in the universe. I guess that must make Cory Doctorow Zaphod Beeblebrox.
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When I were a wee lad, Mr. Potato Head had a whole set of fruit and vegetable pals he hung out with. I distinctly remember the cucumber and the pepper, but there were also an orange and a carrot. I think we actually had the cucumber for a while -- one of us got Mr. Potato Head for Christmas and the other got Cooky Cucumber, but that may be a wishful memory.
Apparently, there was also Dunkie Donut, a cross-promotion with you-know-who. This page says he's from the 1960s, but if you look at the packaging of those other Potato Pals, which are definitely from the '60s, you can see the packaging of Dunkie is quite a bit different. There's also a very 1970s-looking car pictured on the box, parked in front of a DD.
(via my old blogging pal Sciatica, who is back in the saddle again, I see.)
Permalink | Comments (1)Gael from Pop Culture Junk Mail also works for MSNBC where she gets paid to do what she does for free on her own website (nice work if you can get it). Her MSNBC stuff is also "pop culture", but a bit more broadly defined by the "pop" element than her personal site, which is a bit more obscure and/or personal.
Today she's got a link at PCJM to her latest MSNBC post, which includes some sneak-peek stuff about the fall TV season, including this page full of "news" about The Amazing Race 10: some info about the next group of teams, what some of the destinations are going to be, and a bunch of info about the host, Phil Keoghan. Poor Phil often has to put up with the same crappy travel conditions as the contestants, and I was a bit non-plussed to learn that he pronounces his last name "Ko-gan" (here in Boston we would pronounce that name "Kyoo-an").
Permalink |If you've ever read any tech news, or articles about emerging industries in places like the Wall Street Journal or Forbes Magazine, you'll no doubt have encountered the occasional "expert commentary" from "industry analysts". Just who are these people, you may wonder.
These consulting firms are a dime a dozen around here. The firm Bridget used to work for does just that sort of work, focusing primarily on one particular specialty (energy), but handling all sorts of work for clients who needed to have the value of a potential merger worked out, or understanding a developing market for their business. (At this point I wave at the person or persons from said firm who visit my sites every day...Yoo-Hoo! I know you're watching me!)
Blog-friend Lisa Williams was at one point an analyst for another such firm (a particularly well-known media research group also in Cambridge), and in this very interesting blog post she tells you exactly what you need to keep in mind whenever you read pontifications from various research analysts. I especially like the imagery behind the phrase "coin-operated analyst", since it sums up the gist of the thing quite nicely.
Permalink |A slightly convoluted path gets us to our next link, which is actually quite appropriate given the subject matter. Found On The Web has a link to this blogger, who has a link to this Christian Science Monitor feature about the somewhat unusual sport of Road Bowling that is popular in the towns of Ireland (and, oddly enough, West Virginia).
My brother Tim and my mother went on their second trip in as many years to Ireland this spring, and on this trip they chose to rent a car and drive themselves around the countryside. When we picked them up at the airport on their return, almost all of their travel stories involved the narrow and winding little roads that connect the villages, their close-shave encounters with trucks and buses, and several flat tires. No word about running across any of these road bowling competitions, though I'm sure we'dve heard about it if they had.
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Blog-friend "Kate" at Cider Press Hill has posted about her son's recent trip to do some volunteer work in New Orleans following his high school graduations.
His report echoes things you read and hear at other blogs, though almost never in the "MSM": New Orleans is still a wasteland. While they've officially stopped counting the dead, claiming about 1,700 people lost their lives, unofficially they are still finding dead bodies at a steady rate. Bodies which are unidentified or unclaimed are not added to the final tally, as if those people simply never existed.
The groups of volunteers who continue to work in the city are beginning to flag out, demoralized by the conditions and by the enormity of the task which remains. They still arrive to do their bit, but it is becoming clear that the work may simply be beyond the ability of even the most dedicated volunteers.
Meanwhile, the media focuses on stories about hurricane refugees squandering their paltry assistance on frivolous and inappropriate spending, continuing to reinforce the public perception that somehow these people "deserved" what happened to them and aren't worthy of the efforts being made. And, as Kate points out, thousands of refugees (oops, we're supposed to call them "victims") are about to be thrown out of the temporary housing trailers given to them by FEMA...heckuva job there, don't ya think?
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photo by John Tolva
Not only is John Tolva a first-rate blogger and the proud father of a brand-new baby named Charlotte, he's also an amazing guy who designs outstanding interactive projects for IBM (yes, behind those blue suits and white shirts, there are some very creative and innovative souls at Big Blue). He's worked on this incredible site about ancient Egypt for the Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage, and this one for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
He's been travelling back and forth to China quite a bit lately (which you can read about here), and now he's able to tell us what he's been up to (besides sampling some sounds in a restaurant): a completely immersive 3D online tour of The Forbidden City.
Just like other virtual worlds such as the MMORPGs "Worlds of Warcraft" and "EverQuest" or the increasingly popular "Second Life", the Forbidden City site will offer a chance to "exist" inside the Forbidden City. The team hopes to launch the site by 2008, though they realize that's a very optimistic deadline.
Keep an eye on his blog for more updates, as well as his other side projects and posts-of-interest.
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Tod at I Love Radio had a disquieting bit of news the other day: it's being rumored that Clear Channel will offer ONE-SECOND spots on its vast network of radio stations.
One second is just long enough for something like a signature jingle like the "Intel Inside" sound or the T-Mobile ringtone sound. How they would actually implement this isn't entirely clear, but I'm guessing the one-second spots would be like "bumpers" in between other longer spots. I can't even imagine listening to even a short block of nothing but one-second audio clips.
Or maybe I can. If you remember the 1980s, you undoubtedly remember Max Headroom, even if you don't remember the very short-lived TV series he came from. In the pilot film for the series, the evil TV network has designed a "blipvert" -- an entire program's worth of information compressed into a few seconds of video. The unfortunate side effect of blipverts was that they made people's heads explode. Here's the actual "blipvert" itself from that movie (don't worry, your head won't explode...probably)
And, if you read that link to the blipvert page on Wikipedia, you'll see that Clear Channel isn't the only one thinking this way. Apparently, GE, the parent company of NBC, would like to do the same thing on television, in the process trying to put some spin on TiVo and DVR users who zip past commercials by enticing them to freeze-frame the extra-short spots to win prizes.
(Hmmm...this morning, Tod has posted that he is shutting down his blog. I've only been following him for a month or two; he posts about radio and media in general, and the goings on at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp in particular. I wonder if the CBC, his employer, nailed him for some of the things he's had to say recently that were critical of the new right-wing government there.)
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While we're on the subject of food, let's take a minor detour to look at this quite interesting essay by Justin E.H. Smith at 3quarksdaily entitled "Why We Do Not Eat Our Dead".
Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" notwithstanding, Smith considers the anthropological and evolutionary reasonings behind the avoidance of cannibalism in most human societies. Some of the comments that go along with the post offer some refutations of his central assertion and are worth thinking about too.
Permalink | Comments (1)Pardon me, but didn't I just post about McDonald's deciding to re-dress all of its restaurants to look like Starbucks?
Well, now Jim Romanesko reports on his Starbucks Gossip blog that Starbucks is changing over their decor, too. And guess what? The new furniture is plastic chairs and little food-service-standard tables, so that the Starbucks are all going to look like McDonald's.
He also reports that Starbucks' test of an "Egg McMuffin" clone has been extended to more stores.
Can Mackie Macchiato be far behind?
Permalink |Hanan at growabrain engaged in a little cybersquatting a while back based on his hunch that there would be some marketing value to the upcoming birth of the 300,000,000th American sometime later this year. Now he's trying to sell the domain to the highest bidder.
I dunno how much tie-in merchandising and the like there can possibly be for this; it's the sort of thing that gets mentioned in the news briefly and then forgotten. But maybe you've got some ideas and are champing at the bit to score big on Hanan's domain name.
Permalink |Adam "The Amateur Gourmet" wasted no time in whipping up a recipe suggestion for Tom Cruise, who seemed quite ravenous the other day.
(Be glad I didn't include a picture for this one)
Permalink | Comments (1)There was a time on this blog, back in the mists of antiquity, when I devoted much real estate to keeping you up to date on the incursions of those Evil-Doers, the office park geese and their equally shiftless cohorts, the wily wild turkeys.
Well, just because I've moved on doesn't mean the Threat To Our Freedom from these insidious wildfowl has lessened. And I am pleased to see that good old Adam at Universal Hub has carried on in my absence, keeping the citizenry alert to the infiltrations of these feathered fiends. Git R Done, Adam!
Permalink |Has anyone else spent any time over at Newsvine yet?
A couple of weeks ago, just before they staged their public launch, one of the regulars at MetaFilter started passing out invitations to the site. We've been down this road a million times now, right? A few well-placed people start handing out "invites" to a new social-organization website of one form or another, and BOOM, instant web fad. Orkut, flickr, Gmail, and on and on.
So I wangled an invite (not hard, in short order there were half a dozen people handing them out like lollipops) and signed up, but for the life of me I haven't figured out quite what to DO with it. The idea, at least on the face of it, is that people link to news stories, which then get promoted up a ladder by other people who vote on the stories, in the same way that "karma" is used on other websites to promote good material and shunt aside the crap. But people can also post their own blog-type posts, and those get moderated, too, and then there are mechanisms to syndicate everything six different ways to Sunday.
All in all, I am finding it too complicated to be an active participant in any meaningful way, and I have relegated it to being yet-another-newsfeed in my RSS reader, where it seems to spew out a steady stream of wire stories. I'm just wondering if anyone who passes through here has spent any more time than I have trying to figure out a good way to do something with it in hopes that it could be demystified.
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The brouhaha last week over whether or not George Clooney actually wrote this post which appeared at The Huffington Post proves once again the old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I am not a reader of overtly political blogs for the most part, and until last week I had never even looked at The Huffington Post for even a moment. I find Ariana Huffington to be distatefully self-serving and, given her bizarre political "conversion", mostly untrustworthy, and I have always written off the site as more of the same from her in a blog genre that is already overwhelmed by self-serving and untrustworthy people posing as knowledgable commentators.
But even if Clooney didn't write those comments on purpose and they were just edited together by some Huffington Post lackey, it was a very good distillation of thing he has actually said in public. Of course, it seemed pretty clear to me that the editing job got more than a little inspiration from this oft-quoted speech by John F. Kennedy, and probably suffers from more than a little wishful thinking that Clooney would fit that JFK mold as an actual politician. And Clooney has recently demonstrated more than a little interest in the high drama aspect of that period of American history, so maybe the same idea rattles around in his devilishly handsome head once in a while.
So I've added The Huffington Post to my daily blog crawl, even as I was just decrying the state of things over at Huffington's last bivouac, Salon, not too long ago. I feel all cheap and easy for doing it, but I can learn to live with that.
Permalink |When you're cooking or baking using a cookbook, one of the things that's always a challenge (at least to me) is when the recipe isn't explanatory enough to get across a particular technique or what to be looking for in the actual food product itself. I find this to be more true of baking, but that's probably because I have less experience with it and thus am more unsure of what to expect. The cookbook can only go just so far. Video helps, but has its own limitations, especially if you're actually in the kitchen trying to do something.
Rose Levy Beranbaum is widely considered one of THE foremost experts on baking, and her cookbooks are standard issue for chefs and bakers everywhere, both professional and amateur. Frankly, I find her cookbooks a bit intimidating and her recipes very technical, but you have to admire their thoroughness and specificity. Luckily, she blogs and takes actual questions from commenters and posts about them regularly. It's really cool to know that you can get detailed answers from the definitive source herself, which is all too often not the case with "blogs" from other notable people.
Permalink |Anynoe who reads this blog for any length of time knows that I post frequently about my daughter Charlotte. My life has been transformed by her in ways that I can never fully explain or even understand. Being a parent is not a job I asked for or even necessarily wanted, but which has revealed the world to me in a million new ways, and I cannot imagine my life without her now.
For the past few days, she and I have suffered together with the nasty stomach flu that has been making the rounds this winter, and even though she is recovered and I am just now starting to get better, we've had more than a few sleepless nights, bouts of tears, and even some confrontations. But nothing, nothing we have had to deal with this past week, or ever in her little life compares to this struggle:
Via Rex Hammock, here is a blog from the parents of an 8-year-old girl also named Charlotte. A happy, strong, smart little girl who suddenly began to weaken and lose her abilities. Now they have a diagnosis -- a genetic degenerative disease that destroys the protective layer around the central nervous system. Now they have uncertainty, fear, and panic. Now they have a threat that might affect their other children as well as their Sweet Charlotte. Now they need a little emotional support.
In case you're skimming this too quickly, let me re-emphasize that this is NOT my child or my story (for which I am grateful, though my heart breaks for these people). Those of us who invite random people into our lives via our blogs usually do so with at least some understanding of the odd dance of maintaining privacy in a public setting, and so I have to think that this little girl's parents have decided that they are willing to share at least some of their heartbreak with the world at large. To the extent that we, the blog-reading public, share vicariously and sometimes pruriently in the lives of others, it is hard not to feel like reading this is prying, but I think it's worth a moment of your time and perhaps your show of support.
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Jack at TPRS reports that a new opinion poll puts Dick Cheney's "favorable" approval rating BELOW the general public's approval of Stalin...and well-below the approval rating for Michael Jackson.
It's nice to know that the American public hasn't completely lost its mind yet.
(Oh, P.S., today is the 89th anniversary of the beginning of the February Revolution. Workers of the World, Unite Baby!)
Permalink | Comments (1)Those of us who spend too much time on the Internet know that the "in" thing right now is uploading video clips to Google Video, YouTube.com, and a few other similar sites. It was inevitable. Video clips of all sorts have been passed around the Internet from the beginning, but usually by individuals on their own websites, or by the popular community sites like MetaFilter, FARK, Something Awful, and so on. In the face of a zillion other social networking and file sharing sites, it was only a matter of time (and the replacement of dial-up connections with broadband in the US).
I expect that the novelty of the sites themselves will wear off quickly enough, but the core concept is here to stay and there will soon be a veritable plethora of similar sites. On one hand, it means that it will get even easier for people to find those long-lost snippets of video they saw once somewhere on the Internet (or on TV), but on the other hand it's sort of sad to see the Internet finally turning into TV 2.0 in a serious way. (Ditto, BTW, for video iPods and other such things that really do nothing except extend television's reach beyond the box in your living room)
Since it's inevitable, you might want to know about VideoSift. It is a sort of "metafilter" (note lowercase letters) for the video clip sites, where you can see the most popular clips from the other sites. I don't know how much meta-filtering we can stand, but I think it's not a bad idea to have one or two like this as the number of individual clip sites starts to burgeon.
Permalink |Early last summer there was a Me-Too-ish meme of bloggers all getting excited about some MIT guy who had asked them to contribute to a survey of blogggers he was conducting. There was a badge for everyone to put on their site (we bloggers LOVE our steenkin' badges!), and a momentary air of exclusivity if you were one of the first people to fill out the survey (although in the end didn't EVERYBODY fill out the survey?), because it made you look all important like some of those "famous" bloggers (You know....er.....that is.....like....okay, there are NO famous bloggers).
Adam over at Universal Hub notes today that the guy who did the survey has since welched on his promise to share his results because he's too busy with the plump job he landed as a result...with Yahoo. I'll bet THEY got the results, though.
Permalink |The triggering event that led me to take down my blog in September was Hurricane Katrina. Not that the hurricane had anything to do with me personally, merely that it brought so many simmering feelings in me to a boil that I felt I had to walk away. Returning to this site is also in part a reaction to the collective amnesia of our American society, which has done an admirable job of minimizing its attention, even though the situation will linger on for years and years. "Out of sight, out of mind" never held so true.
So once in a while it's good to have some reminders thrown in your face. I occasionally peek in on this blog, written by a man from New Orleans struggling to deal with the long aftermath's effect on his family members and not afraid to continue pointing out our massive failure as a nation to address the situation. I believe I first found this at MetaFilter, where he's a well-known poster.
Permalink |I haven't put up a blogroll for this new version of BKO, and I don't know if I'm going to or not.
Back in Ye Olden Days, when there were only a few hundred thousand or so of us blogging away with stone knives and bearskin (aka Blogger), it was all about getting noticed. And in short order everybody figured out that you could get yourself noticed by inserting yourself into somebody else's blog by linking to them on yours. Since it was a novelty for any of us to get anmy sort of attention at all, most people were flattered and returned the favor. Before long the blogroll was not just a circle-jerk but the de rigeur means of "promoting" your site (oh, yes, don't forget that in the Early Days we were also convinced that we were all going to be stars, too, and you needed to pay attention to these things).
Then "The Great Schism" occurred on or about the eleventh day of September, 2001, and we few hundred thousand happy little kottke-wannabe were joined by a couple of million shrieking, poo-flinging political sideliners and Sides Were Chosen. Your blogroll was not just your half-assed promotional scheme, it was your political pedigree, and determined who would speak to you and who would be flinging poo at you. That went on for a good, long time, too, until we settled into a sort of virtual trench warefare, with the "blogosphere" (aww, you made me say it) winding up like "All's Quiet On The Western Front".
Now I am told that people don't want attention paid to their blogs (which begs the question of why they even have them, but we'll consider the oxymoron of private journalling in the world's most public space another time.). They fear that their own words will be used against them -- by their employers, their less-than-understanding families ("Why did you say that about your own mother?"), or worse. You can call it fascism or McCarthyism or even Stalinism, but it's all about getting people to shut up and/or occasionally rat each other out. That doesn't stop umpteen million new blogs from going online everyday, but it does give people something to be paranoid about, and we're all about the paranoia now.
I tend to look at all of this through my own personal theory of online behavior, which is that the average emotional age of people online is 12. We've all been given this opportunity to unleash our inner child, and it's not some wounded five year old clutching out for mommy, it's a half-grown hormone-fueled creature self-interested to the point of sociopathy. The blogroll began as a popularity contest, morphed into choosing up sides for dodgeball, and now just wants to be left alone before our parents find out what we've been up to on that damn computer.
There are blogs that I like to read, and there are some people out there whom I've gotten to know because we connected to one another's blog back in the mists of online antiquity, and I would like to be able to recommend things to you -- my approach to the medium has always been more about pointing readers elsewhere than asking you to gaze into my navel with me (not that I haven't done that, too). I just haven't found the path through the minefield we've created across this No Man's Land yet.
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