How Green Is My Metropolis, The Book

Tim says,

David Owen has a new book, titled Green Metropolis, that will be released next week. His 2004 New Yorker essay "Green Manhattan" [PDF] is a classic. The book looks like an extended treatment of the same idea.

Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan— the most densely populated place in North America —rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.

These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.

Media Physics with Prof. Hova

Robin says,

Pretty amazingly trenchant observation from Jay-Z:

He now calls the old record companies "archaic," and says they made a huge error in 2000 when they sued to stop the original Napster, which popularized free file sharing: "They had it all in one place coming through one hole, where they could control it. They shut that down, and just opened the floodgates. Now everyone's running their own Napster. Now it's just a hole in the universe, and it's too late."

"Now it's just a hole in the universe." That really is the right image for the craziness we now face. Media space-time torn asunder. Well-established principles of album acceleration and movie momentum no longer apply. It's just a hole in the universe!

Kindle Metrics

Robin says,

Forgive me while I crow for just a moment: Mr. Penumbra just hit what I think is a new peak in the Kindle store. It's the 937th bestselling item in the entire Kindle universe. The fourth-bestselling short story. The third-bestselling "techno thriller."

The sad truth: As best I can figure, that rank was driven by about 30 copies over the past two days.

Alas, Kindle. Your universe is small indeed.

The Tao of Lego

Robin says,

I'm with Jason when he says Legos are becoming just another single-use plastic toy.

But, even as the sets get more corporate, Lego builders get more creative. And, my god. I just cannot comprehend how people build some of this stuff:

The mech from District 9, perfectly rendered, with room for a Lego minifig inside.

Another Legomech, so alive and full of personality. (My 10-year-old self would have traded scraps of soul for the secrets in these bricks.)

Spaceships cooler than anything Lego has ever sold.

And, my favorite, the "microspace" movement, which is like the haiku form of Lego-building. The emphasis is on economy of construction and wee tiny scale. And yet: Danger. Style. Speed. Drama. Each one is like a little puzzle, sometimes a little joke.

This, my friends, is the tao of Lego.

I Hear Prada's Collection Is All Voronoi Diagrams This Season

Robin says,

Here's a great post about Voronoi diagrams: what they are, why they're cool, and how to draw them. sevensixfive writes: "they can be used to describe almost literally everything: from cell phone networks to radiolaria, at every scale: from quantum foam to cosmic foam."

After you have drawn your own Voronoi diagram by hand, perhaps you will enjoy this rad Voronoi diagram animation made with Processing.

You know what Voronoi diagrams always really remind me of? Skin! But also, I suppose, leaves.

Taking It to the Streets

Robin says,

New Kickstarter update in which I visit a local printer and am simultaneously disappointed and emboldened.

(Nerd question: In an upcase headline, you'd leave "to" lowercase, as I did, right? Or no? I always hem and haw.)

Pet Sounds, Renewed

Matt says,

I think I forgot to post this a month or so ago when I couldn't stop listening to it. Some genius had the amazing idea to remove the backing vocals from all the tracks on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. The result is kind of breathtaking, especially "God Only Knows":

The difficulty and the peculiarity of these vocal lines can get obscured in the full versions. Just listen to the fugue section of that song. Man.

And of course, "Sloop John B," my other favorite song from Pet Sounds:

(MetaFilterrific.)

The Correspondent-Fixer Dialectic

Tim says,

George Packer on the death of Sultan Munadi: "It's Always the Fixer Who Dies."

Mr. Penumbra Speaks

Robin says,

This is awesome! The folks at Escape Pod contacted me a while back about doing an audio version of Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store. I said yes, of course... and now, here it is!

I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm really looking forward to it.

The Book's Terms of Service

Robin says,

If this was the set, then this, from Matthew Battles, is the spike: The Book: Terms of Service. Simultaneously sharp satire and a really strong, beautiful statement of values.

It's a reminder that books at their best are not just intellectual objects, not just aesthetic objects, but democratic objects.

And it makes me think of Salman Rushdie's claim:

Literature is the one place in any society where within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

Go go go read it read it read it.

The Virgin and the Inkjet

Robin says,

Read this post for the sound of the words alone! The Late Age of Print and the Storm of Progress! I mean, it's positively Tolkien-esque. Living through the sickly mutant collapse of industrial media? Lame. Living through the Late Age of Print? Awesome.

Great stuff all around from Matthew Battles. And this part is so slick:

The public sphere's terms-of-service, the product of five hundred years of cultural contest, are a better deal than anything Facebook, Amazon, or Google Books has to offer. To keep them current in the digital age, as Richard suggests, we must turn around and face front.

"The public sphere's terms-of-service." Cool.

The only thing missing now is a comment from Tim Carmody, but maybe if we set the snare just so... and step back...

(Actually, I guess this was Tim's comment, really. But now I wanna hear him talk Walter Benjamin.)

The Atlantic Has a Good Month

Robin says,

I still have a soft spot for The Atlantic, the magazine that introduced me to, um, thinking. Certainly to the thrill of great journalism. It hasn't always been as interesting in recent years (James Fallows provides an epic ongoing exception) but wow, this latest issue is really good:

A paean to Al Jazeera, the only cable TV network in the world that actually offers "a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously."

California's new energy economy.

Love this one: the myths that led media companies astray. Because, "[if] we take Netscape's public offering in 1995 as the birth of the Internet era, on average over the next 10 years the biggest media conglomerates achieved less than a third of the returns available from the S&P as a whole. But even more telling is that these companies, as a group, had also underperformed the S&P for much of the previous decade, before the Internet upended their industry. Indeed, one aspect of the media business has remained largely unchanged for a generation: the lousy performance of its leading companies."

And the cover story, a powerful piece by Andrew Sullivan, written as a letter to George W. Bush about torture and "absolute evil"—clear, descriptive, urgent.

Auto-Tune the News Goes Mainstream (Sorta)

Robin says,

Auto-Tune the News feat. Alexa Chung! (Link goes straight to "God Bless America" break-down at the end. "Who is gettin' blessed? America. And who is gonna bless it? GOD.")

The Popular vs. the Acclaimed

Matt says,

Great, great, great AskMeFi thread: In the art forms you are experienced or well versed in, what kinds of stuff is notorious for being only liked by the experts, and what kinds of stuff is notorious for only being liked by less experienced or educated casual consumers?

Examples of artists (or works of art) beloved almost exclusively by other artists in their domain include Rothko, Linux, Cloud Gate, Yasujirō Ozu, Ernie Bushmiller, Rush, the screenplay "BALLS OUT" (pdf) and Paranoia Agent.

There are also some fun minor art-snob arguments, and mini-digressions on the nature of taste. As well as a terrific New Yorker essay I never read about the appeal of Charles Bukowski.

Context-Aware Electronics

Tim says,

Jamais Cascio on devices that pay attention:

Imagine a desktop with a camera that knows to shut down the screen and eventually go to sleep when you walk away (but stays awake when you're sitting there reading something or thinking), and will wake up when you sit down in front of it (no mouse-jiggling required).

Or a system with a microphone that listens for the combination of a phone ringing (sudden loud noise) followed by a nearby voice saying "hello" (or similar greeting), and will mute the system automatically.

When you go down this road, extrapolating from existing abilities (accelerometers, face and voice recognition, light detection) to more complex algorithms, the possibilities get correspondingly more complicated:

What prompted this line of thought for me was the story about the Outbreaks Near Me application for the iPhone. It struck me that a system that provided near-real-time weather, pollution, pollen, and flu (etc.) information based on watching where you are -- and learning where you typically go, to give you early warnings -- was well within our capabilities.

Or a system that listened for coughing -- how many different voices, how often, how intense, where -- to add to health maps used by epidemiologists (and other mobile apps).

It seems to be almost an axiom that the applications of digital technology that are potentially the most beneficial for the aggregate likewise require the most information from the individual user - and therefore creep us out to the point where we're reluctant to put them into practice. There's got to be a name for this paradox - a digital analogue to The Fable of the Bees.

Anna Politkovskaya

Robin says,

The Russian Supreme Court orders a fresh investigation of Anna Politkovskaya's assassination.

I was on a panel with Politkovskaya and Piers Morgan back in 2005, in Stockholm. She made both of us—rightly—seem like complete lightweights. Pure gravity and courage.

Colorful, But Not Cute

Robin says,

Two things I like about this interview with The Little Friends of Printmaking: a) the colors, and b) the process. Near the end of the post, you get to see every stage in the creation of a new poster. Pretty cool.

Californie

Robin says,

From Diderot's Encyclopédie, 1752:

California, large peninsula in North America, north of the Southern Sea, inhabited by savages who worship the moon. Each family there lives as it pleases, without being subject to any form of government. The Spanish have built a fort there called Our Lady of Loreto.

Seems about right.

Michigan's collaborative translation project around the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert is, I have to warn you, pretty fun to click around.

The Mortal Enemy of the Hyphen

Robin says,

Mostly we just called him "Wolfe+585."

The Sense Of America

Tim says,

The NYT reconfigured their Baghdad Bureau blog to make At War, adding reports from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere as well as Iraq. This post by Atheer Kakan, an NYT translator and journalist in Iraq who (along with his family) was recently allowed to emigrate to the US as a political refugee, is downright astonishing: emotional and observant, sentimental and clear-eyed all at once:

My family was starving, so the first thing we did after we sat down was to bring them some food. I went to a fast-food shop and I ordered lots of American food. There was something with melting cheese. I think it was Mexican. And lots of French fries. The cashier girl was asking me if I wanted things, and I was approving everything she said.

Eventually I had lots of food to carry to my family, who were desperately waiting for me. I put down the food and we started eating, and I looked to my children, who seemed to be enjoying their time, and I released another breath as I felt that I was doing the right thing for all of us. It wasn’t the food that I really enjoyed; it was the sense of America that food was carrying.

The airport was so busy; it looked like there was some school trip happening because there were some mothers saying goodbye to their kids and giving them some instructions about what to do and what not to do.

The teenage girls looked impatient and were mocking everything the mothers were saying. I imagined my son Abdullah and my daughter Malak doing the same thing in the future, and my heart was shaking as I laughed at the idea of how I would look like at that time.

A fat boy was sitting behind us. He seemed curiously eager to understand our language, but when he failed he was looking at us cautiously. His looks didn’t insult me, not because he is a kid but because it is time for me to taste the meaning of peace. I lay back my head and relaxed my eyes.

I hope Atheer is writing a book.

[For more on the poorly-rewarded heroism of Iraqi translators, see George Packer's "Betrayed" (which, also astonishingly, was written two and a half years ago).]

P.S.: Atheer Kakan was also the Times' reporter in the room for the Bush/Maliki shoe-throwing press conference:

After the press conference we were locked inside the room for a while. It was very tense.

While we were inside the Prime Minister’s bodyguards tried to delete or confiscate film of the incident from the cameramen, but the journalists were all switching tapes quickly, like magicians, because no one wanted to lose such shots.

Later they let us all go, we do not know why. They just told us: “You can go, no one will try to delete your tapes.”

One of Mr. Maliki’s bodyguards called us ugly names because they thought that we were participating in a conspiracy, that we had all known about what was going to happen.

“We cooperated with you, and you betrayed us. You should have stopped him,” he said. Another guard told me me: “You are all Baathists.” He then raised his finger and said, “You are not allowed to say anything” in a very scary way.

Another tried to beat me after I objected because he was pushing an Iraqi journalist. I told him, “Why are you doing that? He is just a journalist.” He started calling us “sons of bitches” and other dirty names.

He also wrote a lovely essay about the historical imagination in Iraq. Kakan has a Sunni background, but briefly worked for the newspaper of a Shiite political party after the fall of Saddam:

We had many differences, discussions and arguments at that time. One of the most noticeable things about them, that I have never forgotten, was the influence of history on those who came back home after decades of marginalization, pursuit and execution.

Now that they were victorious and it was time for them to exercise the influence that they had been prevented from doing before, the one historical fact they kept in front of their eyes was that they would not let history repeat itself and let what happened after the revolution of 1920 against the British Empire happen again.

Then, their analysis was, that because the Shiites refused to deal, the British who negotiated with the Sunni minority and installed it in power, commencing nearly a century of Sunni dominance.

That historical ‘mistake’ of 1920 wasn’t just the obsession of Dawa. Many Shiites say that after this time they were marginalized and never treated fairly as a majority. Even now this historical fear still affects many of their decisions. They argue “we cannot neglect the political process, so that no one will ever turn around and take control again, after all the blood that we sacrificed.”

After a year I left and I carried with me all the memories about how the Shiites have suffered for centuries, and how history has influenced their positions and attitudes in the present time.

Iraqis adore history. You can hardly find an Iraqi who does not talk about the past in every conversation. Sometimes it prevents them from dealing with the present and planning for the future.

This what historians and sociologists say about Iraqis - they love history so much, to the level that they live in it.

Everyday Super Powers

Robin says,

This is a fun idea, and The Morning News' execution of it is crisp and super-readable: What's your hidden talent? Your... super power?

I liked this one, from Jessica Francis Kane:

You know how sometimes when you're trying to pour something from one glass into another, the liquid mostly just runs back down the edge of the first glass and spills all over the counter? Well, not for me it doesn't. Not a drop. I'm the daughter of a chemistry professor and this is my superpower. You have a half-pint you want to finish up in your pint glass so you don't look like such a lightweight? I'm the one you need. The trick is speed, angle, and confidence. You have to go fast, not tip slowly. You have to hold the emptying glass high, not touch it to the lip of the filling glass. Maybe it's a little thing, but aren't superpowers what we make of them? Lots of very thirsty people have been grateful for my help.

So what's yours? I'll start: I can fall asleep on any airplane, in any position, in under two minutes. Flight is my ultimate soporific. Now, great powers sometimes come great cost, and to tell you the truth, I have a hard time staying awake on planes if I have to. But more often, this is a blessing. Mmmokay see you guys in New York. Zonk.

Nobody's Talking About Polygons Here

Robin says,

The thing I like best about Seth Schiesel's NYT piece on The Beatles: Rock Band is that it's entirely about the game's cultural impact, the way it fits into our world. There's a bit about the play mechanic, too, for those unfamiliar with Rock Band. But nothing about the technical dimensions of the game—not the barest mention of framerate or polygon count or HDR lighting effects or clever combo systems or... ahhh.

I know this isn't unique, and game criticism has been getting a lot better in the past few years. But that the piece could hinge on this claim—

By reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another, The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience.

In that sense it may be the most important video game yet made.

—seems like a watershed to me. Even if he's wrong, I love the fact that Seth Schiesel can make that claim and then spend the rest of the piece trying to back it up.

Sherlock Holmes Had a Click-Through Rate of Two Percent

Robin says,

The author meets the cloud, episode one: naming characters with Google AdWords.

The Working Poor In America

Tim says,

... get stolen from, retaliated against, hurt at work and convinced not to complain, and paid less than the minimum wage, not just sometimes, but most of the time:

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week...

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay...

According to the study, 39 percent of those surveyed were illegal immigrants, 31 percent legal immigrants and 30 percent native-born Americans... [W]omen were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.

Excuse me; I need to go punch something. And then maybe throw up. Then punch something else.

Run Run Run Run JUMP!

Robin says,

Ahhh! This is great: Canabalt, a one-button video game. It is pure style and velocity; I defy you to play the first 15 seconds and not feel a frantic thrill.

Personal record is 2,983 meters and it was all a gray blur by the end there.

(Via things.)

More Meta-Marvel

Robin says,

I did a quick email back-and-forth with my friend Anastasia over at Ypulse about the Disney/Marvel merger. In short:

So that's my concern. Disney's been mining (and protecting) old IP for years. Acquiring Marvel isn't a move to balance that strategy; it deepens it. The tagline for a combined Disney/Marvel might be: "Finding new ways to sell you the same stories, again and again, forever."

The Second-Day Story

Robin says,

Even as the news business fluxes and freaks out, its history and culture continue to provide useful tools for thinking about the world. This probably shouldn't be a surprise, as journalists have been in the thinking-about-the-world business for a long time.

Case in point: Matt cross-posted his great parts-of-stories-you-don't-usually-get post over at Poynter.org, and in the comments there, Roy Peter Clark wrote:

I think what we need is something a bit different from explainers. I don't have a term for it, except maybe for "anticipators." The reporter does not just report on what just happened, or even look back a stretch. The reporter needs a crystal ball, based upon solid research and continuing coverage.

The old PM daily writers knew how to do this and we may have to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear: that is to learn how to write a second day story on the first day. Keep up the great work, pal.

Emphasis mine. How great is that? "Write a second-day story on the first day."

First, it definitely flows into Matt's five concrete steps to improve the news—particularly number four, "track the unknowns."

Second, it's so much bigger than news! Isn't that what great science fiction is? Isn't that what we try to do here at Snarkmarket at least some of the time? "Write a second-day story on the first day."

P.S. Yes, I realize I just implicitly compared journalism to science fiction. Oops.

Adam Smith vs. Blackbeard

Robin says,

This sounds like a made-up book title, but oh, it's real: The Invisible Hook, on "the hidden economics of pirates." Caleb Crain writes it up:

Are pirates socialists or capitalists? Lately, it’s become hard to tell the categories apart.

(Via Omnivoracious's neat meta-book-review.)

Einstein Would Love This Stuff

Robin says,

Georges Rousse is one of those terrific artists that creates large-scale illusions—2D shapes that appear to hover, almost dimensionless, in 3D space when your vantage point is just so.

Bet this video, at this moment, will make you smile.

Rhonda Extended

Robin says,

I'm going to keep you apprised of new developments with this 3D sketching app Rhonda, just because I think it's such an exciting, novel visual tool. In this video, Andreas Martini exports the raw geometry from Rhonda—that's a new feature—and plays with it in a more traditional 3D program. The result is a neat little hand-drawn, day-glo neighborhood.

Reading Poems Out Loud, Or Not

Robin says,

I think I just realized something. I enjoy reading poems out loud. But I only enjoy it when I am the one reading. Stuff like this—A. Van Jordan reading a poem called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—it's like, it loses all of its poetry somehow. Gone. Drained.

Even a poet I love as much as Billy Collins—to hear him reading his stuff is just not edifying. I can barely hear how it's poetry, and not just an odd string of words.

Agree? Disagree? Am I missing a gene?

(The A. Van Jordan link is via Swindle, a neat poetry aggregator. Well, kinda neat. I like the idea, but the links are so devoid of context I can't always muster the interest to click on any. Good titles get me.)

Update: Some great recommendations, and a bonus MP3, in the comments.

Launch Emma, Part Two

Robin says,

This book trailer for Flatmancrooked's Launch Emma project (previously) features, against all odds, a giant metallic Veritech fighter (in robot mode, naturally) extolling the virtues of arts patronage. SOLD.

The End of the Modern Age of Comics

Robin says,

A few reactions to Disney's purchase of Marvel:

• Can we call this the close of the Modern Age of comics? Sometime during the early 00s—maybe even earlier—it seems like big corporate comics (DC and Marvel) shifted decisively from creating new characters and storylines to mining the creative capital they'd accrued over decades. (There's a fossil fuel analogy lurking here.)
  
  
• I'm not talking about relaunches and re-interpretations, a la The Dark Knight Returns and John Byrne's Superman reboot back in the 80s. I'm talking about all you do is look backward—whether it's retold tales like Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man or recursive loops like DC's Infinite Crisis.
  
  
• Okay, I'm sure there are lots of little exceptions, but I really really want to pronounce Marvel and DC dead. C'mon, can't we just pronounce them dead?
  
  
• And what I mean by that is: They are no longer engines of creation. They now exist to license, merchandise, expand and exploit the IP they've been nurturing over the years. Which is totally okay! But...
  
  
• Who's gonna create the new characters?

(Hmm. That ended up being more suited to paragraphs than bullets. Oh well, not changing it.)

Another detail from the story: Marvel has just 300 employees. Think of that company's cultural "throw-weight"—not insignificant—and divide that by its headcount. Pretty impressive.

What have you noticed about comics in the last 3-5 years? Anything noteworthy? Anything that this deal crystallizes? Where is the medium going?

One-Hundred Percent

Robin says,

Amazing! My Kickstarter project hit 100% sometime after I went to sleep but before I woke up. What a thrill.

I posted a project update on Sunday afternoon, for the curious.

(Don't worry, it's not gonna be all Kickstarter all the time around here. I have a post on ancient coins coming.)

Update: Nice mention on the HarperStudio blog. I love that the post's author is, simply, "Intern." Thanks for the shout-out, Intern, whoever you are!

Hey, This is the Kind of Post That I Usually Write

Robin says,

Hmm, this seems to be happening more and more often—Snarkmarketers do something interesting and somebody else explains What It Means for Media. (Usually that's our gig.) In this case it's Eoin Purcell, with a really nice, complimentary post about my Kickstarter project.

And I especially appreciate it because I feel like I have totally written That Post before, and I know how jazzed I was when I was writing it.

Recommended Reading

Tim says,

I loved Virginia Heffernan's postscript to the Facebook exodus:

You’re not the first to think it’s creepy to have your personal life commercialized. Jürgen Habermas has been especially eloquent about this. Start with “The Theory of Communicative Action.” Copies are available on AbeBooks.com.

Just in case it's not clear why this is, um, unexpected AND funny, this is the sort of thing Habermas's two-volume book is about:

With this failure of the search for ultimate foundations by "first philosophy" or "the philosophy of consciousness", an empirically tested theory of rationality must be a pragmatic theory based on science and social science. This implies that any universalist claims can only be validated by testing against counterexamples in historical (and geographical) contexts - not by using transcendental ontological assumptions.

This is what I take to be the gist of Heffernan's recommendation: "No longer wasting time on Facebook? You finally have time to bone up on the Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason!" Sign me up.

An Ancient Math Tutorial... on YouTube

Robin says,

A friend's dad has posted a multi-part abacus math tutorial on YouTube. Okay, I know it sounds like you're going to click the link and see Rick Astley, but no, really: It's fascinating. I didn't realize that the first abaci—or the abacus precursors, I guess—were probably just drawn in the dirt. Use pebbles to count. Easy.

I love that the internet provides a place for super-geeky, super-in-depth projects like this.

Kindle 2020 Playbook

Robin says,

I like Farhad Manjoo's approach in this piece about Kindle competitors. Not: "Here, then, is a survey of the market!" but rather "Listen boys... this is what ya gotta do."

Matt and Kim

Robin says,

This performance has three stars: Matt, Kim, and the look on Kim's face. What a great look! I feel like it's the look you see on your friend's face when she's having fun in the kitchen, laughing at a funny joke you just told but also, like, really concentrating on dicing a tomato. (I mean that as a compliment.)

The New Patronage

Robin says,

I talked to CNET's Elinor Mills today about micro-patronage and my Kickstarter book project; here's the resulting piece.

I like this line:

Mozart may have had his patron Austrian prince, but he didn't have Twitter followers or MP3s to share.

(There aren't any Austrian princes subscribed to Snarkmarket's RSS feed, are there?)

Small World Pop

Tim says,

Tom Ewing, on the ironies of music criticism becoming simultaneously more pop-friendly and less popular:

[I]f anything, rock criticism's become less populist over the last decade, as the spiraling decline of album sales makes it tougher to frame successful records as public events and easier to make niche sensations seem like they matter. And as we'll see, there were definite limits to the types of pop that could win over wider audiences.

On a personal level, of course, the idea of a pro-pop revolution feels right because it validates the many hours I spent arguing about it on the net. Making niche events feel somehow important is something the Internet is horribly good at: it turns arguments fractal, lets your bunch of digital friends and foes feel like the world when it no way is.

The So-So Firewall of China

Robin says,

I've read reports like this before: China has set up a massive internet filter inside its borders. A massive internet filter that is remarkable easy to circumvent.

It makes you wonder about the Chinese government's real objectives:

[...] it is not important for the CCP to make the wall insurmountable, just existent.

Is there—might there be—an ongoing argument inside the Chinese government about the optimum level of internet filtering or censorship in general? That's what's so fascinating about stuff like this; the official "thought process" is entirely opaque. (Compare to the U.S., where it is basically public.)

And I'm still on the hunt for more/better journalism about China in general. I'm talking not about "whoah crazy trend in China!" pieces but rather "this is how the Chinese government made this decision" pieces. But maybe those, uh, just don't exist.

Research Confidential

Robin says,

Early prediction: This book, Research Confidential, is going to become an underground new liberal arts classic, ostensibly about one specific field but actually applying to lots more—almost like the "Understanding Comics" of social science. (If you understand the analogy I'm trying to draw there, I love you.)

Here's the setup and the table of contents. I'm not the only non-social scientist who thinks this looks interesting, right?

The New Rules Still Apply

Robin says,

Been consistently enjoying Kevin Kelly's serialized excerpts from New Rules for a New Economy. This line from today's text-blob applies to so many different domains:

A small piece of an expanding pie is the biggest piece of all.

I feel like there should be a gorgeously-illustrated kids' book with this as the central message. Take small slices. Grow the pie.

D is for Digitize

Robin says,

I'm going to be on a panel at the D is for Digitize conference put on by James Grimmelman and New York Law School in October. It's keyed to the Google Book Search settlement—which is far from settled:

Everything about the Google Book Search project is larger than life, from Google's audacious plan to digitize every book ever published to the gigantic class action settlement now awaiting court approval. The groundbreaking proposed settlement in the Google Book Search case is so complex that controversy has outpaced conversation and questions have outnumbered answers.

We aim to help close these gaps.

I'm going to study up on the settlement between now and then, and I'll share as I go. First order of business is the under-publicized but super-interesting research corpus clause.

However, I should note that I was invited not on the basis of my legal scholarship... not for my media futurism... but because of a short story. Pretty cool!

Kickstarter Video Tips

Robin says,

P.S. I wrote up some video tips for the Kickstarter blog, too.

Red Carbon

Robin says,

Ben Clemens maps per-capita carbon emissions by congressional district. It would be interesting to add rural/urban as a dimension, too—although maybe we get that data "for free" because it correlates so well with red/blue.

I'm Writing a Book (With Your Help)

Robin says,

I'm not going to make this a splashy, OH-MY-GOD-CLICK-THIS-NOW post because you're going to be hearing a lot about it over the course of the next two months. No, like seriously: a lot.

But, building on the terrific experiences of Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store and New Liberal Arts, I'm writing a book! And I'm using Kickstarter as the funding and community platform to do it.

Ta-da!

A special Snarkmarket note: I'm as interested in the new process as I am in the new economics. How do you balance behind-the-scenes updates with secrets and surprises? What's a tempo that's engaging but not annoying? How do you effectively solicit ideas? (For some reason—I don't know why I'm so sure of this—I am just 100% certain that a crucial idea, the key to some puzzle, is going to come from my backers.)

There's a video intro, so come take a peek.

What Is The Price?

Tim says,

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009:

His first words are "How much time do I have?"

The Tape Wore Away, and We Discovered What Was Underneath

Robin says,

Lovely, evocative recollection from Brandon Kelley:

I was reminded tonight of my life in Detroit driving up and down Woodward Avenue. Up and down, up and down. My car didn't have a CD player, only a tape deck. The tape I had was one side dubbed with Björk's Post and the other side with Homogenic. So many ups and downs on Woodward that after two years the tape was deteriorating to the point where the song "Pluto" sounded like it was imploding rather than exploding. Once getting to "All is Full of Love," Björk's voice was sounding more like Stephen Merritt's than Siouxsie Sioux's. "Headphones" was an audio reading from Nick Cave. It was sad and that was some lonely driving around.

(That's some of Merlin Mann's clackity right there.)

Stairway to Heaven

Robin says,

This made me laugh. Not one of those "ho ho, what a clever piece of art" laughs, but one of the better kind. I think a lot depends on the scroll; I pray that your monitor is not so tall that joke and punchline are displayed together, all at once.

Unicorns Bringing Up the Rear

Robin says,

Here's your oh-yes-it's-real chart of the day: the incidence of various elements on fantasy book covers. Swords hold a commanding lead, of course. But who knew boats would do so well?

Ta-Blet 2010

Tim says,

Fake Steve Jobs explains his non-thinking behind the new Apple tablet:

I started with the big questions. What is a tablet? Who will use it? And for what? If the tablet were a tree, what kind of tree would it be? And what of the word tablet itself? Ta is a Sanskrit root, for "gift." Blet is Proto-Indo-European meaning "to be perfect while lacking usefulness." Will you write on a tablet, or just read from it? Or will you just buy it and put it on your desk and look at it a lot and never use it at all? Or will you maybe carry it around and put on the table in restaurants to show the other humanoids in your tribe that you are more advanced and wealthy than they are, and they should fear you because you have powerful magic that they do not understand? You see what I mean? What is the anthropology here? And what about the ergonomics? Can you mount it on a wall? Will it have a shiny surface so that Macolytes can adore themselves as they use it in public? (Yes. It must.) The tablet must look and feel not like something that was made by man -- it must feel otherworldly, as if God himself made it and handed it to you.

Can't wait.

Perfect for the Botnet Master or Drug Dealer in Your Life

Robin says,

Wow, I weirdly sorta want one of these shameless knockoff pseudo-iPhones. The real attraction is the space for two parallel SIM cards. I feel you'd want to stock those slots with a couple of throwaway numbers and, what? Do secret things!

The New Looks

Robin says,

Just some links to things that are visually stunning:

Jillian Tamaki: How to smuggle a dirty bomb.

Yuhiko Tajima's illustrations from 1976. Look at the use of black. And look at the top figure; it's everything Dragonball has ever wanted to be.

AA Models. Geometric architectural and geological forms. Pretty much totally unbelievable.

Composite Squiggles (link to embedded Processing applet). Wonderful color.

Anaelle by Stefan Gruber (link to embedded Quicktime movie). C-H-A-R-M-E-D.

Collage by Able Parris. "The beginning involves applying." (Also, is Able Parris totally a name out of a novel, or what?)

And now, the big finish... Shane Hope. His big colorful freak-out giant-sized prints are "[r]endered and built with customized versions of user-sponsored open-source molecular visualization systems." Love that. Science visualization software co-opted for goofy, rainbow-colored fun. Full details here.

His Compile-a-Child drawing are fun, too (example), but they hit you in the head—whereas the big, colorful stuff hits you in the eyes.

A Constant and a Variant

Tim says,

I love stories like these, from poet Robert Creeley:

In the late forties, while living in Littleton, N.H., I had tried to start a magazine with the help of a college friend, Jacob Leed. He was living in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and had an old George Washington handpress. It was on that that we proposed to print the magazine. Then, at an unhappily critical moment, he broke his arm. I came running from New Hampshire—but after a full day's labor we found we had set two pages only, each with a single poem. So that was that.

Good enough, right? Nope:

What then to do with the material we had collected? Thanks to the occasion, I had found excuse to write to both Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. I didn't know what I really wanted of them but was of course deeply honored that they took me in any sense seriously. Pound very quickly seized on the possibility of our magazine's becoming in some sense a feeder for his own commitments, but was clearly a little questioning of our modus operandi . What he did give me, with quick generosity and clarity, was a kind of rule book for the editing of any magazine. For example, he suggested I think of the magazine as a center around which, "not a box within which/ any item." He proposed that verse consisted of a constant and a variant, and then told me to think from that to the context of a magazine. He suggested I get at least four others, on whom I could depend unequivocally for material, and to make their work the mainstay of the magazine's form. But then, he said, let the rest of it, roughly half, be as various and hogwild as possible, "so that any idiot thinks he has a chance of getting in."

Creeley goes on then to meet Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, all of the Beats... it just kind of runs on from there, a glorious march through almost all of the avant-garde poetry of the 1950s, from town to town, magazine to magazine... Just kids cranking away on their rusty old handpresses, broken arms be damned.

(Creeley's entire Collected Essays is available at the U of California press site - just follow the link above.)

And Suddenly You Feel Like An Alien

Robin says,

Um. Question. When you buy a hardcover book—or have one foisted upon you (because maybe you're like me, and you vastly prefer trade paperbacks—do you immediately peel off the jacket and, like, throw it away?

Apparently people do this. Seriously? I cannot even imagine. I'm not sure why, as I obviously don't like those filmy coverings. But to throw one away? It feels... transgressive!

Is this really a thing that people do?

Update: Wow, I'm not the only one. The battle lines are drawn! It's dust jacketeers vs. trashbots, and I think the DJs are winning.

Two Weeks' Worth of Awesome

Matt says,

Gabe Askew's fan-video for "Two Weeks" by Grizzly Bear can conjure only one appropriate adjective: Sublime.

Here's an interview about it, and here's the thing itself:

(Towlerrific.)

Error-Code Poetry

Robin says,

I just subscribed to Jamais Cascio's future-y blog on Fast Company and in the subhed of the Google Reader subscribe page, it said:

That's just a bit of exposed CMS-speak, but hmm. It seems resonant somehow.

Hari Seldon, speaking to students across a glowing touch-table covered with flickering blue-green graphs: "But to predict future events, you must apply the taxonomy view." He swipes his thumb and the graphs rotate.

A student pipes up. Linus, the eager one: "But at what depth, Master Seldon? Three-hundred? Three-thousand?"

"No, no, no." Seldon smiles. "The depth... is zero."

Dance in Unlikely Places

Robin says,

I'm sitting in a coffee shop right now, quarter-aware of some of the funny conversations and interactions around me, so it occurred to me to link to this: Lily Sloan (my sister!) is an MFA student in dance at Texas Woman's University, and the project she's working on right now involves observing customers in a coffee shop—essentially building a database of motion and behavior—and then amplifying and remixing that into an "action score"—choreographing it.

You've gotta see the video of an early rough draft. It's simultaneously familiar and strange.

Hmm, now I'm peering around, on the lookout for undercover choreographers...

Sideloading Now Seems So Simple

Tim says,

Nilay Patel, on the whole Apple/Google/AT&T/App Store-avaganza:

I don't think there's any good reason the most interesting things about the App Store right now should be procedural details and the number of submissions each reviewer handles a day -- somewhere around 80, if you can believe it. I'd rather be talking about new and exciting ways to integrate the iPhone and other mobile devices into my daily life -- I'd rather be talking about apps. And the more I think about it, the only way Apple can get back to that is by doing what it should have done in the first place: allowing developers and users to bypass the App Store and sideload apps onto the iPhone themselves.

Every single App Store submission story we've covered boils down to the fact that Apple is the single point of control for the iPhone ecosystem, and it's simply not fast or flexible enough to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation we're seeing on the platform. Like it or not, what's happening on the iPhone is leading the entire tech industry, and Apple should be doing everything in its power to enhance that, rather than miring itself in scandal and regulatory investigation. If that means releasing some control over the platform, then so be it -- especially since allowing sideloading would make almost all of these problems simply disappear.

See also #8.

Away We Go

Tim says,

Children's picturebooks for the iPhone/iPod touch.

See Winged Chariot press -- I think it's UK only for the moment.

H/t Alan Jacobs

Pitchfork Prescience

Tim says,

Just for the record, I totally nailed OutKast's "B.O.B." as song of the decade a month ago. I wrote:

OutKast's B.O.B. is the best because it says YES to everything we are and compresses it to pure energy. It's our Good Vibrations, our Layla.

Robin (who clean-sweeps his tweets) had a nice addition:

Jeez now I'm listening to it again, and like Harold Bloom's Hamlet, it's a Total Work. EVERYTHING is in here.

Here's Pitchfork's Stuart Berman with a more expansive explanation:

"B.O.B." is not just the song of the decade-- it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it. In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords ("Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS"), personal anecdotes ("Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo") and product placements ("Yo quiero Taco Bell") that read like the world's first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black).

Of course, there is a downside of being ahead of your time-- upon its release, "B.O.B." didn't even dent the Billboard Hot 100, and merely peaked at No. 69 on the Hip-Hop/R&B Chart. But unlike OutKast's subsequent number one singles ("Ms. Jackson" and "Hey Ya") "B.O.B." is too disorienting and exhausting an experience to ever succumb to over-saturation, and its majesty has never been diminished by ironic cover versions from cred-hungry rock bands. Because even after a decade that's seen the act of copying music become as easy as a mouse-click, and the process of performing simplified for toy video-game guitars, the future-shocked ferocity "B.O.B." is something that just cannot be duplicated.

The best place to enjoy "B.O.B.", of course, is at Snarkmarket 3000.

Technologies Don't Transform. Societies Do.

Tim says,

Quick-hitting today, but here's an important axiom from Dan Visel at if:book --

the social use of digital media is more transformative than the move to the digital itself

Visel's responding to Eric Harvey's "The Social History of the MP3":

The first widespread music delivery technology to emanate from outside industry control, mp3s, flowing through peer-to-peer networks and other pathways hidden in plain sight, have performed the radical task of separating music from the music industry for the first time in a century. They have facilitated the rise of an enormous pirate infrastructure; ideologically separate from the established one, but feeding off its products, multiplying and distributing them freely, without following the century-old rules of capitalist exchange. Capitalism hasn't gone away, of course, but mp3s have severely threatened its habits and rituals within music culture. There is nothing inherent or natural about paying for music, and the circulation of mp3s > through unsanctioned networks reaffirms music as a social process driven by passion, not market logic or copyright. Yet at the same time the Internet largely freed music from its packaged-good status and opened a realm of free-exchange, it also rendered those exciting new rituals very trackable. In the same way that Facebook visually represents "having friends," the mp3s coursing through file-sharing networks quantify the online social life of music by charting its path.

P.S.: This observation from Harvey's essay is a great coda to my "How the iPod Changed the Way We Read" --

This might be the most profound social shift of the mp3 era: hoarding and sharing music changed from an activity for eccentrics to the default mode of musical enjoyment for millions.

One of Those Old Words We Don't Use Anymore

Robin says,

It's not really the full content of Charles Stross's argument here that gets me; it's simply his use of the word "mercy." He connects Abdelbaset Al Megrahi with U.S. health care reform, and argues that the U.S. is suffering from a mercy deficit, and it's worth checking out. But really, I'm sort of inclined to ignore the argument, and just dwell on the word. Mercy.

Is that word like totally not a part of our modern lexicon or what? I'm rolling it around in my mouth, and in my brain, and it feels almost like one of those hard-to-translate words from another language. Saudade. Schadenfreude. Mercy.

Where does mercy live in our society today? What policies do we promote that have mercy at their core? What would that even mean? Not rhetorical questions; I find myself suddenly and sincerely puzzled by this.

The Part of District 9 I Didn't Like

Robin says,

Racialicious calls out District 9's Nigerian gangster caricatures:

So why the racist parts? Why can't the Nigerians just be people with logical motives like money and weapons? Why do they have to go out of their way to be ooga-booga savages? The film would still have held up without the narrative elements of cannibalism and interspecies sex. Why do the blacks have to be sexual degenerates who will eat filth and violate the oldest human taboo by committing cannibalism? The only reason I see is to shoehorn some cheap visceral thrills into the movie. It's lazy, sensationalist writing, and it diminishes the potential for intelligent, nuanced allegory. And it doesn't even make sense. Man, it pissed me off.

Yup, I agree. Not a reason not to see and enjoy the movie; but one should notice such things, and call them out.

Speaking of Lego Voltron

Robin says,

Besides the a priori awesomeness of Lego stop-motion and chiptune music, I think what this video brings to the table is: a) amazing camera work; b) many, many how-did-he-do-that moments; and c) stuff like this.

DIY Book Scanner

Robin says,

The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed.

P.S. Something I find myself doing more often these days: snapping a passage out of a book with my phone's camera and emailing it to myself. Now if only Gmail had a little built-in OCR module...

P.P.S. I seriously want to build one of these things.

My Global Cereal Arbitrage Scheme... FOILED

Robin says,

I love posts like this! I feel like I have an infinite appetite for them: Rice Krispies boxes from around the world. Sometimes they're... Rice Bubbles?

I want posts that aggregate: movie poster variations from the around the world; book cover variations from around the world; corporate identity variations from around the world; you get the idea.

And hey, is this blog idsgn scarily well-designed or what?

Via (@twm.)

A Short History of Color Printing

Tim says,

So lately I've been thinking a lot about how color turns out to be a surprisingly important part of our experience reading printed books, and I came across this terrific website on the history of color printing, part of a special collections exhibit in the 90s from the University of Delaware's Morris Library.

I love this stuff:

Lithography was the first fundamentally new printing technology since the invention of relief printing in the fifteenth century.... Early colored lithographs used one or two colors to tint the entire plate and create a watercolor-like tone to the image. This atmospheric effect was primarily used for landscape or topographical illustrations. For more detailed coloration, artists continued to rely on handcoloring over the lithograph. Once tinted lithographs were well established, it was only a small step to extend the range of color by the use of multiple tint blocks printed in succession. Generally, these early chromolithographs were simple prints with flat areas of color, printed side-by-side.

Increasingly ornate designs and dozens of bright, often gaudy, colors characterized chomolithography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Overprinting and the use of silver and gold inks widened the range of color and design. Still a relatively expensive process, chromolithography was used for large-scale folio works and illuminated gift books which often attempted to reproduce the handwork of manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The steam-driven printing press and the wider availability of inexpensive paper stock lowered production costs and made chromolithography more affordable. By the 1880s, the process was widely used for magazines and advertising. At the same time, however, photographic processes were being developed that would replace lithography by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Interview with a Botmaster

Robin says,

Two things about this article on botnets are interesting:

1. "The botmaster, upon realizing that one of his bots was suddenly sentient, appeared to assume that the researcher was a fellow botmaster and that their respective networks had 'collided.' The researcher worked to strengthen the botmaster’s assumption. Pretending to be a fellow botmaster, the researcher asked about the server software. Figure 3 shows the initial conversation with the botmaster." (Here.)
   
   
2. Who's responsible for this bit of investigative cyber-journalism? Why, it's... Cisco. I think you're going to see more and more entities not traditionally in the business of journalism supporting and publishing stuff like this.

List of Hypothetical Objects

Robin says,

The themed lists on Wikipedia are the best. For instance: hypothetical objects.

Includes links to invalid dinosaurs and nomina nuda—"naked names"!

Frankenstein Frankenstein

Robin says,

This is fun. Not a breezy read, but fun. Ed Park reviews a new book called A Monster's Notes, in which:

Mary Shelley's creation has come unstuck in time. He lives in New York or did until recently. He passes Tower Records, a Duane Reade drugstore.

And then! Park posts a remix/remake of that review. It's even sketchier—even more like raw notes. Or like a David Markson book. Again, not an easy read, but I think you might enjoy it. Includes:

Sheck's novel acknowledges Google searches. Wikipedia. Redirections. All this webwork.

"A Monster's Notes" is an uncommonplace book. A site for revision, translation, error, confusion, melancholy. Limits of this method. Book is over 500 pages long, not without longueurs. (Could it have worked at 100 pages, at 50?) But heft becomes crucial to the experience. To exhaust the metaphors and the monster.

Also:

Are these my real notes or the ones I will publish? Which version has more energy?

Actually, the more I think about it, this might be the coolest thing I've read in weeks.

Death Star Over San Francisco

Robin says,

For your desktop. And a Star Destroyer in the fog!

Hanging With Kafka

Robin says,

The new Franz Kafka Society Center is lovely.

One of my favorite bits from Kafka is a passage from The Trial:

He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for.

That's totally fashion in 2009!

Caravaggio and the Cops

Robin says,

John Sevigny writes:

Caravaggio was no stranger to run-ins with the law. Accused of killing at least two men and having done several stints in prison, the painter put his own multiple arrests on canvas when he interpreted this Biblical episode known to every Sunday school student.

Also, think about how stunning the dark, stark look of this painting must have been at the time:

[Caravaggio's] style -- realism and high-contrast lighting directed with dramatic precision against haunting, black backgrounds -- changed art forever. His work made the Sistine Chapel's figures and religious scenes look like clumsy, antiquated, cartoons. In an age of intolerance, Caravaggio almost single-handedly killed off traditional religious art and made money off the Church in the process, all the while behaving like a savage.

"His work made the Sistine Chapel's figures and religious scenes look like clumsy, antiquated, cartoons." Whoah!

A Piece of the Planet, Pinned To Your Chest

Robin says,

This seems really resonant to me: a piece of jewelry cut to the contour of any place on earth. The silver version is too expensive, but it's a cool idea; they should offer them in plastic.

Rockin' Microsoft Fonts

Robin says,

Microsoft has taken an epic amount of abuse for Arial, their now-ubiquitous Helvetica knockoff. But, uh, did anybody notice... I think they took it to heart... 'cause the new Windows fonts are really good?

And they're not even that new, right? I think they've been out since 2007. Anyway, one in particular, Calibri, is just really nice. Of course, I think it's nice, in part, because it has many ligatures (see above).

Maybe this is old news and everyone has been joyfully typing away in Calibri and Consolas for years now. I'm just getting wise. And looking for synonyms with the "ti" word pairing.

Update: Actually, I totally remember when this Poynter piece by Anne Van Wags about the C-family came out. But it was all "ooh, wow, coming soon, maybe" and then somehow I missed the actual release of these fonts.

Is This Painting or Sculpture?

Robin says,

In case you can't tell, that's a 3D "painting" made from many closely-packed glass "canvases." How much do I love it? So much!

(Via Jon Hansen.)

Joburg Is the Future

Robin says,

The assertion from Neill Blomkamp, director of District 9:

I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. My version of what I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg. Every time I'm there, it feels like I'm in the future, so I was just very, very interested in the city.

Also: woo-hoo!

Well, the film was so creatively rewarding to work on, it's got all my favorite ingredients, that if the movie's successful, and people want a sequel, I would happily make one. Because I would love to go back to the world of aliens in Johannesburg.

(Via faketv.)

The Completely Understandable Spectacle of the Haul Video

Robin says,

Here's a new Viral Video Film School about haul videos, which you probably didn't even know existed. It's hilarious.

My first reaction to this (besides laughter) was: "Oh man, people are strange. I do not understand this at all. The internet is a machine for showing you how weird and unlike you other people are."

Which is, you know, a common reaction to a lot of things on the internet. But then I thought better of it, and tried to exercise a bit of empathy. And you know what? I'm thinking of the crisp joy of setting a big, boxy bag (the kind that stands up on its own) down on your apartment floor. I'm remembering the "fashion shows" we'd do as kids, trying on new outfits in succession as soon as we got home from the mall to show them off to our dad. I'm pondering the "I win at life" delight of snagging something awesome on super-deep discount.

And it makes perfect sense. Whew. Curmudgeonly moment avoided. Oneness of humanity affirmed.

The Writer & the Witch: Sold!

Robin says,

Free web version coming tonight!

(We now return you to our regularly scheduled material intertextuality.)

Everybody Knows You Never Capitalize a Public Good

Robin says,

A note on style! Moments ago, @thatwhichmatter said:

WEBSITE/WEB SITE? Website is one word, lowercase. When used alone, as "the Web," capitalize. Some use "Web site" so check preferred use.

ThatWhich is right; it's definitely "website." But—and please do not award me any pedantry points; I only mention this because I carry a deep, nerdy conviction on the point—it's always "the web" and (for that matter) "the internet." No capitalization.

As I explained on Twitter:

"The Web" is like "The Taj Mahal": distinct & proprietary. "The web" is like "the sky": diffuse & open. Thus more accurate.

I don't think there's a single diffuse natural system that we capitalize: the sky, the ocean, the atmosphere, the planet, and so on. Right? And therefore, to the degree it's both descriptive and, perhaps, prescriptive too, let's use "the web."

The Spines! The Spines!

Robin says,

Listen, whatever Kindle 2020 is, I want it to have a hot-pink banner and a contrasty black spine, okay?

More great covers at Book Worship.

(Via Brandon.)

Launch Emma

Robin says,

Flatmancrooked frames it like this—

For just $10, you can buy a share in Emma [Straub]'s future. As recompense for that investment, you get a signed and numbered copy of her first stand-alone book (above is an excerpt and the fabulous cover featuring beautiful art by Raul Gallardo). Buy multiple shares, get multiple copies. Give them away to friends, neighbors, and libraries; help start a career.

—but really it's the GIANT GREEN BUTTON that makes it work. From now on, every innovative publishing model needs a giant green button.

This Is a Two-Word Post

Robin says,

And those words are:

Lego. Voltron.

(Via io9.)

Visualizing Usain Bolt

Robin says,

Aha! Data visualization is often pretty, but not always truly revelatory. I found the Guardian Data Blog's post on Usain Bolt—putting him in context—to be totally enlightening.

Turns out that Bolt is not merely fast. He is getting faster faster than anyone in the history of fast.

Ideabox Fix

Robin says,

Just a micro-note: If you're using the ideabox iPhone web-app, a small change to the Google Forms "API" just broke the old version. It was an easy fix, though, and the updated version is available here (link goes to zipped archive).

Classifying Very Small Objects

Tim says,

I love this SO VERY MUCH.

(Via.)

"While My Guitar Gently Beeps"

Matt says,

If you were planning on not reading this week's NYT Mag cover story because it's, um, about Guitar Hero, reconsider. It's really good. And the photo at top is mesmerizing. (And whoever came up with the headline, I salute you.)

The Writer & the Witch Mini-Milestone

Robin says,

Just hit 50 copies of The Writer & the Witch sold! Not bad. The weekend is always slower, so I doubt I'll get to 100 by Monday, but you never know.

Yes, I know you don't own a Kindle. Tell your friends.

Aliens and Mermaids

Robin says,

This weekend:

• I'm seeing District 9.
• You should see Ponyo. I would be if I hadn't seen it already. See it for the animation of the ocean alone. It's not CGI; in fact it's anti-CGI—hand-drawn and gestural and, like, totemic. It'll take your breath away.

Welcome to the Choice Factory

Robin says,

Analogies are like soups.

But, even so, an original, well-crafted analogy is one of the best tools that exist for staking out new mental territory. So, here's one that just flipped my lid. Kevin Kelly takes us way back:

A few hours after the big bang 14 billion years ago, the total freedom available within the fine mist of light atoms and zipping particles drifting in the universe was stifling narrow. The possible arrangements between them were dreadfully few. You could count the actionable options for a helium atom on one hand. Compare that prison to the universe one billion years ago (at least in the neighborhood of Earth), when life unleashed an overwhelming explosion of freedoms. Millions of species, each of them an engine of options, filled the surface of a planet with staggering choices.

Reasons why this is mind-expanding:

• "A few hours after the big bang 14 billion years ago." I know cosmologists talk like this all the time, but normal people don't, and every time I hear it, it's bracing. Like a glass of cold water in the face.
  
  
• "[T]hat prison." Wow. The primordial universe as a prison! Solitary confinement, with no food iron or water oxygen. And it took us 13 billion years to dig a tunnel (or fashion a shiv?) and make our getaway.
  
  
• Earlier he says "[a] mind, of course, is a choice factory" and here he calls a species "an engine of options." I think that's such an interesting lens. +10 to the cephalopods, I think.

Can't get the prison thing out of my head. Maybe the Big Bang itself was the breakout? Jeez. Creation as jailbreak. Evolution as heist movie? I'm taking it too far. Go read Kevin Kelly.

The SHOCKING TRUTH About Health Care Reform!!!1

Robin says,

You have, no doubt, seen this site. I hear it was engineered in just a few days by a Republican web operative working round-the-clock with a team of Estonian PHP hackers.

Here's an audio interview with the site's shadowy creator.

The Health Care Meltdown

Matt says,

I've been an independent contractor for the past year, and my boyfriend's been unemployed. So I've been getting acquainted with the intricacies of the US health care system outside of employer-provided care, the universe affectionately known as the Wild West. Firsthand familiarity led me to seek a bit more policy familiarity - reading some books and think tank reports, following the health reform battle as it wends its way through Congress. And I've been itching for a while to create something that I hadn't been able to find - a stark, straightforward overview of why health reform is happening and where it's heading.

This week, when the hysteria seemed to reach a fever pitch, seemed like the right time to get this project done. So starting Tuesday night, I put together a quick little site, on the order of The Money Meltdown: DeathPanels.org.

Hope you enjoy it. Please send it to your crazy grandpa.

Compose Your Holes

Robin says,

Okay so first, Austin Kleon does the unthinkable, a photo-blockquote:

The part he's focused on is the line: "It's learning what to leave out. Like with good guitar players—it ain't the licks they play, it's the holes they leave." Then, Kleon writes:

It reminded me of Ronald Johnson, in his introduction to radi os, a long poem made by erasing words from Milton's Paradise Lost: "I composed the holes." (Johnson was quoting a composer whose name I forget at the moment.)

Composing the holes. That's what we do when we craft a piece of art, whether it's drawing or making a blackout poem.

It's often the holes in pieces of art that make them interesting. What isn't shown vs. what is.

The same could be said of people. What makes them interesting isn't just what they've experienced, but what they haven't experienced.

He goes on, and it's worth reading.

There's a really nice, subtle twist here. Our culture focuses so much on experience: soaking it in, racking it up, putting it to use. There are whole industries built around giving you crazy new experiences. So it seems pretty radical to say: Actually, skip it. Embrace the gaps in your experience, in your reading, in your knowledge. They're important, and in a way, productive.

(Via Zach Seward in Google Reader.)

Incidental Music

Robin says,

The story of Les Paul's life is wonderful and ingenious. I liked this detail in the NYT obit:

Some of their music was recorded with microphones hanging in various rooms of the house, including one over the kitchen sink, where Ms. Ford could record vocals while washing dishes.

Now Available: The Writer & the Witch

Robin says,

Hey look!

My new short story, The Writer & the Witch, is now available on the Kindle (and the Kindle iPhone app, too, of course).

More details here. I'm using the ransom model for this one; after 100 Kindle copies are sold, I'll post the free web version. So grab a copy, or tell a Kindle-owning friend to check it out.

Max Barry Pulls a Dickens

Robin says,

Ah, I love this! Max Barry's Machine Man, which he's writing and posting online at the rate of a page a day, will be published as a book, too. Barry's happy that he gets to have it both ways:

[T]his is a significant step for a publisher, and I’m really happy Vintage took it. I didn't want to take down my online serial. That would be like leading my child into a forest and abandoning her there. Then, I guess, going home and building a new child based on the first one. And offering her in print form. Wait. This analogy may have gotten away from me.

Give it a peek if you haven't already.

Generations

Robin says,

I'm only now digging into Joshua Glenn's generations, recommended by Tim—but I gotta tell you, this is too much fun. Jason Kottke provides a handy menu; in particular, I recommend reading about the New Gods, the OGX, and of course: the Net generation.

That last label seems really right to me, by the way. It's become increasingly clear, based on nostalgia that's welling up even now in our late 20s, that this generation is going to find itself, at age 90, still swapping tales of the first BBSes we ever dialed, the first web pages we ever wrote. "And it was by hand, too!"

Now, I have no idea if this is true, but I like the sound of it:

Whereas OGXers and PCers enjoy brooding over the past, assembling fragments of past cultural moments into collages in various media, Netters take a less complicated approach. They just dig the past, and slip it on like a Halloween costume. (Paging Andre 3000, Amanda Palmer, Sisqo, Pink, and Jack White!) It's no longer the case that Americans in their 20s and early 30s want their reheated entertainments freshened up with air quotes. These days, they prefer taking it straight.

Funny, though, to see the list of notable births from 1979 (which is my year, too, if just barely):

1979: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Claire Danes, Kate Hudson, Foxy Brown, Rachael Leigh Cook, Mena Suvari, Rosario Dawson, Adam Brody, Brandy, Lance Bass, Pete Wentz, Norah Jones, Pink, Bam Margera, Adam Levine, Avey Tare, Nathan Followill, Alison Lohman, Brandon Routh, Chris Daughtry, Dan Auerbach, Nick Stahl. Elsewhere: Pete Doherty, Heath Ledger, Evangeline Lilly, Corinne Bailey Rae, Petra Nemcova, Sophie Dahl, Matt Tong.

Wait, is there seriously not a single writer on that list? It's all actors and musicians! Something is amiss, here.

Speaking of Airships...

Tim says,

Christopher Hsiang at io9.com just posted what looks like a terrific primer on steampunk novels new and old. This is perfect for someone like me; steampunk has always seemed right up my alley, but I haven't read much of anything.

Nature Boy

Matt says,

Awesome story from MeFi. You know that Nat King Cole song "Nature Boy"? The haunting one that opens and closes Moulin Rouge? Turns out it was written by a vagabond hippie and left in an envelope for Cole after one of his performances. Much more in the thread.

New Magnanimous Arts

Robin says,

Any theories as to what this is? It's like somebody ran New Liberal Arts through Google Translate a few times:

A era of digital locals is careening towards college. A manage to buy is rebooting itself weekly. You have brand brand brand new responsibilities right away -- as employees, adults, as well as friends -- as well as you have brand brand brand new capabilities, as well. A brand brand brand new magnanimous humanities supply us for a universe similar to this. But... what have been they?

WHAT HAVE BEEN THEY?

The Bouncer and the Concierge

Robin says,

Here's an analogy to tuck away. Richard Nash talks about filters and finished up with an interesting image:

RN: [...] It is very complicated for an unknown writer to reach an audience of readers given the vast numbers of unknown writers out there. How do people find out about it? So I believe in the role of intermediaries. People always look to trusted friends who might be more expert or knowledgeable in a given area for advice about things [...] The question is, who are going to be those people. The model is going to shift from kind of a gatekeeper model to an advisor/service model. Or let's say from a bouncer model to a concierge model.

For some reason that just really struck me: from bouncer to concierge. From being in the business of saying (mostly) "no" to being in the business of saying (mostly) "hmm, how can we get that done?"

Feels very Kickstarter, doesn't it?

Google for 3D Models

Robin says,

So, this is very cool, even if you've never worked with a 3D model in your life, and never want to (but why would you never want to?): 3dfilter is Google for 3D models and textures. There are actually a surprising number of free model "warehouses" online, including one from Google. 3dfilter searches them all at once and presents the results clearly. It's pretty amazing what you can find.

The Concorde, naturally. An Eames chair? Sure, which one? A model of the deYoung Museum? Oh yes!

And, uh, I'm not completely sure, but I think you might be able to assemble all of Manhattan from the results here.

So, it's confirmed: the tools exist for a Garage Kubrick to ply his trade. The only question: Where is he? (Be careful: That link goes back to an old 2004 post about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It might give you media vertigo.)

(Via Fabbaloo.)

These Books Are, However, Not Free

Robin says,

Over on The Daily Beast, Chris Anderson recommends some books. His blurb on Stephen Johnson's The Ghost Map includes this line:

Nothing has saved more lives than statistics.

You know, maybe psychohistory has been staring us in the face all this time...

A Much-Needed Hyphen Tutorial

Robin says,

Aha! We talked about this before, and I got good advice, but @thatwhichmatter settles it:

HYPHEN? [1/3] Use hyphen to join 2+ words serving as 1 adjective before noun. (chocolate-covered pretzel, much-needed vacation)

HYPHEN? [2/3] But when they (compound modifiers) come after the noun, they're not hyphenated. (The vacation to Slovenia was much needed.)

HYPHEN? [3/3] Use a hyphen to qualify an upcoming hyphenated phrase. (The parrot is a ten- or eleven-year-old.)

Point [2/3] was still tripping me up. Thanks, @thatwhichmatter!

"I'm Doing This for Alison"

Robin says,

Alison Byrne Fields writes:

I was babysitting for my mom's friend Kathleen's daughter the night I wrote that first fan letter to John Hughes. I can literally remember the yellow grid paper, the blue ball point pen and sitting alone in the dim light in the living room, the baby having gone to bed.

I poured my heart out to John, told him about how much the movie mattered to me, how it made me feel like he got what it was like to be a teenager and to feel misunderstood.

(I felt misunderstood.)

I sent the letter and a month or so later I received a package in the mail with a form letter welcoming me as an "official" member of The Breakfast Club, my reward a strip of stickers with the cast in the now famous pose.

I was irate.

I wrote back to John, explaining in no uncertain terms that, excuse me, I just poured my fucking heart out to you and YOU SENT ME A FORM LETTER.

That was just not going to fly.

He wrote back.

"This is not a form letter. The other one was. Sorry. Lots of requests. You know what I mean. I did sign it."

Alison and John go on to become pen pals: the teenager and the director of movies for teenagers.

This is like Life of Pi: I really want it to be true.

CJR's Got Your Back

Robin says,

Now this is what meta-media is for: Dean Starkman provides a smart, sweeping analysis of Matt Taibbi's feisty muckraking. His verdict is nuanced and not easily blockquotable, but the bottom line is: Taibbi can't be dismissed.

Starkman doesn't let him off easy, though. This is by no means central to his analysis, but it's a fun line (and also good advice):

The weakness of the piece is where others might find strength, its polemical nature and its hyperbole. When you call Goldman a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," you're in a sense offering a big fat disclaimer—this piece is not to be taken literally and perhaps not even seriously.

I actually didn't know about CJR's The Audit feature—of which this is a part—and I'm a new fan. This is really valuable work.

The Stakes

Robin says,

Wow. Just excising a line from A. O. Scott's review of Julie/Julia here. Talking about Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," he says:

The book stands with a few other postwar touchstones—including Dr. Benjamin Spock's "Baby and Child Care," the Kinsey Report and Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat"—as a publication that fundamentally altered the way a basic human activity was perceived and pursued.

Ignore the impulse to say "uh wait, says who?" or nitpick the list, and focus instead on the broader observation, the fact that some books actually do just that: alter the way a basic human activity is perceived and pursued.

What a goal! What a reward.

I mean, they do, don't they? Is that still true?

Shadows of Shenzen's Future

Robin says,

I like this proposal for a new stock exchange district in Shenzen—it's got some really cool lines. (However, it lost the competition, so those lines can only be enjoyed on computer screens.)

Rupert Murdoch Forgets He Ever Saw That Crazy Flash Movie

Tim says,

Five years ago, Rupert Murdoch sat down at his computer and spent a few minutes watching a movie made by two journalism students. When he rose, he proclaimed that "he and his fellow newspaper proprietors risked being relegated to the status of also-rans if they did not overhaul their internet strategies."

Then he bought MySpace and the WSJ. He also bought a locket with Matt and Robin's picture inside.

But now, instead of following the clear lesson of that movie - that is, merging these two properties to make WallSpace? MyStreetLiveJournal? - he just might out-grey-lady the Grey Lady by contending to become King Cash on Paywall Mountain.

Feral Houses of Detroit

Robin says,

Whoah whoah whoah. Why was I not informed that wizards and witches have taken over Detroit? (Seriously, some of those shacks are just depressing, but this one? Or this one? I'll take it!)

(Via @jamieg.)

The Name is Shrdlu... Etaoin Shrdlu

Robin says,

It was Howard Weaver who introduced me to the phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU—the most frequently-used letters in English, in order, as lined up on old typesetting machines. World Wide Words adds a dimension: a list of appearances the phrase has made in literature, including this...

[...] a once-famous play, The Adding Machine, in which Etaoin Shrdlu was a character.

...to which I say: YES, of course Etaoin Shrdlu is, must be, a character. Possibly Celtic/Croatian. Possibly a poet. Possibly a spy. Possibly a poet/spy.

Somebody write a story starring media man of mystery Etaoin Shrdlu right now.

(Via my favorite new twitterer, @thatwhichmatter.)

Beyond Starbucks: Physical APIs

Tim says,

Some great ideas are sparking here, helped along by Robin's notion of a "Starbucks API." Noah Brier calls it a "physical API" (see also the smart comments) and Kit Eaton at Fast Company extends the concept (tongue-in-cheek) to Microsoft, Apple, and Twitter. But I like Drew Weilage's proposal at Our Own System the best:

The idea: create a "physical API"... of the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. Copy their entire way of doing business and paste it into hospitals around the country. In a nicely wrapped package deliver their systems for decision-making, integration, coordination, and expertise. Include their human resources practices, innovation efforts, and technology. Import their employment model, their bargaining power, and of course brand recognition. This is a beta release so if anything is left out, it can be included in a later version.

Mix with water. Implement. Poof! Great health care!

Just think about it, Local County Hospital, powered by the Mayo Clinic or Our Lady Health Care System, supported by the Cleveland Clinic; it's a definite brand extender.

Seriously -- this has, potentially, amazing public policy implications. My dad, who's worked in the government for-practically-ever in Wayne County/Detroit (first at the jail, then in public health, then in lots of places), always used to stun his bosses, co-workers, everybody, because whenever they ran into a persistent problem or one they couldn't solve, he would get on the phone to people he knew in Oakland County, or Chicago, or Denver, to see how they handled it, who would in turn refer him to other people, etc.

You can get these information bottlenecks even when there's no competing interests, and nothing proprietary -- it's just hard (without an API) for people to know where or how to look.

A Fine Vintage In the Kitchen

Tim says,

I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff; Regina Schrambling praises vintage stoves:

So many other essentials in life are clearly improved in their latest incarnation: Phones are smaller and portable; stereos are downsized to ear buds; cars are safer and run on less fuel. But stoves are a basic that should stick to the basics: The fewer bells and whistles, the less need for bell-and-whistle repairmen. Motherboard is not a word that should ever be associated with the kitchen—put computer technology in a stove, and you're asking for a crash. Google "I hate my Viking" these days, and you get a sense of how many things can go wrong with techno-overload. Some of these ranges combine electric and gas elements, which is a recipe for trouble, as is microwave or convection capability. This kind of overdesign is what killed combination tuner/turntables—one goes, and the other dies from neglect.

I get kind of excited about things like self-updating blenders and coffee makers that I can control from my Blackberry, but there's also, sometimes, something to be said for saying, "You know, I think we've kind of figured this out. Maybe we'll work the kinks out on what's next in another few decades, but until then, let me have my dumb appliance."

This sort of dovetails with Michael Pollan's essay about Julia Child and food TV -- there's something about the convergence of cooking with electronics that transformed it into entertainment, that elevated it into something harder than most people could or would do at home, that left us with celebrity chefs and high-powered gadgets and a vastly reduced proportion of us actually cooking anything on them.

Which in turn makes it harder for technology to help us - we'd have to actually KNOW what we were doing to actually make a better (as opposed to shinier, or more convenient) device.

The Aliens Within

Tim says,

I hadn't really been following much news behind the Peter Jackson/Neill Blomkamp project District 9, but this is intriguing:

When its extraterrestrial passengers emerge, they are sequestered to a sprawling shantytown and shunned by even the lowest strata of human society. Amid an effort to relocate the creatures to a new camp, a corporate bureaucrat (played by Sharlto Copley) is infected with a virus that begins turning him into an alien, forcing him to confront his prejudices and his loyalties while he runs for his life.

If it all sounds like a science-fiction parable for South Africa’s segregationist history, Mr. Blomkamp, 29, says that is no accident. “The whole film exists because of that,” he said.

High time that alien invasion movies quit the trope where the global nature of the invasion boils down to B-reel of the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, etc. When our visitors come, assuming they're interested in people at all, they're hitting Mexico City and Tokyo and Mumbai -- the Lincoln Memorial will be low, low, low on the list.

In other Peter-Jackson-related news, I also really liked Henry Jenkins's observation that among nerdly filmmakers, James Cameron is the ultimate geek (making movies because he loves creating and playing with the latest technologies) and Peter Jackson the ultimate fanboy (making movies because he loves all the movies and books he saw and read as a kid).

All Multi-Colored, Many-Faceted Possibility

Robin says,

OK, here's a little game. I cropped the top off of this image—the part with the text. Take a guess: What do you think it's supposed to be representing?

The answer—and many more amazing images—here.

(Personally, I think it looks like the internet.)

You Won't Find These on Threadless

Robin says,

Oh man, how much do I love these arcade boot-screen t-shirts?

Reminds me a bit of Gerhard Richter's stained-glass pixels. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Juxtaposition

Robin says,

One of my favorite blogpost genres is "here are two things that, for some reason, seem like they go together." Chris Coldewey serves up a good one: a mural in NYC and a music video featuring Lady Gaga.

I haven't been following L.G. at all, really, and while I'm not 100% enthusiastic about this video—it's really just homage, and doesn't push anything forward—I'm impressed by its over-the-top, throw-everything-at-the-camera fantasia. There are some indelible images in there.

They Are Safe

Robin says,

I'm so happy to be able to finally link to this. My god. I can't even tell you.

Current is wall-to-wall with Laura and Euna's work in commemoration, and (we don't usually do this) streaming it online, too. It affords you a glimpse of the courage that led them so close to North Korea in the first place.

You can also leave a message here if you like.

Welcome home, Laura and Euna!

How We Spend Our Days

Matt says,

Now I don't remember who pointed me to this; it's been abandoned in a tab all day. Best NYT infographic I've seen in many a day: a visualization of how Americans spend their time, hour by hour.

Update: Just looked at my RSS reader, and now I remember who pointed me to this ... everybody in the world. Geez.

Pepper LaBeija Has My Wisdom Teeth

Matt says,

Also from my I ♥ the Internet file, Kottke alerts us that the entirety of Paris Is Burning is available on YouTube, for the time being at least. It's probably fair to say this documentary changed my life. Somehow, confronted with a culture too rich and enormous for the ghetto it's been relegated to, the film manages not to gawk or exoticize or judge. Jennie Livingston takes the world of voguing and drag balls completely on its own terms, no small feat at the pinnacle of the AIDS epidemic in GLBT America. For a post-adolescent gay boy fresh out of Christian school, this was a revelation. I can't imagine that most people wouldn't find a completely different and equally valuable story in it.

FF4-ever

Matt says,

We already know how much I love Final Fantasy IV and its immortal score. So even though this appeared on MeFi weeks ago, it's clear that it would find its way here eventually:

The geniuses over at OverClocked ReMix have given FFIV the full OCReMix treatment -- an entire album of Final Fantasy songs, re-imagined in something other than midi. My first love, the "Red Wings Theme," has been transformed into "Full of Courage." (Incidentally, I think "Full of Courage" is a very valiant attempt, but it sadly neglects the song's longing in favor of its bombast; it's like John Williams' take on Nobuo Uematsu.)

The album's available as a free download, natch. Let me say it again: I LOVE the Internet.

If Plants Had Culture

Robin says,

Tim Maly commented on my Starbucks API post, and I followed the link back to his site, as one does, and found this wonderful vision of vegetation.

I'm skipping the setup, so you might not understand what's going on here, but even so, check out these scenarios:

A weed appears in the Middle East with seed pods that are as satisfying to smash as a florescent tube. When smashed near the right kind of soil, chemical triggers set off a fiery light show. Youthful Tehran is overrun with the stuff.

In Paris, a species of flower predicts next season's colours and changes its children accordingly. A bizarre symbiosis occurs as fashion designers derive inspiration from plant and plant derives inspiration from the runway. All the big houses guard their greenhouses jealously. Chanel's radical "Agent Orange" spring line causes a scandal.

It goes on, and it evokes BLDGBLOG at his scenario-spinning best. Really a fun read.

Drifting Away, Like Doctor Manhattan

Tim says,

I've been spending a lot of time reading about autism lately, so this NYT piece on a slate of forthcoming movies featuring characters with autism or Asperger's syndrome caught my attention.

But isn't the great book/movie about autism really Watchmen? One character after another -- savants, to be sure -- driven by their obsessions, unable to make lasting emotional connections with other people, despite their best efforts to connect and identify with humanity?

From the NYT:

“The more I learned about Asperger’s,” said Max Mayer, the writer and director of the romance, “Adam,” which opened last week, “the better metaphor it felt like for the condition of all of us in terms of a desire for connection to other people.”

People with Asperger’s may have superior intelligence and verbal skills, and they often have an obsessive interest in a particular topic (astronomy, in the case of the title character in “Adam,” played by Hugh Dancy). But they tend to be self-defeatingly awkward in social situations, and romantic relationships can leave them at sea.

BOOK SQUADRON, ASSEMBLE

Robin says,

Hugo Chavez's revolutionary reading plan:

[A] key part of the Reading Plan are thousands of 'book squadrons.'

These are basically roving book clubs that are intended to encourage reading on the metro, in public squares and in parks.

Each squadron wears a different colour to identify their type of book. For example, the red team promotes autobiographies while the black team discusses books on 'militant resistance.'

Props to the BBC for going beyond the obvious smirky weirdness of this story and sharing a detail that's actually interesting/important:

"I think there's a great contradiction there," says Mr Garcia [who runs Random House in Venezuela]. "That a government which on the one hand is promoting reading, giving out Les Miserables in a public square, but doesn't allow the free importation of literature—not, it should be said, for any ideological reason, but because of currency controls."

It Really Is Snark Week

Tim says,

... but that doesn't mean Christopher Shea isn't right:

I'm as big a Julia Child fan as the next person... But how many pieces about Child's cultural significance can media outlets run before it starts to look as though reporters and editors have a financial stake in the forthcoming Nora Ephron movie about her?

Sacred Texts

Tim says,

All this gabbin' 'bout Shakespeare makes me wonder - what are the sacred, that is, foundational, texts for us? (Feel free to variously define "us.")

I mean Shakespeare's plays are one; I think the Bible is or ought to be another; The Simpsons, seasons 2-8; the original Star Wars trilogy; Sophocles; The Great Gatsby; Goodfellas...

I'm half kidding, one quarter reaching, and one quarter deadly serious; what cultural references are now, for you, and in your interactions with others, just assumed, like the way Moby Dick assumes King Lear, Paradise Lost, and the King James Bible?

Richard Scarry 2009

Robin says,

Love this new direction from Jillian Tamaki. Wouldn't it be cool if she did an entire Scarry-style book like this? What Do People Do All Day for the 21st century. Little anthropomorphized bears and alligators blogging and sequencing DNA.

The New Lexicography (or) Wordination Postenko

Robin says,

Sure, the Oxford thesaurus is gonna be great when it comes out. But what happens when the bounds of existing English past and present are simply not enough?

Wordoid.

It's meant for naming products, websites, etc.—but I like the (silly) notion of an app like this as a general-purpose tool. Writing a blog post, need a new word? Done. It's parlineasy.

Note the crucial indicators that Wordroid provides: Is the domain available? Are there any search results for this word yet? Welcome to the new lexicography. (Prelexicography?)

Link Love and the Viral Spike

Robin says,

Worlds collide! Both Current's Sarah Haskins and Snarkmarket's guest-blogger Matt Penniman are mentioned approvingly in this BBC Web Monitor post. (Via Tim.)

The BBC also points to an op-ed by Bill Wasik in the NYT, which I am drafting into service in our Snarkmarket Forum on Free (Related Topics Division). It's about the new "big break"—the viral spike!—which is made possible, after all, by the friction-less power of free.

Well, that and the internet.

For Sound, We'll Sync Up Shells

Robin says,

I have no idea where I found this—it was lurking on the far-left side of my tabs—and I sorta feel like it must have been planted there by some HTML fairy: Kelp, a poem by Paul Farley. Just terrific. Recommended: speak the words aloud and feel them in your mouth.

Trollope's Discipline

Robin says,

I'm still working on Newsweek's Trollope recommendation, and I love this bit of Trollope trivia:

Trollope wrote for two and a half hours each morning before he went to work as a clerk in the British Postal Department. The schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-page heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote "The End," set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book.

Wow. Routine and discipline seems to be the key to so much.

(Via Molly Young.)

White Box

Robin says,

The paper, it's alive!

Hey, It's Just Like Upgrading Firefox, Right?

Robin says,

Handy! Matt Yglesias provides a checklist of changes to our political institutions that would not require, you know, a revolution—but would still change things hugely for the better. I'm on board with all of 'em.

Hey! I See You Copying That

Robin says,

Over at Nieman Journalism Lab, Zachary Seward explains Tracer, a utility with two functions, one terrible and the other cool:

1. Terrible: It inserts extra stuff into your copied-and-pasted text. So for instance, if Snarkmarket was running Tracer, and you copied this line, when you pasted it, it would also say: "Come check out the original post at Snarkmarket!" along with a link. T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E.
   
   
2. Cool: Forget the copy-paste hijacking and focus on the analytics you could get from this thing. Seward writes: "But I'm much more impressed by Tracer's backend, which allows publishers to see which pages—and, even better, which parts of those pages—are most frequently copied."

Don't miss the graphics on the Nieman Journalism Lab post.

This connects back to some of the ideas in my post about tethered books—and has some of the same creepy/cool combo, too. But, on balance, I think more granular information about how people read and use text is really exciting—simply because it could help you make your text so much better.

New (Hampshire) Liberal Arts

Robin says,

I was just on New Hampshire Public Radio, live, talking about New Liberal Arts. Sure to be the buzz of Manchester this morning!

Mr. Penumbra Would Like This

Robin says,

Swoon! Postliteracy.org:

Each week postliteracy.org presents visitors with a single image, which will often have multiple layers of meaning in its visual content. Embedded within that image, though, is textual content hidden through steganography. The audience must decode the hidden text [...] in order to "read" the entire message.

And this sounds pretty new liberal artsy, doesn't it:

Thus, each post at postliteracy.org requires polymodal literacy—here, visual, interactive, computational, and textual literacies—to decode its full meaning.

Helpfully, they link directly to the tools required to find the hidden messages.

(Via booktwo.)

Quick Visual Links

Robin says,

A mixed bag of really cool sculptural stuff by Maryam Nassir Zadeh over at Covenger + Kester.

And PJ just keeps serving up the good stuff:

• GOOD takes on the North Pacific Gyre. (Which is better viewed as an infographic, anyway; actual photos are pretty unimpressive. Think "slurry.")
• If/when we get signals from outer space, I hope they're designed like this.
• Green... Lantern? (Here's more context. Posters from an alternate future?)

City of Inference

Robin says,

So, this research team at U of Washington totally out-awesomed PhotoSynth by building amazing point-cloud 3D models of monuments and cities from Flickr photos.

Don't miss the final example video, even though it doesn't have the recognition factor of the Colosseum. It's Dubrovnik, and wow... it's Dubrovnik. Just look at this.

(Via Waxy.)

Only One Thing

Robin says,

I like this format. A bunch of designers complete this sentence—

So you’re thinking about becoming a designer? If I could tell you only one thing about going into the field, my advice would be...

—and their responses are presented as pithy one-liners paired with longer explanations in video. Random-access mixed media. This is what the web is for!

My favorites: "Hire the one who can write" and "Focus: Find a topic, [..] find a method and focus all your efforts on it."

(Via @coreyford.)

The Most Brilliant Apps (Not Just the Best-Selling)

Robin says,

Question: Do you know of any blogs, or other sources, that do a good job tracking brilliant ideas in iPhone app design? Stuff like that great subway-finding app but not so widely linked; stuff that's less whoahhh and more ooh, nice, perhaps. (That link is to Daring Fireball, and yes, I know that's a good source; but I want something that goes deeper on actual iPhone app design and ideas.) I feel like there ought to be a dozen iPhone nichepapers out there. What are they?

'Maybe Media Won't Be a Job At All'

Robin says,

Aha! Chris Anderson is in sync with Matt Penniman here at Snarkmarket: In the future, fun work could mean free work. Specifically, he says:

In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part-time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby.

Backing up, I love how Anderson comes into this Spiegel interview with guns-ablazing:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Anderson, let's talk about the future of journalism.

Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don't use the word journalism.

SPIEGEL: Okay, how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide.

Anderson: Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.

SPIEGEL: Which other words would you use?

Anderson: There are no other words.

Awesome! (Update: Apparently I am the only one who thought this was awesome. That's OK.)

There's a great comment thread growing out of Matt's fun-is-free post—it's worth checking in.

Think Like a Pirate

Robin says,

Wow. Wired's interview with a Somali pirate is amazing. Very matter-of-fact. He thinks like a CEO:

Once you have a ship, it's a win-win situation. We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or then its like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.

The Nichepaper Manifesto

Robin says,

How is Umair Haque so good at this?

There's a lot in his nichepaper manifesto that's not new. You'll recognize ideas from Snarkmarket, ideas from Newsless, ideas from all over.

But I have never seen them so seamlessly and stylishly combined. Part of it is simply the language: Haque has a gift for punchy parallel structure. Just scan down his list of bold directives—"Knowledge, not news," "Provocation, not perfection"—and tell me you don't want a nichepaper, like, now.

I'm kinda into his neologism "commentage," too.

Anyway, if you are even 1% interested in this stuff, go give him a glance.

The Feed Giveth, the Feed Taketh Away

Robin says,

Pieter's description of his reading habits resonated with me. I, too, subscribe to an info-megaton of feeds, and derive a sort of cruel pleasure from scrolling through them at warp speed. If you don't catch my eye, too bad for you. Mark all as read.

But then, over at Laura's site—which is crisp and appealing—I find a link to Jon Kyle's, which is amazing. Look at that quote treatment. That is the best quote treatment I have ever seen on the entire internet.

Now I'm imagining those quotes, completely stripped of style, in Google Reader. Mark all as read.

Jon Kyle's site just keeps going. It's stunning.

What do we do about this? On one hand: the demands of scale; the great, brain-tingling opportunities of aggregation. On the other hand: the richness of a great frame; all that the setting adds to the stone.

I don't even really have a dream solution. These two values feel really fundamentally incompatible to me. Scale vs. specificity.

Of course, I'm not just talking about a few beautiful sites; I could put those in a bookmark folder and check 'em every so often. I'm talking about the rapidly-growing regime of words and images as portable, style-free info-bundles—which has a lot going for it!—vs. a world where words and images are fundamentally linked to their design and context, because without them they'd just be lame quotes in a Google Reader window.

It actually feels like there's an opportunity here, but I'm not sure what it is. Anyway, until we figure it out, you should probably bookmark this and this.

Disney Double-Vision

Robin says,

Wow. Re-used animations in Disney movies, intercut to make the duplication clear. I can't tell if it was corner-cutting or homage. Maybe a bit of both? (Via things.)

Make It More Swedish, Will You?

Robin says,

What happens when mass-market book stores don't matter as much anymore?

Book covers get weird.

In the Year 3000 They'll Wonder: Why Do All Books Have Soundtracks?

Robin says,

Wouldn't it be funny if the next-gen e-book arrived... as album liner notes?

A Happy Marriage

Robin says,

There are a lot of book recommendations coming up this week. Here's a small one to start:

Last weekend I read, and really enjoyed, A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. Here's the NYT review.

Most of all, I enjoyed his rendering of New York in the 70s; it felt like a dream. I think that's the point, because the early-2000s story he cuts back and forth to is, on the contrary, entirely real, and entirely harrowing.

There are books that you plow ahead with, fulfilling your readerly duty, and then there are books that hold your attention—books with a certain magnetism, or gravity. A Happy Marriage has both.

Oh and P.S.: I read it on the Kindle.

What Do You Buy When You Buy a Kindle?

Robin says,

I actually think Nicholson Baker's assessment here is pretty fair:

Here's what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon.

I used to tell people that you should buy the Kindle if (and only if) you satisfy all of these conditions:

• You read a lot.
• You travel at least a medium amount.
• You are interested in all this meta-media, future-of-books stuff at least a little bit.

But now, with the availability of the Kindle iPhone app, and the promise of Barnes & Noble's new gambit in partnership with Plastic Logic... I'm not sure. I think I'm going to change my Kindle recommendation from BUY to HOLD.

I'm definitely glad I have one, but you can tell this whole thing is just getting started.

Swedish Covers

Robin says,

Oh yes. These Swedish book covers are quite fun.

I'd play a video game featuring these characters.

And I sorta desperately want to know the plot of this one. Mad moose attacks?

Suicide in Shenzen

Robin says,

The sad tale of Sun Danyong:

After being interrogated by his factory managers for losing an iPhone prototype, Sun Danyong jumped from the twelfth floor of his dormitory at 3:33 A.M., on July 16th. He left behind a poignant electronic trail that provides one of the most revealing views that I can remember into life in the factories of southern China: who works where, why, and in what conditions. Much of this remains unconfirmed, but the dramatic story contained in text messages, instant messages, and bulletin-board posts would never have been recorded ten years ago.

The rest of the post is really fascinating; recommended.

Just Another Walk Down the Aisle

Robin says,

Just watch this video. There are many subtle things to like about it, but I don't want to give away the surprise. You won't have to wait long; the fun starts at 0:30.

Counterfactual Friday

Robin says,

This is interesting: Noah Brier points to a thought experiment posed by Tyler Cowen:

A freak solar event "sterilizes" the half of the planet (people, animals, etc) facing the sun. What happens?

Okay, it's weird and bleak. But I think devoting even a few minutes of hard thought to bizarre scenarios can make you a much better thinker. It's counterfactual cross-training.

By way of analogy: I always tell people that blogging is useful, even if nobody's reading, because it forces you to have an opinion on things. You don't realize how blankly you experience most of the stuff you read every day until you force yourself to say something—even something very simple—about it.

So I think regularly engaging in a bit of counterfactual thinking can provide the same benefit—and maybe on a more macro scale. The trick is to be realistic: You're not trying to dream up a pithy one-liner, but rather a sequence of headlines that you really think might unfurl over the course of days, weeks, years.

Tyler Cowen thinks this kind of thinking is useful, too:

To some of you these mental exercises may seem silly. Indeed they are silly. But what's wrong with silly? Such questions get at the stability of social order, the sources of that stability, and the general importance of demography and intergenerational relations. Those are all topics we don't think enough about. Because we're not silly enough.

And click through to see what he thinks happens next.

Showdown in the Public Domain

Robin says,

I'm a little late to the party on this, but I love it:

1. Some new Jamba Juice ads rip off "Get Your War On."
2. David Rees issues a funny call-to-arms.
3. But this is my favorite part: What's the law at work here? Is it copyright, even though "Get Your War On" is built on public-domain clip art? Is it trademark? "Trade dress"? Things get nerdy, fast, and I like it.

Rhonda Forever

Robin says,

Oh man, how can I get in on the alpha test for this? Rhonda, a crazy hybrid 2D/3D drawing app.

New Liberal Arts in the Boston Phoenix

Robin says,

Woohoo! Mike Miliard provides a fine write-up, complete with commentary from Tim, in the Boston Phoenix.

This Is Not CGI

Matt says,

Found this via Ezra Klein, whose admonishment to watch all the way to the end for the Pixar-worthy octopus feat is worth heeding:

Pictureplane

Robin says,

Kind've a Hudson Mohawke thing going on here: Check out Pictureplane. (Yeah, I mostly just like the first track because it sounds like the intro to some amazing NES game that didn't exist.)

Crunchy Color

Robin says,

Love the rough-textured, rainbow-bright work of Edward McGowan.

Wednesday Comics Report

Robin says,

So I did go out and snag Wednesday Comics, as I mentioned. My verdict? Beautiful, inventive, and fatally flawed.

But the flaw is so simple! You see, Wednesday Comics #1 is comprised of sixteen giant pages. And each of those pages is a separate story. This renders it almost completely unreadable. Just as you build up a modicum of reading momentum—TO BE CONTINUED. And they're not even good to-be-continueds, because really, how could they be? Nothing has happened yet!

It's only worth mentioning because the whole thing would have been so sublime if they'd simply focused each issue on two or four stories instead of sixteen. I'm sure there's some sort of production logic at work here—Paul Pope is still madly scribbling out the back half of his Adam Strange story somewhere—but even so. The product, as is, is broken. It's fine fodder for "trends in media!" talk—and you know I love that—but as an actual reading experience it's no fun. Fresh formats are great, but you gotta get the fundamentals right, too.

However! A super-jumbo-sized trade paperback, collecting all of the issues, released around Christmastime, would be a fine thing indeed. I'll wait for that—and buy it with relish.

Azkatraz

Robin says,

Lev Grossman's notes from Azkatraz, the giant Harry Potter convention held right here in San Francisco this weekend past. Here's an interesting hypothesis on the conjoined history of Harry Potter and the internet:

There was a great panel on the history of Harry Potter fandom online, starring Melissa Anelli, founder of The Leaky Cauldron and author of Harry: A History. She made an interesting point, which is that because Harry and the Internet both became massive mainstream phenomena at around the same time, and because Harry fans are kind of amazingly determined and resourceful, they wound up establishing a lot of the rules and social forms of online fandom in general. Harry Potter fandom is now the template for all future fandoms.

Also:

There are only so many delicious, refreshing Harry Potter-themed novelty cocktails I can drink and still feel like a man. There is no hangover like a Felix Felicis hangover.

Stop-Motion Steampunk

Robin says,

My friend Scot just posted his stop-motion opus. It's one of those wonderful animations where heretofore inanimate objects—in this case, old camera parts—come to life, golem-like.

Two things worth mentioning:

1. It's not a one-trick pony. This animation keeps surprising you with new scenes, new visual ideas.
2. Notice how good, and how crucial, the sound design is!

Check it out: The Falcon.

Ghost Faun

Robin says,

Listen, I know you subscribe to today and tomorrow too, so I should stop posting links here, because of course you have seen them already. But come on, aughhh where does he get this stuff? So beautiful and unexpected.

You're Gonna Need New Drivers for That Font

Robin says,

Oh get out of town.

The letter-forms for a new typeface, traced out by a plucky little Toyota curling and careening below a camera. Just watch the videos.

And now you can even download the font arghhh every nerd neuron is firing at once!

The Trinitron Uprising of 2009

Robin says,

Aha. Television's master plan, finally laid bare.

Now, TVs outnumber people.

You know what they say: In Soviet Russia... television watches you.

Media and the Moon

Robin says,

Wow. Props to Slate; this video is sharp, funny, and deflating. It answers the question: How would TV news cover the moon landing if it happened today? Sigh—the sad thing is, I think they've got it right.

(Via Romenesko.)

Build Me a Bridge to the Stars

Robin says,

Tom Wolfe on NASA's philosopher deficit. Resisted a blockquote, because the whole thing has a pleasing arc and totality.

The In-Hoax

Tim says,

Mark Sample spots a review of a David Foster Wallace collection authored by a Don Delillo character. McSweeney's? Nope. It was published in the book review section of the academic journal Modernism/Modernity.

Update: M/M editor Lawrence Rainey and former managing editor Nicole Devarenne 'fess up [kinda] in an open letter to Mark.

The Fine Art of the Cut

Robin says,

Check out this reel of short, stark animations. You know what makes it work for me? The sudden cuts to black. Almost every single one of the animations cuts out before you've seen enough. It's totally addictive! Talk about snack-sized media.

Like, this part here, "The Mad Gremlin"—it's barely an animation at all. More of a moving comic book panel. Really dig it.

Apparently it's related to this game—Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet!

Settlers of Snarkmarket

Robin says,

This is a great idea! Gamecrafter is Lulu for board games.

And particularly I'm excited by the idea of a custom, one-off board game—talk about the ultimate Christmas present.

They'll even sell you the pawns.

The Robots of Wall Street

Robin says,

Story idea, spurred by an odd and entertaining NYT op-ed.

Yes, everybody knows that these days, most trades on Wall Street are between computer programs. But that's such a lame generalization. What kind of computer programs? What's the taxonomy? What do they look like?

The story would basically be a slide-show. Each slide would focus on one flavor of financial app. It would feature, ideally, an actual screen grab—fully annotated—or if that's not available, a wireframe, based on descriptions and sketches.

It's likely that many of these apps don't have user interfaces at all, because they don't have users. They're trading daemons—headless market-makers. In that case, I want to know how they think. Imagine a diagram of the basic logic loop that propels a trading-bot through the day. I'm not looking for Goldman Sachs' secret sauce, here; I want computational finance 101.

The screen-grabs are the key, though. Maybe I'm weird, but honestly, I'm sorta desperate to know what this program looks like:

[...] the finance industry’s standard software for structuring bonds based on pools of mortgages (yes, you may have heard of the unhappy consequences of this process) [...]

This is one of my favorite kinds of stories (in theory) because a) this knowledge is all out there, and widely distributed—just not crisply packaged, and b) to lots of people, what I'm suggesting would sound completely absurd and boring, because "the finance industry's standard software for [etc., etc.]" is just the terrible, frustrating program they use in their job every day. Yes! Both are good signs: It means there's an opportunity for journalistic arbitrage!

ProPublica in Perspective

Robin says,

I've been semi-following ProPublica, and I'm an unabashed Amanda Michel fan, so I found this review of the organization's work-to-date helpful. Bonus: It's written by Bill Rappley, Mediaite's 85-year-old columnist. Talk about context.

Wednesday Comics

Robin says,

I think DC's Wednesday Comics project sounds really fun. Every week this summer, there's a new issue—and even though each one sits on the shelf at normal comic-book-size, it actually folds out twice to 28" × 20". That is big. Seems like it would feel really exciting to get one in your hands... sit down... slowly unfold it... "Whoah! Batman!"

Each issue has a bunch of stories from various writers and artists. Here's a peek at Paul Pope's contribution, starring Adam Strange.

Here's my beef: Why can't I order these online? Or subscribe to the whole series? I am reduced to scrounging on Amazon—thin pickings, and all at a hefty markup.

Update: Just caved and called Isotope here in SF. It is an awesome comic shop. Still want to subscribe, though.

Ocean of Storms

Robin says,

It's a cliche at this point: You walked on the moon. Now what?

But even so, these photos of Apollo astronauts—then and now—are incredibly compelling.

Related: I'm now (finally) reading Moon Dust. Even just fifty pages in, it's terrific.

New Liberal Arts Unboxing

Robin says,

Unboxing. The public documentation of possession. There's an essay waiting to be written about what it means—about consumption, sharing, voyeurism, recognition of personhood in the face of mass production, blah blah blah—but I will not be the one to write it.

Instead, I will simply report: It is totally awesome to see people unboxing something you made!

Here's Jon Hansen's snap, which has the distinction of being the first one posted.

Here's Kiyoshi Martinez—looking, as a twitter-pal pointed out, sort of like a 17th-century Dutch oil painting. The dark glimmer!

And here's Snarkmarket favorite Howard Weaver, who displays New Liberal Arts in context. Look at all those books!

Here it is on another bookshelf—"attention economics" contributor Andrew Fitzgerald's, in fact. Wow. Good company there.

What Fun To Wreck [Language]

Tim says,

Conceptual writer Kenny Goldsmith introduces a new issue of Poetry devoted to probably the most divisive no-va-nt-guar-d writing in generations:

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Jay-Z and The Fog of Rap Battle

Tim says,

Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy goes there:

See, Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He's #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he's got Beyoncé. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. Heck, when he tried to retire after the Black Album, he found himself dragged back into the game (shades of America's inward turn during the Clinton years?).

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?

But here's the other question: are Jay-Z and Beyoncé really in the same game? What about The Shins? In other words, maybe one set of actors are in the sphere of realist power politics, and another set are acting under a completely different set of assumptions - maybe idealist, maybe postmodern, maybe not based on the nation-state/single artist framework at all.

This was always my issue whenever we examined competing explanatory frameworks in political science: the assumption that whatever assumptions you made, they had to apply to all actors equally and individual actors consistently.

To me, it seemed (and seems) perfectly consistent to suppose that rational actors could be operating under different frameworks of rationality at different times, or even in some instances scuttling rationality altogether due to misinformation, contradictory internal forces, or misguided teleologies. "You can't build models that way," my freshman poli sci teacher said, half-joking but half-serious. No, I guess you can't.

Ferguson/Fallows on China

Robin says,

This 75-minute dialogue between Niall Ferguson and James Fallows, about China and its relationship with the U.S., is nuanced, detailed, and thought-provoking.

(My view here is colored by the facts that a) James Fallows has been my favorite journalist since I started reading his Atlantic articles back in college and b) I want to somehow, somehow, learn to speak like Niall Ferguson. Scottish accent and all? I think so.)

Anyway, Ferguson and Fallows really argue here—in the way two smart people argue over dinner, not in the way that people argue ("argue") on cable news. It's always surprisingly thrilling to see people actually think on camera.

To set it up, the point they don't dispute is that, right now, the world's most important entity is "Chimerica"—the blended economies of China and America. At this point, even after the economic shocks of 2008 and 2009, they are still inseperable, and incoherent without each other.

Ferguson and Fallows disagree on what happens next. Ferguson says Chimerica is doomed, and get ready for a painful disruption. Fallows, fresh off of three years living in China, is more optimistic—he thinks the relationship is flexible, durable, and many-faceted.

I saw Niall Ferguson debate Peter Schwartz here in San Francisco, and all I gotta say is: I wouldn't want to face off with this guy across a stage. He is erudite, to be sure; but he also carries and deploys his erudition in a particularly cutting way—like an Oxford don James Bond.

Anyway, I emerged from the 75 minutes mostly on the side of Fallows—but I always appreciate Ferguson's gloomy, ultra-realist point of view. Also, Fallows follows up here.

Re-Burbia

Matt says,

We all know how I feel about suburbia. How would you redesign the suburbs?

The question is the subject of a contest from Dwell magazine and Inhabitat. I'm pretty curious how Snarketeers would answer this question.

Ordinary Everyday Crisis vs. Cartoonish Super-Crisis

Tim says,

California, strapped by an insane budget crisis, is issuing IOUs to its employees and creditors, and will soon likely be willing to accept these IOUs as payment for taxes and other state obligations. Nothing like a little extra-constitutional currency creation to spice up the economic picture of the U.S.A!

The Economist's Free Exchange offers this take on the consequences:

The highly uncertain long-term value of the IOUs may make anyone reluctant to accept them, preventing them from rising to de facto currency status. On the other hand, if enough people and institutions begin accepting them, Gresham's law may apply. Consumers may be anxious to hold on to dollars and spend their funny money wherever they can, until circulation is dominated by the IOUs.

But then, of course, economies that do business with California would have a demand for the IOUs, and other states—Nevada, and Oregon, say—or countries might begin accepting them. A constitutional challenge likely wipes all this out, but it is interesting to consider.

Another question—what to call them? I nominate the term "props", in honour of the ballot initiatives which landed California in this mess in the first place.

Meet The New Fetish, Pt. 2

Tim says,

If you want people to know what awesomely supercool books you are reading, you can use the internet to tell them.

Ezra Klein, "Can the Internet Be Your New Bookshelf?":

This is one of those spots where I imagine social networking really will save us. Back when I was using Facebook more, I was a big fan of Visual Bookshelf, which let you display what you were reading and, when you finished, let you rate and review the books. As a matter of signaling, it's quite a bit more efficient. Your friends don't have to catch you in a literary moment on the Metro. And being able to browse the collections of all my friends was a delight, and offered occasional surprises that helped me known them better: former football teammates who were now reading John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, and libertarian friends who listed "The Grapes of Wrath" as one of their favorite books of all time.

I also found that displaying the contents of my bedside table helped counteract my tendency to get distracted 90 pages in and start something else. Now that the books were hanging out on my profile, I felt more pressure to finish them. Somehow, simply leaving books around my room didn't carry the same silent reproach. In fact, I sort of miss that pressure. Which is why I've added a little Amazon widget that does much the same thing to the right sidebar. Technology!

The New York Review of Ideas

Robin says,

This looks promising. I love a site that provides reading lists. (Especially Bollywood reading lists!)

High, Meet Low

Robin says,

What's that? You want blog entries that seamlessly mix high and low, a little monocle gesture to go with your Michael Jackson moves? And Matt Thompson and Tim Carmody aren't enough for you? Okay fine. Another champion of the form is Nico Muhly. His writing communicates enthusiasm that's both educated and unabashed—a balance that's actually pretty hard to strike.

This whole post is a delight. (And it really does include Michael Jackson moves.)

The Anti-Ffffound

Robin says,

I love cultural arbitrage: taking words, images, ideas from one place on earth (or time in history) and importing them into a new context where they're suddenly fresh and striking again.

This is, of course, common practice, so just like financial arbitrage, it takes a lot of work to stay ahead of the pack. And systems like Ffffound and Tumblr have become great levelers: They're like financial markets, automatically "pricing in" new information about what's cool. Oh, you like that retro-chromatic look? We got a hundred a' those.

So usually, when you find a good source you keep it secret. But I'll share this one, via Paul Pope. It's a collection of super-weird book illustrations. I mean seriously, what is this stuff? It defies genre. And yet, much of it would look good on an Urban Outfitters tee.

And actually, come to think of it... Joan Kiddell-Monroe has a bit of Paul Pope in her. Or, maybe it's the other way around.

See also: Slovenian event posters.

Amazon vs. Paypal

Robin says,

Oh, and while I'm talking up Google forms, I probably ought to report back the result of my one-question survey. With a sample size of 110, the result was 76% in favor of an Amazon.com product page and 24% for Paypal.

Behold, the Dark Knight of... Civic City?

Robin says,

Wow. Gotham City was almost... um:

Batman co-creator Bill Finger explains: "Originally I was going to call Gotham City 'Civic City'. Then I tried Capital City, then Coast City. Then I flipped through the phone book and spotted the name 'Gotham Jewelers' and said, 'That's it', Gotham City."

That's from the Architects' Journal run-down of the top ten comic-book cities. Here's the Gotham City entry; cross-reference with Jimmy Stamp's great Gotham post.

I like their characterization of Mega City One, home to Judge Dredd. I haven't read any of those comics, but now feel like I sort of want to.

Finally: I think the one glaring omission is Astro City. How 'bout you?

Pity This Poor, Paltry Network

Robin says,

I just cannot bring myself to believe that this Pew chart of internet usage is true. Finally, more than half of American adults use the internet on a typical day -- but the proportion that engages in other more specific activities is still so, so low. "Watch a video" is at just 15 percent.

On one hand: What??

On the other hand: This just means all the really good stuff is yet to come. Patience, I tell myself. Patience.

The Clicks, They Are Involuntary

Robin says,

Again with the irresistible headlines from Wired Science:

Robot Teaches Itself to Smile

Please Take This Simple One-Question Survey

Robin says,

I'm wondering about payment methods and purchase "friction." I have one question for you—click over to this Google Form and give me your gut reaction.

Next Time, Bigger And More Humble

Tim says,

Selected early reviews of New Liberal Arts:

Kevin Kelly, "Innovative Publishing Model":

It really doesn't matter what's in the book. The model is brilliant, if you have an audience. The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible... As it happens, the PDF reveals that the content is pretty thin. But it did not have to be. Their premise is great (the new literacies), and their biz model innovative. We can hope they try again. I am impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book.

The readers at Book Cover Archive: "This may be the only use of Century Gothic I'll ever appreciate," "friggin sold out! love that quarter binding..."

Court Merrigan, "Tiny Snarkmarket’s ‘free’ strategy: 200 hardcover copies of ‘New Liberal Arts’ sold in just eight hours":

Aside from the PDF’s inherent weaknesses as e-book format, this is a pretty cool idea. The tiny press run gives value to the hardcover, certainly pays for the free PDF giveaway, and gets the interest up for the next book to be thusly released... In any case, given that it took only eight hours for New Liberal Arts to sell out, the Snarkmarketers might want to think of printing more next time.

Mark Allen: "New Liberal Arts is a free PDF ebook about things Jason Kottke often refers to as “Liberal Arts 2.0” and is written by a lot of really smart people about some really interesting topics such as brevity, micropolitics, mapping, reality engineering and a bunch more. It also has an innovative publishing model. It’s only about 35 pages of content, and each page is a discrete, bite size idea that will likely send you off in a completely new direction for the rest of the day."

And nobody (besides late-rising Californians) has even seen the physical book yet! (Which, just to be clear, is a perfect-bound paperback, not a hardcover.*)

Quiver for Brushes

Robin says,

I just bought one of Ashlee Ferlito's terrific tiny paintings. Can you guess which?

That Magic Threshold

Robin says,

I have a question.

Per Farhad Manjoo, domains are for suckers. That goes both for buying them and keeping track of them. Why bother remembering talkingpointsmemo.com when I can just type "josh marshall" or "tpm" into the address bar in Firefox or Chrome (not Safari, though) and jump directly to the site?

Here's the question: Talking Points Memo is the first Google result for both "josh marshall" and "tpm"—that's how those browsers know to take me there straightaway. However, robinsloan.com is the first result for "robin sloan"... but I do not get the boom-tube treatment. So what's the missing piece? Do you need a certain number of links backing you up to activate the shortcut? A certain number of queries per day? Any ideas?

More examples: "nick kristof" takes me straight to Kristof's NYT topic page. "matt thompson" takes me to the Google results page. "farhad manjoo" takes me to Manjoo's Wikipedia entry. "jason kottke" takes me straight to kottke.org. "epic 2014" takes me straight to EPIC 2014. "tim carmody" takes me to Google results. Argh! Are we really that obscure?

Man on Plinth

Robin says,

Eyeteeth explains a cool new art project:

Since Monday, artist Antony Gormley has been asking Britons to use Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth to make "a portrait of the UK now." For the next 100 days, he's opened up the remaining empty plinth -- built in 1841 to support an equestrian statue of William IV, but never completed due to lack of funds -- in central London to anyone for an hour, to do whatever they'd like.

There's a live stream!

NEW LIBERAL ARTS: The PDF

Robin says,

I wondered for a moment whether we should wait a week, or ten days, to post the PDF—wait, that is, for all the printed copies to arrive. But then I got impatient. Here it is.

If you bought one, resist temptation! You're going to enjoy opening it up in the mail a lot more than scrolling through it in the browser.

More meta-commentary on the book and the whole process—soon.

Update: Kevin Kelly says the content is "pretty thin," but also that "I am impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book." Cool!

Swimming Out Of The Death Spiral

Tim says,

And now for a note on the dark side of printed books: Michael Jensen, Director of Strategic Web Communications for National Academies and National Academies Press, collects and analyzes data about global warming and ecological collapse. At the AAUP meeting in Philadelphia, he presented "Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity," an argument that the combination of financial and environmental necessity compels university presses to move away from printing, shipping, and storing books and towards a digital-driven, open-access model, with print-on-demand and institutional support rounding out the new revenue model.

(I'm posting Part 2 of Jensen's speech - the part that's mostly about publishing - here. Watch Part 1 - which is mostly about the environment - if you want to be justly terrified about what's going to happen to human beings and everything else pretty soon.)

This is one reason I'm kind of happy that we didn't print a thousand or more copies of New Liberal Arts. We can make print rare, we can get copies straight to readers, we can make print more responsible, but mostly we have to make print count. And - of course - share the information with as many people as possible.

Tasting Menu

Tim says,

Are you on the east coast, or (gasp) in the Eastern Hemisphere, and can't wait until your copy of the New Liberal Arts is delivered or late-rising Californians post the free PDF?

You can already read four of the New Liberal Arts entries for free, online, now:

• Jennifer Rensenbrink, "Home Economics"
• Matt Thompson, "Micropolitics"
• Timothy Carmody, "Photography"
• Rachel Leow, "Translation"

Enjoy.

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 7:33 AM

Why Books Are Great, In One Link

Robin says,

From a neat presentation by the super-smart Matt Webb. He's talking about Bruno Munari, who in turn is talking about all the interesting ways there are of drawing a human face.

So, page one. As Webb says: "It's great prose, makes a lot of sense. And then you're halfway through a sentence, and you turn the page, and..."—(Click the "next" link on Webb's page, you'll see.)

What's great about this? The full-bleed-ness. There is no full-bleed on the web. And that totally sucks! It's such a crucial, powerful tool. Books and magazines get full-bleed. TVs and video game consoles get full-bleed. Even the Kindle and iPhone get full-bleed! But not the web. You don't ever get the full screen, the entire page, the total experience. In fact—the way browsers are going—you get less and less.

What's also great? The surprise. For some reason, hiding a reveal behind a hyperlink doesn't pack the same punch as the page-turn. I don't know why; I feel like it should work just as well. A super-fast, Javascript-y appearance would probably work better. But there's something special about the turn of a page. Maybe it's all the narrative expectation that we build into that physical experience over the course of years. Whatever it is, it's one of the things I really loved in the Kindle version of Penumbra (and missed in the web version): Page-turns became a storytelling tool.

The Real Reason to Make Books: You Get to Make Book Covers

Robin says,

Awesome! NLA designer Brandon Kelley gets some play over at The Book Cover Archive. Don't click over to their home page unless you want to be struck dumb by the transcendent beauty of books.

While I'm here: Wow, I really did not expect those books to sell out so fast. Now I wish we'd printed twice as many. But, a limited edition is a limited edition! PDF coming soon.

NEW LIBERAL ARTS: 200 Down

Robin says,

Whoah! Only 41 left! All gone. Look for the PDF tomorrow!

Thanks, everyone -- we sold out in eight hours.

A Fine Company of Newness

Tim says,

Just sayin':

Wolfgang and Red Riding Hood

Robin says,

I'm with Jillian: This line from Wolfgang Joop is the jam. Like Brothers Grimm meets Yoshitaka Amano.

Also: "Wolfgang Joop"!!

My Travel Kit

Matt says,

During my year of shuttling back and forth between Missouri and Minnesota, I honed my travel regimen down to a precise science. I've got my High Sierra Wheeled Backpack, my Monster Outlets-to-Go travel power strip, spare contacts, spare eyeglasses and two zippered bags for liquid and dry toiletries, all ready to go whenever I need them. Most of my liquids -- lotion, shaving oil, hand sanitizer, eyedropper (for contact solution) -- are either refillable or are normally sold in TSA-acceptable containers, like deodorant and roll-on styptic pens.

What's always bedeviled me, though, is the toothpaste. Travel-size toothpaste can be surprisingly elusive, and the container isn't refillable. Or so I thought. I mean, it's not like you could just put the nozzle of your regular toothpaste tube up against the nozzle of the travel tube and squeeze, right?

Right?

Wrong. It totally works. And just you watch, I will still be using the same grody .75-oz tube of Crest in 2011.

Three Thoughts On Early Cities

Tim says,

Kevin Kelly:

Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling rapacious appetites. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many wonder if they are eating us as well. Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?

Image via Wikipedia

Well, every city begins as a slum. First it's a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center — civic or religious — and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn't matter in what century or in which country, the teaming guts of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town that "were putrid, sodden and sagging." Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.

Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas:

The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.

Jonah Lehrer:

While it's very nice to have some statistical evidence for this idea (even if I can't pretend to understand the "Bayesian coalescent inference" method used by the scientists to calculate the population densities in the late Pleistocene), it's worth pointing out that the density explanation isn't particularly new. In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs forcefully argued against the "dogma of agricultural primacy," which assumed that farmers and agricultural innovations made civilization possible. Jacobs argued that the dogma was exactly backwards, and that it was the density of urbanesque clusters which generated the innovations that made farming possible. As Jacobs writes: "It was not agriculture then, for all its importance, that was the salient invention...Rather it was the fact of sustained, interdependent, creative city economies that made possible many new kinds of work." After all, you can't learn how to grow food until you've got a system for transmitting knowledge, which is why population density is so essential.

Gratuitous Space Battles

Robin says,

Seems like the essence of a good video game is (sometimes) figuring out what a player really wants to see on the screen, and then engineering a system to conjure up that screen as reliably as possible.

I feel that the designers of Gratuitous Space Battles have done exactly this.

The Geography of New Media

Tim says,

Rex at Fimoculous posts this insightful conclusion to the end of his post on launching new Dan-Abrams-published meta-media site Mediaite:

If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.

The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampirically bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is "launch another blog," which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.

Sign One that Mediaite will be smarter than HuffPo: this Jeffrey Feldman column that turns Nico Pitney vs. Dana Milbank into Marshall McLuhan vs. Thomas Jefferson. Me likey, Jeffrey. Me likey a lot.

The Problem Is the Wall

Matt says,

Ezra Klein recently moved from the American Prospect to the [depending on your perspective] loftier perch of the Washington Post. I'm guessing this has also gotten him better access to the halls of power; he seems to be snagging higher-profile interviews more often (e.g. Atul Gawande, Ron Wyden, Tom Daschle, Bernie Sanders).

But his heightened proximity to the legislative sausage factory might be having a depressing effect. Lately, he's gotten more and more negative about the deficiencies of our government structure. Most of our biggest problems, he's been saying, can't really be pinned on individual actors like Obama or, say, Tom Harkin. They're systemic.

To illustrate, he offers a nice fable:

Imagine a group of men sitting in a dim prison cell. One of the walls has a window. Beyond that wall, they know they'll find freedom. One of the men spends years picking away at it with a small knife. The others eventually tire of him. That's an idiotic approach, they say. You need more force. So one of the other men spends his days ramming the bed frame into the wall. Eventually, he exhausts himself. The others mock his hubris. Another tries to light the wall on fire. That fails as well. The assembled prisoners laugh at the attempt. And so it goes. But the problem is that there is no answer to their dilemma. The problem is not their strategy. It's the wall.

A California Constitutional Convention

Robin says,

The setup:

With the state's fiscal woes mounting and Sacramento seemingly frozen in place, a group of California leaders has proposed a constitutional convention as a way to fix the Golden State's deeply entrenched structural problems.

But how do you organize the convention? I really like the sound of this scheme:

RANDOM SELECTION: This method might sound the strangest but actually may hold the most promise. It has been used in Canada and elsewhere. A scientific sampling of Californians would be randomly selected from the statewide voter list, like a jury pool.

The Bay Area Council, a group of business leaders, has proposed randomly selecting 400 Californians to create a body of average citizens who could bring their common sense and pragmatism to the problems at hand. Those delegates would be paid to participate for eight months, starting with an intensive two-month education process in which they would hear from many experts about the problems and potential solutions for California.

It's like deliberative polling with teeth!

It's not without problems, of course -- but to me they seem like better problems than the ones you get with appointed or elected bodies. And keep in mind, a randomly-selected group would be generating policy options which would then be voted on by everyone else in California, so it's not like we would, er, skip democracy entirely.

This Is What the Alien Invasion Looks Like

Robin says,

Another winner from Today and Tomorrow. Pretty sure this scene would be completely gross seen through eyes not belonging to an amazing photographer. This is the danger of great photography, yeah? The world doesn't look like this. Or even like this.

Riding in Style

Robin says,

Yo I totally want one of these vehicles. How can something so Seuss-ian actually be real?

Kickstarter

Robin says,

Kickstarter is quickly becoming one of my favorite things. Here's a list of recently-funded projects.

Geeking Out, c. 1990

Tim says,

I love this; Hewlett-Packard is selling an exact copy of its HP-12C financial calculator for the iPhone.

The iPhone version of the HP-12C is a near carbon copy of the actual machine. It not only looks the same, but it actually runs the same code as do the physical calculators. The iPhone version is actually a bit better than just a clone of the original, though, because HP includes a simplified portrait-mode calculator (the 12C is a landscape-mode device). When used in portrait mode, you can use the number keys, along with all the usual math operators and a couple of other functions such as square roots and memory—perfect for those times when you just need a basic calculator.

The real power of the HP-12C is found when you rotate your iPhone to landscape mode; what appears on the screen then is a photographic reproduction of the actual HP-12C calculator, complete with the gold-brown-orange-blue color scheme that made the original so…endearing? Because the app uses the actual calculator’s code, absolutely everything works just like it does on the real calculator.

I used a calculator just like this to win a middle school mathematics competition - in those days, it was called a "Calculator Competition," because you could (gasp!) use a calculator. There was a school-wide thing, then a regional, and then a state final; it was a whole thing. The state final was the first time I'd ever seen a graphing calculator; that shiz blew my mind.

This Post Is About the Windows Operating System

Robin says,

(Pardon the geeky, utilitarian interruption, but this Windows volume control app just changed my life. Which will sound silly to you... unless you've ever tried to change the volume on Windows, in which case you too will be scrambling to click that link and download this app.)

Sixty Symbols

Robin says,

Oh wow. Sixty Symbols defines a bunch of classic, crucial constants in physics and astronomy -- for instance, h, Planck's constant -- via short, snappy videos. It's clever and consumable. A+.

What Canadian Expats Miss About Canada

Tim says,

The NYT asked:

In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States.

— MALCOLM GLADWELL, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Outliers: The Story of Success”

I also liked this quip from Simpsons writer Tim Long:

I miss the snow. Yes, I know the United States gets snow, but to my Canadian eye, American snow is like American health care: sporadic, unreliable and distributed unevenly among the population.

My Eight-Year-Old Self Can't Believe Any Of This

Tim says,

There are only 60,000 nuns left in the US Catholic Church.And the Vatican wants to start an inquisition into what's left of the orders, 'cause some o' them ladies just maybe ain't been doin' what they're told.

Well, that's just great. Thank you, Pope Benedict - you're so evil, you've got me rooting for nuns. (It's like in Return of the Jedi, when you realize Darth Vader isn't really the real bad guy.)

Behold, the Macro-User

Robin says,

Wow. Google explains some new Gmail features with graphs of aggregate user behavior. That is amazing. I want to see the whole Gmail user behavior dashboard! I want to see the top 100 labels that people use! I want to see everything!

A Special Canada Day Message

Tim says,

Jeff Scher's Parade

Robin says,

Love, love, love Jeff Scher's video about people walking down the street. It's simple and stunning.

Trollope Rides Again

Robin says,

It's tough to be a writer today, but then again, it's always been tough: More than in any other medium, you've got to compete with the past as well as the present. Hmm, should I dig into the new Richard Ford novel... or Moby Dick?

Of course, this is the great opportunity, as well. (At least if you believe Mr. Penumbra.)

This is all to say that I absolutely love the fact that an Anthony Trollope novel from 1875 is the top pick on Newsweek's list of books for our times. In fact, I love the whole list. It's one of the best I've ever seen -- broad without being shallow, diverse without being precious.

I'll offer a strong second to #28 ("Midnight's Children") and #36 ("The Dark Is Rising"); in fact, the Newsweek mention has inspired me to go back and read them both again.

And here's a Kindle bonus: Get your Trollope for free.

In Water

Robin says,

I dunno where Today and Tomorrow gets this stuff. Beautiful.

The Death of the End, the Birth of the Beginning

Tim says,

I don't have any answers just yet, but I like Rex's well-titled "The Death of Writing, The Rebirth of Words."

(See Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author is the Birth of the Reader" and Jacques Derrida's "The End of the Book, The Beginning of Writing")

Modern Problems

Robin says,

This is seriously one of the most 21st-century stories I've ever read:

For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban.

But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia.

(Via @mallarytenore.)

Flights 001

Robin says,

Fun project: Plot all the routes numbered 001 on various airlines. Please note the continents not visited.

Childhood

Robin says,

Cross-reference these two:

• Joanne McNeil explains why teenagers read better than you. ("China Mieville, at his talk at the Harvard Bookstore a few weeks ago, said he wrote his YA book 'Un Lun Dun' because he's 'jealous of the way [young people] read.'")
  
  
• Michael Chabon writes about the lost wildness of childhood. (It made me remember roaming deep in the thickets that curled around my subdivision, ears perking up when my mom called my name from far down the street -- because it was time for dinner.)

I think the rumors of childhood's death are exaggerated. I base this not on any first-hand experience with children -- I have none -- but rather on my skepticism that mass media, in any format, can ever match, in terms of pure play potential, a glade of trees and some fallen sticks.

Welcome to the Chimera

Robin says,

I agree with Nav; this post by Emily Gould is terrific. Less for her strong rebuttal of an errant "the internet is vulgar" argument -- which is so silly it requires no rebut -- than for this description of the internet itself:

Kunkel's experience of the Internet bears no resemblance to my experience of the Internet, but then, that's the funny thing about the Internet, isn't it? No one's Internet looks the same as anyone else's, and it's that exact essential fungibility that makes definitive assessments like Kunkel's infuriating. The Internet isn't a text we can all read and interpret differently. It's not even a text, at least not in most senses of that word. The Internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to. If you are looking at the Internet and expecting it to be a source of fleeting funniness, unchallenging writing, attention-span-killing video snippets, and porn, then that is exactly all it will ever be for you.

On one level, you might just say the internet is just a technology, and broad claims about content on the internet exist at the same level as broad claims about things printed on paper. On another level, you might say the internet is a chimera that magically manifests in whatever guise its viewer expects it to, and man, I want to be on that level.

Polygon Pants

Robin says,

I want the toned-down J. Crew-ized version of this look.

Where There Is Love ...

Matt says,

For my family, the death of Michael Jackson was one of those call-your-people-and-make-sure-everyone's-okay moments. I was checking the New York Times on my cell on the way to Tampa International Airport when the story was still that he'd been rushed to the hospital, reportedly for cardiac arrest. The way they'd written the story, though, with eulogistic snippets of bio fleshing out the news report, it felt as though the writers had pasted in text from Jackson's canned obit, which I interpreted as a bad sign. I kept saying to the folks in the Super Shuttle that I had a bad feeling about it. As I handed my boarding pass and license to the TSA inspector, she passed it back slowly, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Michael Jackson is dead."

So. Muse upon a problematic and epic life with me, Snarketeers. What have you seen that lives up to the moment? I'll kick us off with this reminiscence, by Minneapolis writer Max "Bunny" Sparber. And the MetaFilter obit thread is always a propos.

And, for the road, from Tim:

The Future Is All Filters

Robin says,

I made my Iran dashboard because I needed a better filter for Iran news. But filters aren't just for just for tracking global tumult; people need them on all levels. For example: My sister, an ultra-busy grad student and dancer, doesn't really have time to read Snarkmarket.

The solution?

The best of Snarkmarket, filtered by my mom. (She has a tumblr, too.)

No you cannot unsubscribe from this feed and sign up for that one. I'm going to know if you do. We have analytics for these things.

Tolkein in Tehran

Tim says,

Salon's Tehran dispatch, "The regime shows us movies":

In Tehran, state television's Channel Two is putting on a "Lord of the Rings" marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it's two or three films a day. The message is "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Let's watch, forget about what's happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.

Frodo: "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish that none of this had happened."

Gandalf: "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."...

Who picked this film? I start to suspect that there is a subversive soul manning the controls at Seda va Sima, AKA the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. It is way too easy to play with the film, to draw comparisons to what is happening in real life...

On the television screen, Boromir, human of Aragon, falls. He dies an honorable death defending the lives of his compatriots.

"In edame dare." This is to be continued. The phrase has become our hesitant slogan, our phrase of reassurance. "In edame dare." People are not going to let up so easily.

God. Wait until they get to the Battle of Gondor.

Headline of the Month

Robin says,

How can you not click on this headline?

Reverse-Engineering the Quantum Compass of Birds.

The only question is: Is it a science-y blog post... or a new work of literary fiction?

A Living Wage for Living Literature

Tim says,

If you hang around with me long enough that we get a chance to go to a fancy restaurant together, you might get to hear this parable. It used to be possible to be a professional waiter - one who thought of service as a career. And the service you received was service from a career professional. But as wages declined, so did service. A rotating cast of college students and twentysomethings can sometimes surprise you with their talent or enthusiasm, but they can't make a career of it. You come in, you do your best, and you rotate out, and what you end up with are a lot of chain restaurants where it's good to be a college student or twenty-something, good to drink a lot and eat a lot, but comparatively few places were you can feel like a gourmand.

The New Yorker's The Book Bench tells a similar story about wage cuts among younger workers in the publishing industry. The impetus to the post are cuts at William Morris, where entry-level workers saw their pay cut from 13.50/hour to 9.50/hour.

Tiny salaries in the low ranks of publishing are miserable for the young workers, but they’re probably worse for literature (You can insert “movies” for “literature,” if that’s the prism through which you want to read this.) It’s a truism of the industry that most of these jobs are held by people who can afford them—people with some parental support and no student loans. Often they’ve had unpaid internships, that most pernicious example of class privilege. Their superiors are the same people, ten years later. They—we!—are smart, cultured people with good intentions, but it’s easy to see how this narrow range could lead to a blinkered view of literature.

So, if you’re sick of coming-of-age novels about comfortable young men, a little solidarity with the lowly assistants might help.

Although now I'm scratching my head: the privilege thing I get, but are publishing companies and talent agencies overrun by dudes? I've never gotten that vibe.

The Hidden Fourth Dimension of Music

Robin says,

I'm picking up on a musical meme -- probably an old one, but new to me.

Space.

Start with this nice NYT write-up of a piece of music composed for long, curving lines of trombone players -- 89 in all! -- surrounding the listener.

Cross-reference with the new physical electronica -- and the argument that real sound sources, placed creatively in space, create an effect not replicable by any speakers, no matter how slick.

Pile on academic projects like spherical speaker arrays and laptop orchestras.

In an era when anybody can crank out music in stereo that doesn't sound half-bad, how do you distinguish yourself? The same way the movie studios are doing it, of course: add a dimension.

So now, I want the home version: How about an iPhone app that plays a composition on many phones simultaneously, networked via BlueTooth, and requires you to place them strategically around a space to get the full effect. Maybe dynamic performance instructions flash on-screen: "Run forward!" or "Muffle this phone with your shirt!"

If the app knew the relative locations of the iPhones -- (you, as a user, could probably give it some clues) -- the sound could swish and pan from phone to phone, in a sort of super-amorphous surround sound.

The Real Book Business

Robin says,

Unaccountably fascinated by the prospect of this New Yorker piece on Nora Roberts, teased by GalleyCat here.

She sells 27 books every minute! She makes more money than John Grisham or Steven King. And -- this is more macro -- "of people who read books, one in five read romance."

I wonder if there's room to reinvent, subvert, honor, and blow up that genre all at once. Sorta like what Battlestar Galactica did with TV sci-fi. Can you imagine a new name on the supermarket romance rack -- in swoopy high-gloss letters, natch -- that the hipsters reach for, too? (Does this author already exist?)

Iran Filter Meta

Robin says,

Amy Gahran asked me some questions and wrote up some of the background, mostly technical, for the Iran filter.

Extra context, for nerds only: There's a bit of screen scraping involved, and for that I used Hpricot, an almost-magical Ruby HTML-parsing library, and Sinatra, a definitely-magical Ruby web framework. They make it easy to create useful micro-feeds -- for instance, http://iran.robinsloan.com/nytlede, which tells me when the newest NYT Lede entry was updated -- information that's not included in the RSS feed.

Iran Filter

Robin says,

The web's saturated with Iran election coverage, and I felt like I needed a personal hub -- mostly to keep myself from obsessively reloading 10 different sites -- so I made this. Very minimal, but maybe it will be useful to you, too.

Update: Good response on Twitter, and a link on Boing Boing, too. Nice!

Update #2: Added a Persian tweet translation page. I think I want all my news in 22-pixel Helvetica now.

Ideas Ideas Ideas Ideas

Robin says,

China Mieville, guest-blogging on Amazon's Omnivoracious, drops some ideas he wants other people to write books around. Two of the ideas are meta-ideas. (Of course they are.)

Been having a hard time getting into The City & The City, actually. But I haven't given up. Mieville's books can be hard to kick-start but once you get 'em going... what a ride.

EPIC 1960

Tim says,

Thomas Baekdal has a nice schematic history of news and information from 1800 to 2020. I like his 1900-1960 entry:

By the year 1900, the newspapers and magazine had revolutionized how we communicated. Now we could get news from places we have never been. We could communicate our ideas to people we had never seen. And we could sell our products to people far away.

You still had to go out to talk other people, but you could stay on top of things, without leaving the city. It was amazing. It was the first real revolution of information. The world was opening up to everyone.

During the next 60 years the newspapers dominated our lives. If you wanted to get the latest news, or tell people about your product, you would turn to the newspapers. It seemed like newspapers would surely be the dominant source of information for all time to come.

Except that during the 1920s a new information source started to attract people's attention - the Radio. Suddenly you could listen to another person's voice 100 of miles away. But most importantly, you could get the latest information LIVE. It was another tremendous evolution is the history of information. By 1960's the two dominant sources of information was LIVE news from the Radio and the more detailed news via newspapers and magazines.

It was really great times, although some meant that "The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio is simply to get out better papers", an argument that we would hear repeatedly for the next 50 years.

The stuff about 2020 seems very familiar.

Via Lone Gunman.

Four New Roles for Publishers

Robin says,

Nice post over at O'Reilly TOC. I like Andy Oram's forthrightness here:

The bedrock principle in [the new media] environment is that the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper. Anything can go online to be linked to, rated, berated, or anything else people want to do with it. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.

Sounds nice--but that puts us in a real quandary, because the elements of quality we have seized on so proudly over the decades no longer matter as much. We have to recognize the new environment we're in and find new meaning for ourselves.

(Emphasis mine.)

My favorite of his four new proposed roles is the last one, "integrating facets of a large-scale text," which is, besides being a useful service, also just a nice-sounding phrase.

The Writing Life

Robin says,

Oh no. I have become obsessed with the Amazon page for Mr. Penumbra. What's that? Another review?? Wait, I was at #5 on the short stories list -- how'd I fall down to #7??

I can only imagine how addictive (and ridiculous) this is for people with real books, and real sales. It's simultaneously an economic metric and a proxy for your self-esteem. Dangerous.

For the record: 130 Kindle copies sold to date. And about a hundred times that many web views... which feels about right.

Getting Better

Tim says,

Kottke on Gawande:

I don't know why, but I've always thought of surgery as primarily a cerebral pursuit; a great surgeon is so because he's clever and smart. A short passage from Gawande's [commencement] address reveals that perhaps that's not the case:

In surgery, for instance, I know that I have more I can learn in mastering the operations I do. So what does a surgeon like me do? We look to those who are unusually successful -- the positive deviants. We watch them operate and learn their tricks, the moves they make that we can take home.

So surgeons learn surgery in the same way that kids learn Kobe Bryant's post moves from SportsCenter highlights?

Actually, Gawande reminds me a little bit of Tony Gwynn's method of obsessively recording pitchers to see what pitches they might use against him:

What began as a casual "let's take a look at how I swing" Has developed into a Spielberg-like production.

On the road, Gwynn carries two extra bags packed with video equipment and supplies. He has tapes of himself against every pitcher he has faced in the National League, showing every at-bat he has been able to film.

In his hotel room, before every game, he uses a small video replay machine to review the tape of that night's pitcher.

"I kind of take things to an extreme," said Gwynn, who edits and compiles his own tapes. "I know all I have to do is see the ball and hit the ball and I will put my bat on the ball. I know that, but it's not enough...

"I don't keep a journal. Most of it is mental anyway. Once you watch these tapes as much as I do, you know. I think I would be as good a hitter without the tapes, but this is fine tuning. I really don't look at myself that much, but rather I look at how the guy has pitched me in the past. Maybe they will try it again, maybe not. But it will be in my mind knowing what they might do, and that is an advantage to me as a hitter."

How to Invent

Robin says,

According to Jeff Bezos, inventing is easy. You just have to sign up for these three things:

"There are a few prerequisites to inventing.... You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to think long term. You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you can't do those three things, you need to limit yourself to sustaining innovation.... You typically don't get misunderstood for sustaining innovation."

I think most people probably underestimate how hard it is to stomach being "misunderstood for long periods of time." Like, long periods of time.

But I agree. Determination, discipline, and stubbornness are what get good ideas out into the world.

Live Swimsuit Intervention

Robin says,

Imagine an art exhibit that features a giant swimming pool, sans water. Imagine yourself standing there, scoping it sound, thinking: Okay, that's neat.

Now imagine that a trio of museum-goers... the ones standing just behind you... suddenly strip down into bathing suits and swim trunks. Giggles and shouts.

They run into the pool, and leap into the air.

Snap.

Love it on every level.

Well, That Is Quite Large

Robin says,

This image looks so good it almost looks bad: a gamma ray burst.

Vaguely aquatic.

The New Liberal Arts and the New Professors

Tim says,

So I'm writing a short essay for a forum on the future of scholarship and the profession at The Chronicle of Higher Ed, I think on the New Liberal Arts.

Like you, i've spent a lot of time thinking about WHAT the NLA should be, but relatively little on how that would change colleges, universities, and the lives, research, and careers of professors.

So... What should I say?

The Boss Sure Can Write

Robin says,

Wow. Bill Keller's memo from Tehran can be read almost as a direct rebuke to the Daily Show segment on the NYT. (Which, by the way, I didn't think was very funny. The mean-spirited field segments have always been my least favorite part of that show.)

Kinda like: "How's this for yesterday's news?"

Something else to notice: Bill Keller can write like a dream.

On the streets around Fatemi Square, near the headquarters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, riot police officers dressed in Robocop gear roared down the sidewalks on motorcycles to disperse and intimidate the clots of pedestrians who gathered to share rumors and dismay.

"Another four years of dictatorship," a voter muttered, and "this is a coup d'etat." Several others agreed. Some women wept openly. Some talked of "mutiny." Others were more cynical.

"It was just a movie," said Hussein Gharibi, a 54-year-old juice vendor, scoffing at those who got their hopes up. "They were all just players in a movie."

Crisp, imagistic ("dressed in Robocop gear"), revealing. Pretty amazing when the top (editorial) executive is also one of the best writers.

The Boss Sure Can Write

Robin says,

Wow. Bill Keller's memo from Tehran can be read almost as a direct rebuke to the Daily Show segment on the NYT. (Which, by the way, I didn't think was very funny. The mean-spirited field segments have always been my least favorite part of that show.)

Kinda like: "How's this for yesterday's news?"

Something else to notice: Bill Keller can write like a dream.

On the streets around Fatemi Square, near the headquarters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, riot police officers dressed in Robocop gear roared down the sidewalks on motorcycles to disperse and intimidate the clots of pedestrians who gathered to share rumors and dismay.

"Another four years of dictatorship," a voter muttered, and "this is a coup d'etat." Several others agreed. Some women wept openly. Some talked of "mutiny." Others were more cynical.

"It was just a movie," said Hussein Gharibi, a 54-year-old juice vendor, scoffing at those who got their hopes up. "They were all just players in a movie."

Crisp, imagistic ("dressed in Robocop gear"), revealing. Pretty amazing when the top (editorial) executive is also one of the best writers.

Fusion Tables

Robin says,

Why hello, Google Fusion Tables. You are a handy new tool. (Via Sunlight.)

Snarkmarket Process Bonus: Mr. Tyndall

Robin says,

Two rejected sketches of Mr. Tyndall from Penumbra:

Both not crazy enough. Also, the second one looks a little like Roger Ebert, yeah?

Our Daily Bread

Matt says,

Today Lifehacker brings us a ridiculously good idea. You make and refrigerate a week-or-two supply of no-knead bread dough. When you're ready for a fresh loaf, you pull off a chunk and stick it in the oven for half an hour. Voila! Cheap, convenient, delicious, homemade bread! These folks turned this idea into a cookbook.

The Economists Went to Their Homes

Robin says,

The New Yorker Book Bench reports: "Yesterday, Ha'aretz -- Israel's oldest newspaper -- sent home all of its regular reporters and contributors, and replaced them with famous literary scribes."

This was the business report from Avri Herling:

Everything's okay. Everything's like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything's okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points.... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again....

Pretty cute. More than cute. Reminds me of what Chip Scanlan at Poynter used to say: Newspapers shouldn't just be in the information business; they should be in the wisdom business.

Kindle Store Data Point

Robin says,

For the record: It takes about 25 sales to make it into the top 10 best-selling "technothriller" list in the Kindle store. (Technothriller!)

Question for you: Any blogs or boards where you think I ought to be promoting this? Kindle-centric blogs... book blogs with a penchant for new forms... hubs for short fiction? Just curious. Leave a comment or email me, robin at snarkmarket.

While I'm writing: Gotta give manifold props to John August, whose Kindle short story The Variant was what convinced me to put Penumbra on the Kindle as well. He's also written up some observations of the Kindle market as a whole, and the general takeaway seems to be: The numbers are all really low. The best-selling books in the Kindle store sell around 500 copies a day. And okay, that's actually a lot. But it's not iPhone-scale at all, and of course the numbers drop off steeply from there. How many Kindles are there in the world? Less than a million, right? It's still a tiny universe.

Why Is Gawande So Good?

Robin says,

There's been lots of Atul Gawande love here and elsewhere... so I am a bit embarrassed to admit I only read his latest New Yorker piece yesterday.

And now I can confidently agree, it's great. But why is it so great?

Here's my theory:

• It's a first person narrative -- and not tentatively so. There are I's everywhere in this piece, and it's wonderful.
  
  New rule: The more abstract and complex the subject matter, the more important it is to anchor it to an identifiable human point-of-view.
  
  
• The use of place in this piece is also really important. Yes, the piece focuses on different health-care costs in different parts of the country, so it makes sense. But, even absent that connection, I think anchoring ideas to places is generally a good idea. Think of a memory palace. Our brains have super-powerful circuitry for thinking about and remembering places, and when you connect ideas to places (even imaginary places) you co-opt some of that power. It's like a computer scientist finding a way to do a calculation on the GPU to take advantage of that crazy speed and parallelism.
  
  New idea: Use place in narrative as a hack to engage the 3D-sensing-mapping brain.
  
  
• It's a hero's quest. Really! In this piece, Atul Gawande is Luke Skywalker leaving Tatooine. Frodo going to Mordor. He has an urgent quest (to solve this health-care puzzle); he enters new, unexplored territory (McAllen, Texas); he meets friends and foes along the way. It's Joseph Campbell meets Peter Orszag. Near the two-thirds mark he literally mentions flying home; that's important. It gives the piece a familiar, satisfying arc.
  
  New venture: Policy think-tank co-founded by George Lucas and Peter Jackson?

So there you go.

Now This Is My Kinda Contest

Robin says,

The new contest that Google is running with the Guggenheim is absolutely terrific:

Today, Frank Lloyd Wright's 142nd birthday, we're excited to announce the Design It: Shelter Competition. Held by the Guggenheim Museum and Google SketchUp, the competition is inspired by Wright's assignment for his apprentices at Taliesin: If you wanted to study to be an architect with Wright, you had to design and build a shelter in the desert outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Then you had to live and study in it.

Unlike the Taliesin assignment, the shelters in this competition are virtual. To enter, use Google SketchUp to design a small structure where someone might sleep and work. Your shelter should be created for a specific site anywhere in the world and geo-located in Google Earth. It also should conform to size constraints and must not include running water, gas or electricity.

Here's the official contest site.

There's a bit of the "editor as wizard" effect here -- the power of a framework or context. (There's a better way to articulate this but I'm in a rush.) I could have, at any point since SketchUp's introduction, designed a site-specific shelter and posted it for all to see. But... that would have seemed kinda lame, and certainly disconnected.

But now? Watch for mine on Snarkmarket sometime in the next couple months.

Ghosts

Matt says,

This io9 essay on Dollhouse reminded me of something I bet a lot of slightly-less-hardcore Joss Whedon fans didn't know: Years ago, Whedon wrote a couple of action movie screenplays that got reviewed at Screenwriter's Utopia. The review includes a summary of one of the movies (called "Afterlife") that clearly prefigured the ideas Whedon's exploring in Dollhouse. The premise changed a lot in the intervening years, but it's somewhat fascinating to look at the progression.

The Seven Types of (Twenty-Four-Hour) Book Store Customer

Robin says,

Jason Kottke points to a run-down of the seven types of book store customer. I'm going to let you in on a secret. There is an eighth:

Let me tell you: Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store does not operate around the clock due to an overwhelming volume of book-buyers.

In fact, whole nights go by without a single customer. Just me, my laptop, and the dusty heights.

But oh. That single customer.

There is, I have learned, a community of very strange men clustered in this part of San Francisco. They visit the store late at night. They come wide awake, and completely sober. And they are always nearly vibrating with need.

(Yes, I'm going to be doing this all week.)

The Path

Robin says,

I haven't tried The Path, the new game from Tale of Tales, but I gotta give a priori props to a project that can earn this kind of paragraph:

I'm left feeling incredibly unsure about how to express my negative feelings, having attempted this paragraph half a dozen times. I don't want to give anything away that happens in the game, but I do want to discuss my experience of playing as Ruby, and why it genuinely upset me. I think this is The Path's greatest achievement -- to be capable of being genuinely upsetting.

And then check out the comments. This is not the kind of convo you usually get about a new game release. Granted, this is all on Rock Paper Shotgun, which is already sort of the New Yorker of game blogs. But even so.

Sounds and Pictures

Robin says,

Things I'm digging right now:

• This old Tungg song: Bullets. It wasn't until the third listen that I decided it was being sung by happy, dancing zombies. Or hobbits. Or zombie hobbits? (Be sure to get past the odd little sonic intro.)
  
  
• I think I mentioned him before, but man, I just cannot get enough of Hudson Mohawke. Two of my favorite tracks are on this page in different forms, but I really think it's worth getting the whole album. Here's some more context.
  
  
• I love Jillian Tamaki's sketchbook. These animals are appealing without being overcute. (Total Babar vibe, you know?) There are glimpses into her process. And overall I'm just blown away by the variety of tone and style. Like, wha? Whaaa?
  
  
• Tornadoes in Brooklyn has been on a roll lately. Love these images of the magical (?!) former Soviet Union. These ones creep me out. And look at the texture of the sky here. Is that real? I'm kinda suspicious. Look at these signal flags! Wrapped up like Batman's utility belt... for a boat.
  
  
• Let's get a Snarkmarket treehouse.
Comments (2) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:36 AM

Making Those Schrifts A Little Shorter

Tim says,

Before coming to Snarkmarket, I blogged solo for four years at Short Schrift. After trying a handful of different ideas, I wound up having SS mirror my posts here -- but usually with a lag, since I update a bunch of posts at once.

Well, today I'm changing the format of Short Schrift to make it more like a link blog/reading diary. Snarkmarket will be the home of ideas, questions, problems, and commentary, while Short Schrift will be more, um, gestational. My first "new" post is here: "Bursting the Higher Education Bubble." Old and new readers alike, check it out. And look at some of the archives too! There's a lot of stuff in there that I'm still thinking about. I would love for you to think about it too.

How Do You Follow The Web?

Tim says,

Me, I subscribe to a lot of sites, so I get auto-updated. I use an RSS reader, NetNewsWire, with Google Reader as a woefully unsynced backup. I keep feeds sorted into folders by category, and I just tweaked the categories:

academia blogs books and libraries CFPs digital life downloads friends' blogs friends' personal history ideas journalism mac magazines media music must reads my blogs news online mags politics radio sports tv and movies

I also have a couple of things emailed to me semi-regularly: new comments or links to Snarkmarket, Counterfictionals, or Short Schrift, mentions of my name, and new search results for "blood and treasure." (Weird, I know.)

How do you do it?

Is That a Big Idea In Your Pocket?

Robin says,

This is a great line, from Ben Brantley's review of a new play:

Topical plays tend to make their characters tote a Big Theme as if they were pack animals, scrunched into awkward postures by the weight of the idea on their backs.

May 35

Robin says,

James Fallows reports on the vibe in China today:

CNN is still blacked out whenever words like "In China today...." or "Twenty years ago in Bei...." come across the airwaves. Whereas BBC TV is airing uncensored footage of tanks in the square twenty years ago and repeatedly using the phrase "Tiananmen massacre." And just as I type, the admirable Quentin Somerville of the BBC is talking, live from Beijing, about the "ruthlessness at the heart of the Communist government." (And just this second, in a Borges-worthy moment, Somerville said that international coverage was being blacked out across China -- so I got to see him saying that I was not able to see him. Still, the general point is true.)

And Nick Kristof mentions:

China has blocked the use of "June 4" in Internet postings. So people are referring to the crackdown on "May 35."

Does that sound like Orwell or what? "...and the clocks were striking thirteen."

Finally, Gavin points to the NYT Lens blog's post on the story behind the Tank Man photos.

And check. this. out: a new view of the man, and the tanks, never before seen. Wow.

Apparently, the Earth Is Only Pretty When It's Empty

Robin says,

I think the conversation about "The Earth Is Hiring" sensitized me to this point: Watching the trailer for Home, I couldn't help but think, "Oh, I get it. The beautiful shots are the ones without humans."

And then, later on, the rapid-fire cuts of cities are supposed to be emblems of corruption and destruction. Except, of course, dense cities are better for the planet than other living arrangements. (I mean, come on. Look at that.)

This is all to say: I'm tired of the old visual tropes. I want some pro-planet media made with a more Worldchanging sensibility. Hmm... I guess the challenge is that stirring tribal music goes better with fly-overs of blue whales than cutaways of city-wide gray-water systems.

(Via @algore.)

Islam and America

Robin says,

This was by far not one of the big grafs in Obama's Cairo speech, but for some reason I found it really stirring:

I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started businesses, taught at our Universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers -- Thomas Jefferson -- kept in his personal library.

Oh right. History.

The whole thing is terrific, but you don't need me to tell you that. (Here are quick reactions from Stephen Walt and James Fallows.)

Talismanic Economics

Robin says,

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias are talking about "prestige cross-pollination" in economics:

"...the habit of distinguished economists using prestige acquired within their field to pass off sloppy work in other fields."

Klein backs it up:

...it's not just about commentary. Take the Obama administration. Brian Deese, the guy quarterbacking the auto restructuring, is a 31-year-old members of the economics team. Peter Orszag is probably the most powerful voice on health-care policy. Larry Summers, by most accounts, has a hand in literally everything. Economists, in other words, are the prime movers on not only the economy, but health care, climate change, housing policy and much else.

Klein finished with: "I'm not saying whether this is good or bad."

I think it's probably bad. Economics has been afforded a strange, special status in our society. It's become the master science of large-scale planning. It's become psychohistory.

Except it's not cut out to be either of those things. There are simply too many important values in the world that we can't tally in monetary terms. (And when we try, it's a hack -- better than nothing, but still a hack.)

Well, one caveat: To the degree it's been able to absorb social insights from other fields -- sociology, cognitive psychology, math, law, even some biology -- sometimes "economics" is just a convenient umbrella for a lot of very different tools.

But that integrative role needn't belong to economics alone. I think certain kinds of social scientists, and certain kinds of historians, could frame big policy decisions just as well -- or better -- than economists.

"Now do it bigger! And more humble."

Fredo Rides Again

Robin says,

Fredo Viola, creator of Sad Song, one of my favorite videos ever, is back with a new... uh... what do you even call this? An interactive album?

Who cares, because I love it. It's the same layered sound as Sad Song, along with an even more free-form approach to video. 4:3? 16:9? Boring! Inspect one of the circles, or the hexagon, to see what I mean.

Cross-reference this with the combinatorial Cold War Kids and you are on your way to something important.

(Via @jkretch.)

Update: Wow, there's more (older stuff?) I hadn't seen. Moon After Berceuse is a time-merge media music video. Imagine playing in an ensemble with alternate versions of yourself. Or time-traveling backward and forward, 30 seconds at a time, to fill in different parts of a song. My head just exploded.

Lost Memory of Tianenmen

Robin says,

God, this is amazing. James Fallows writes:

I have spent a lot of time over the past three years with Chinese university students. They know a lot about the world, and about American history, and about certain periods in their own country's past. Virtually everyone can recite chapter and verse of the Japanese cruelties in China from the 1930s onward, or the 100 Years of Humiliation, or the long background of Chinese engagement with Tibet. Through their own family's experiences, many have heard of the trauma of the Cultural Revolution years and the starvation and hardship of the Great Leap Forward. But you can't assume they will ever have heard of what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. For a minority of people in China, the upcoming date of June 4 has tremendous significance. For most young people, it's just another day.

Emphasis mine. It's one thing to have an event downplayed, recast, mythologized, whatever. It's another to have it erased.

The Earth is Hiring (Extended Remix)

Robin says,

I gave Paul Hawken's "the earth is hiring" commencement speech mixed marks, but I feel like I should upgrade my assessment, because it did one of the best things any piece of rhetoric can do: It started an interesting conversation.

Dan comments:

I have never been able to warm to an argument that posits "the Earth" as a central player. The earth is not hiring.

Rather, each graduate will help build a world from the materials left to them from past generations of humans and other living creatures. Their challenge is to work together to build a good world for themselves and for the next generations that will come.

Tim called this the "now do it bigger, and more humble" approach... and I can already tell that this going to become a recurring phrase on Snarkmarket.

But Saheli says:

...but I also think the reason why that too big/more humble canvas doesn't work for many people is their brains are not widescreen enough to properly count disappearing possibilities; and their engines are not rational enough to abstain from some large source of affection, approval and courtship. By Deifying the Earth and ennumerating Her gifts, Hawken provides that external motivator and waves away the necessity for rationally understanding the dangers of failure. So I understand your critique, but I can see why Hawken's metaphorical fancy makes more sense for a large class of college graduates.

"Their engines are not rational enough." What a great phrase.

From there we get into supernova-prevention schemes and the ethics of museum guards with guns. This is a thread you gotta read.

The Earth Is Hiring

Robin says,

Commencement season continues! Nice one from Paul Hawken:

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

I like this bit, too:

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true.

If his speech has a failing, it's that is goes too big, too fast. You gotta ground yourself, earn the graduating class's trust, before you reach for the "CAN YOU FEEL THE VERY STARS THEMSELVES IN YOUR CELLS?" lines, but Hawken sorta jumps right in.

He keeps it pretty abstract, too, and I can imagine an aspiring financial analyst in the crowd going, "Uh... does this apply to me?" And of course it does, but Hawken doesn't connect the dots.

That said, it's got enough stirring lines to reward a reading.

The New Psychohistory

Robin says,

Paul Krugman reminds us of the awesome fact that he got into economics because he read the Foundation series as a kid. In the series, there's a character named Hari Seldon who studies psychohistory -- the imaginary super-socio-economics that allows you to predict mass-scale human behavior using quantitative models. He shows up as a hologram at various point in the series' long chronology, long after he's dead, saying: "I pretty much predicted what you will be doing right now." And he's always right!

Anyway, it made me remember seeing, in the new issue of Wired, that Google's chief economist Hal Varian admitted the same thing!

"In Isaac Asimov's first Foundation Trilogy, there was a character who basically constructed mathematical models of society, and I thought this was a really exciting idea. When I went to college, I looked around for that subject. It turned out to be economics."

This makes me want to come up with some new, imaginary discipline and write a series of books around it, expressly in order to inspire a generation of smart young people to find ways to do it in real life. They will fail, but they will do such cool things along the way!

Google I/O Ignite Talk Links

Robin says,

Just a place to put a few links relevant to the Google I/O Ignite talk (20 slides! 5 minutes! GO!) I'm about to give, mostly for the benefit of people at the talk:

• Good overview of Philip Tetlock's work.
• Niall Ferguson's counterfactual book.
• Why I think Feed is so great.
• EPIC 2014!

The Right Combination

Robin says,

Dear student running a secret library of banned books out of your locker,

You are awesome.

Signed,
Snarkmarket

(Via @eszter.)

NLA Micro-Teaser Update

Robin says,

The very final pieces have just now locked into place. There's still a bit of work to be done -- most of it involving moving atoms from place to place -- but the New Liberal Arts book is coming very, very soon. And you're going to love it.

BLDGBLOGBookBuying

Robin says,

Psst. I pre-ordered the BLDGBLOG Book. Did you?

Two Houses, Both Alike in Awesomeness

Robin says,

Nav over at Scrawled in Wax just blew my mind, twice:

1. 17-year-old beatboxer Julia Dales. Whaaaaaa?
2. Merey Mathay by Kiran Ahluwalia. Sure, I love Hudson Mohawke; sure, Passion Pit sounds great. But I'm pretty sure when we ascend, Bill-and-Ted-like, to join the Intergalactic Orchestra, the music there is going to sound like Kiran's.

Lucky Four-Eyes

Robin says,

I don't wear glasses, but have always wished I did. Once, in college, I was getting a lot of headaches, and I realized it: This was my chance! So I went to the eye doctor, basically begging for glasses. His response: "Um. Your eyes are fine. I mean, I guess I could prescribe the closest thing to plain glass that is not in fact plain glass."

So he did, and I got my glasses -- which I never wore, because come on, who can remember to wear glasses when you don't actually have to? I still have them; they sit, dusty, at the bottom of a drawer.

All of this is to say that a) I like glasses a lot, and b) if you're looking for non-hipster glasses options, maybe you should peruse this wonderful post over at A Continuous Lean. I hope to make use of it in 10-20 years, after decades of blogging have finally pulled my eyes out of focus.

International Relations Primer

Robin says,

Stephen Walt, whose column I've been enjoying over at Foreign Policy, has a list of ten international relations articles you must read.

Unfortunately it looks like only one of them is available online for free. (Will do some googling this weekend to confirm/deny this.)

You know what would be cool, though? If FP paid to license these articles and hosted them at FP.com.

One neat role a media company can play in today's weird world: It can "ransom" content from a thicket of licenses to make it available in a simple, useful way. (I think the way we make tons of library music available to producers in our VCAM program at Current is an example of this.)

An End to Ghostly Labors (2009)

Robin says,

Hey! Whoah! Matthew Crawford's "Shop Class as Soulcraft" returns -- in the NYT Mag, and apparently soon as a book!

Can you say ahead of the curve?

Returning to the essay (and the post), I'm struck again by that phrase "the most ghostly kinds of work." Back in 2006 it sounded like email and Powerpoint. Now it sounds like CDOs and exotic derivatives, too.

Crawford's new piece in the NYT Mag is great. This seems as clear an articulation as any of what you should be looking for in a job:

As I sat in my K Street office, Fred's life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun.

I also think this is incredibly crisp and correct:

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

This is important stuff.

A Conservative Vision

Robin says,

I love Dave Eggers' style and spirit, but...

Nothing has changed! The written word -- the love of it and the power of the written word -- it hasn't changed. It's a matter of fostering it, fertilizing it, not giving up on it, and having faith. Don't get down. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org -- if you want to take it down -- if you are ever feeling down, if you are ever despairing, if you ever think publishing is dying or print is dying or books are dying or newspapers are dying (the next issue of McSweeney's will be a newspaper -- we're going to prove that it can make it. It comes out in September). If you ever have any doubt, e-mail me, and I will buck you up and prove to you that you're wrong.

...this is demonstrably untrue, and far worse -- if you consider what an idea factory McSweeney's and 826 National have been -- it's uncreative. "Don't get down" is 100% the wrong advice.

OK, so here's my pitch for the right advice -- just a simple rewrite:

Everything is changing! The written word -- the love of it and the power of the written word -- is still as powerful as ever, but it's undergoing a seismic shift. If we care about the deep, durable stuff, then we need to get moving and get learning. Don't simply have faith that things will work out; work them out. It's time to get down to it. I actually have established an e-mail address, deggers@826national.org -- if invention seizes you by the scalp, if you see that publishing is changing and print is morphing and books are evolving and newspapers are rebooting and you want to be part of it (the next issue of McSweeney's will be an E-Ink prototype -- we're going to do something with the medium you've never seen before). If you have any ideas, e-mail me, and I will help you make them real.

Sneakernet 2009

Robin says,

Even if you're not a developer, you should sign up for the Amazon Web Services email list. Think of it as a newsletter about the cutting edge of cloud computing. Even if half of it doesn't make sense to you, it sets an enviable example -- both in terms of Amazon's pace of innovation and the way they communicate about new stuff.

Anyway, the newest program? Send Amazon a hard drive and they'll load it into Amazon S3 for you. This would be useful if you had, for instance, a petabyte of raw data that would take two weeks to upload via the internet but two days to get to Amazon via FedEx. I love it.

The Combinatorial Music Video

Robin says,

As it's being created, any song, picture, game, blog post -- anything -- is like an electron cloud. There are lots of ways it could be (but won't). And a lot of the choices along the way are pretty arbitrary. So, hey: Here, take the whole cloud!

I think this is totally awesome. Art as combinatorial matrix. "Hey, did you hear the new Cold War Kids single?" "Which one?" "Oh... green-green-red-blue." "Yeah! LOVE that combination."

Okay, okay, I know this implementation is pretty simple. But I like that about it. I also like the fact that it's so accessible; it's not like twelve channels of evolving white noise that you can mix-and-match.

(Via Rex.)

Games, Architecture, the Good Stuff

Robin says,

BLDGBLOG's interview with Jim Rossignol has got my brain a-sparking. Rossignol wrote a book called The Gaming Life that I now want to get; it's a tour of gaming cultures in London, Seoul, and Reykjavik.

Lots to recommend in the interview (it's long) but here's a nugget that I liked. Why doesn't game development seem to have the same fast-paced froth as, say, open-source web stuff? Well...

Rossignol: At the last game developers conference in San Francisco, one of my colleagues said to me that perhaps what was most interesting were all the ideas that were walking around inside the heads of the developers -- the ideas that they wouldn't talk about, or stuff they kept secret because it was too good and too commercially important for their companies. It did make me wonder whether the fact that games are so commercial stunts their futurology -- after all, if game developers were given free rein to be pure creatives, I think there would be a massive exchange of ideas. This kind of accelerated avalanche of development could come out of there being no limits on sharing ideas. It makes it very difficult for game designers to get the ideas they need to make games better -- because they're going to be protected, or hidden, or otherwise held back by commercial concern.

Hmm... ideas too valuable to share. At this week's Long Now lecture, I heard Paul Romer talk about the incredible economic benefits of, er, sharing ideas. This strikes me as an interesting challenge, especially because games -- more than, say, movies or books -- can scaffold off of each other so effectively, both in terms of tech tools and play mechanics.

Here's one other bit, really just an aside, from Geoff that I liked. Not related to games at all. He's working at an architect's office in London, and...

At one point, I found a bunch of tapes that were nothing but surveillance footage taken inside Wembley Stadium. It was unlabeled, black and white footage of people milling about outside the bathrooms, near the ticket gate, and so on -- and my initial thought was actually that some sort of crime must have taken place. There had been a stabbing, or a riot -- and, I thought, maybe even someone here at Foster & Partners had been involved. That's why we had the tapes. Then again, that's how it always is with surveillance tapes: you're always waiting for something to happen on them. All CCTV footage of road traffic, for instance, looks like CCTV footage taken right before an accident.

Wow. That is a novelist-caliber insight. "All CCTV footage of road traffic, for instance, looks like CCTV footage taken right before an accident." Unpack that. It's like five dimensions of Our Modern Situation compressed into an evocative visual metaphor. This is the kinda stuff you get reading BLDGBLOG.

In This Civil War Reconstruction, The Union Has Dinosaurs

Tim says,

I like this so much. From io9.com:

The attraction, called "Professor Cline's Dinosaur Kingdom," imagines a lost chapter from Civil War history. It supposes that in 1863, a group of paleontologists inadvertently stumbled upon a valley of live dinosaurs. The discovery comes to the attention of the Union Army, who, recognizing the destructive power of the giant lizards, decide to capture them and unleash them on the Confederate Army. Naturally, it results in Jurassic Park-inspired carnage.

H/t to friend (and former student) Drea Nelson.

Like Two Halves of My Brain, Battling

Robin says,

I've been posting more links to my Twitter account lately. But sometimes it feels vaguely like cheating on Snarkmarket. On the other hand, sometimes the links don't feel cool or noteworthy enough for Snarkmarket, which is precisely why I post them to Twitter. On the other other hand, maybe everybody just subscribes to both feeds, so who cares?

Quick gut-check: More short links here? Fewer?

From Photo to Painting

Robin says,

Nice walkthrough of the process from photo to finished oil painting by Greg Smith. (Via @agreatnotion, who took the photo!)

I Always Wanted To Live In A Knights Templar's Castle

Tim says,

If only I had 6 million EUR lying around:

Château de La Jarthe was once a refuge for the Order of the Knights Templar, the secretive Christian military order that once wreaked havoc in the region.

Located on 120 hectares (297 acres) in the Dordogne near Périgueux, the restored castle offers many of the amenities buyers might expect in a 12th-century castle ruled by the order, including a chapel, massive fireplaces, stained glass windows and a 102-square-meter (1,098-square-foot) gathering hall known as the Knights Room. Many of the original medieval features remain, such as flagstone beamed ceilings, hand-carved wood details and an old granary.

Exactly what havoc did the KTs supposedly wreak in France? In and around Jerusalem, sure -- but in France, they mostly got slapped around by King Philip. Unless I'm mistaken.

Somebody Pull a Craigslist on Craigslist

Robin says,

Earlier today, Kurt Andersen said:

Yesterday I told Craig Newmark that craigslist had effectively expropriated newspapers' classified-ad business and put it in escrow....

...and then asked him: what if local web news startups asked to partner with craigslist to, you know, save American journalism? No comment.

Right theme; wrong approach. Instead, how 'bout we do what Daniel Bachhuber suggests: out-compete Craigslist.

I don't agree with all of Daniel's points. But I do think that he's directionally correct. On today's web, Craigslist is feeling awfully creaky and old-school. There's an opportunity for disruption there.

Yo Can I Get Some Better Eyes

Robin says,

The galaxy rises. Oh, hi, galaxy. Have you been there all along?

Will people in the not-so-distant future be horrified that we saw so much of the world through naked eyes, unaugmented -- and, for that reason, missed so much of it?

The Transit of the Atlantis

Robin says,

The full image of the transit of the Atlantic across the face of the sun is terrific; a lot of people are posting the cropped image and it doesn't do it justice at all. The full disc of the sun is what makes it seem really iconic, even mythic, to me. I saw somebody write that it looked like modern art; like a giant Gerhard Richter painting.

This Presidential NatSec Briefing Brought to You by 123Publish

Matt says,

To me, the thing that's striking about these national security briefings isn't the hokey combo of Bible verses and combat pics, it's the amateurish design. Something tells me whoever creates Obama's briefing papers has to consult a 133-page stylebook.

Now That's What I Call "Inventio"

Tim says,

James Fallows, "On eloquence vs. prettiness":

[Obama's] eloquence is different from what I think of as rhetorical prettiness -- words and phrases that catch your notice as you hear them, and that often can be quoted, remembered, and referred to long afterwards. "Ask not..." from John F. Kennedy. "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat" from Winston Churchill. "Only thing we have to fear is fear itself" from FDR. "I have a dream," from Martin Luther King. Or, to show that memorable language does not necessarily mean elevated thought, "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" from the early George C. Wallace.

At rare moments in history, language that goes beyond prettiness to beauty is matched with original, serious, difficult thought to produce the political oratory equivalent of Shakespeare. By acclamation Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is the paramount American achievement of this sort: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right..."

The reason to distinguish eloquence of thought from prettiness of expression is that the former tells you something important about the speaker, while the latter may or may not do so. Hired assistants can add a fancy phrase, much as gag writers can supply a joke. Not even his greatest admirers considered George W. Bush naturally expressive, but in his most impressive moment, soon after the 9/11 attacks, he delivered a speech full of artful writerly phrases, eg: "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." Good for him, and good for his staff.

Rhetorical polish, that is, can be a staff-enhanced virtue. The eloquence that comes from original thought is much harder to hire, or to fake. This is the sort of eloquence we've seen from Obama often enough to begin to expect.

(Sorry for the long quote, but I wanted to include all of Fallows's examples.)

Also --

Inventio is the system or method used for the discovery of arguments in Western rhetoric and comes from the Latin word, meaning "invention" or "discovery". Inventio is the central, indispensable canon of rhetoric, and traditionally means a systematic search for arguments (Glenn and Goldthwaite 151).

Inventio comes from the Latin invenire, meaning "to find" or "to come upon". The same Latin root later gave us the English word inventor. Invenire is derived from the Greek heuriskein, also meaning "to find out" or "discover" (cf. eureka, "I have found it").

Urban Sky Edens of the Future

Matt says,

Reading through this month's Communication Arts, I encountered an article on the High Line, an abandoned elevated rail platform in NYC. After the line went fallow in 1980, Nature reclaimed it. Trees, grasses and wildflowers overgrew the tracks, turning it into an urban wonder -- a wild garden in the sky. Due to years of legal wrangling, the line somehow never got demolished. So a group of dreamers calling themselves Friends of the High Line assembled a coalition of influential hipster sympathizers to turn it into a park. Back in 2007, New York Magazine chronicled the rail line's evolution from urban ruin to civic treasure. Kottke's been blogging it since 2004, so I may be the last nerd-hipster to hear about it. If I'm not, photos of the thing abound, so do spend some time enjoying them.

Photo from Flickr user cdstar, licensed under Creative Commons. Feel free to make derivative works off this post, if you'd like.

Frühling Für Hitler Und Vaterland

Tim says,

A German adaptation of Mel Brooks's The Producers opens in Berlin.

Another One from Michael Pollan

Robin says,

This guy is has mastered the art of the useful epigram. Here's another one to go along with "eat sunlight, not oil":

Don't buy any food you've ever seen advertised.

Via NSOB.

Curtis Roads, Aaron McLeran, and the Future of Music

Robin says,

Curtis Roads is one of the pioneers of computer music, and he's not done pioneering yet. He calls the current era of electronic music its "golden age," because sound is more plastic than ever before:

Electronic music extends the domain of composition from a closed, homogenous set of notes ... to an open universe of heterogeneous sound objects ... All of a sudden, we're working with any sound possible. And that really changes the game.

Early case in point: Friend-of-Snark Aaron McLeran, who wrote the score for EPIC 2014 back in the day and now works with Roads at UCSB, has been investigating a new kind of synthesis that gives you more flexible, high-fidelity control over sound samples than ever before. Here's an explanation and example. (Be sure to play the sample files.) Check out some of Aaron's other work, too -- it's like the online lab of a mad audio scientist!

Update: Aaron has a new blog -- Digital Poesis.

It Is Not Logical

Tim says,

Andrew Hungerford -- aka the smartest, funniest dramatist * astrophysicist = lighting director you should know -- has written the best post on the physical holes in the new Star Trek movie that I think can be written.

Basically, almost nothing in the movie makes sense, either according to the laws established in our physical universe or the facts established in the earlier TV shows and movies.

Wherever possible, Andy provides a valiant and charitable interpretation of what he sees, based (I think) on the theory that "what actually happened" is consistent with the laws of physics, but that these events are poorly explained, characters misspeak, or the editing of the film is misleading. (I love that we sometimes treat Star Trek, Star Wars, etc., like the "historical documents" in Galaxy Quest -- accounts of things that REALLY happened, but that are redramatized or recorded and edited for our benefit, as opposed to existing ONLY within a thinly fictional frame.)

If you haven't seen the movie yet, you probably shouldn't read the post. It will just bother you when you're watching it, like Andy was bothered. If you have, and you feel like being justifiably bothered (but at the same time profoundly enlightened), check it out right now. I mean, now.

Twitter's Bigger Than a Mere Integer

Robin says,

Twitter's status IDs -- the unique numbers that identify each tweet -- are about to cross the line where they can be expressed by a signed, 32-bit integer, which only goes from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,648. This might mean that there have been about two billion tweets so far.

This thread reminding Twitter API developers about the change is interesting, even if you don't understand all of it. Lots and lots of bugs have been caused by programmers thinking: "Pshaw! This number will never get that big..." -- and indeed, the system I built for Current's twitterized election coverage will be rendered inoperational when tweets cross the 32-bit threshold. (Luckily, web apps are a lot easier to upgrade and fix than space probes.)

Okay, I realize this post might be really boring. I've always been unaccountably fascinated by the limits imposed by computer architecture -- length of numbers, number of colors, size of files, etc.

Also: Two billion tweets! Whoah!

The Story of a Life

Robin says,

Wow. This anecdote from the new Atlantic article about long lives and happiness is... stunning. I can't believe it's true:

In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they're future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs -- protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections -- but in the short term actually put us at risk. That's because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his "prize" Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. "On his 70th birthday," Vaillant said, "when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, 'Would you write a letter of appreciation?' And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters -- often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him." Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. "[Dr. Vaillant], I don't know what you're going to make of this," the man said, as he began to cry, "but I've never read it." "It's very hard," Vaillant said, "for most of us to tolerate being loved."

You gotta read this article. It's weird and long and counterintuitive and interesting.

X, Y, and F#

Robin says,

Here's how St. Vincent wrote her new album:

Annie Clark, who does business as St. Vincent, wrote much of her new album, "Actor," by drawing, not playing. Mainly a guitarist, Clark began the album in a French hotel room in December of 2007, using GarageBand software and a pair of headphones, "drawing notes one by one, until they sounded how they should sound."

I am not a good musician, but for what it's worth, I've always found the piano-roll grid of computer music apps a million times more intuitive than either music notation or (worse) music language -- e.g. "Okay, give me a G-major!" My brain just doesn't work that way.

I like this part best: "...until they sounded how they should sound." You can have Ableton Live (and lots of other programs too) just loop through the sub-section you're working on, again and again. You tweak it as it's looping, adding and moving notes, listening to the differences. Nudging and scraping the sound like clay.

The Tyranny of Solving Problems

Robin says,

Here's a great bit of counter-conventional-wisdom from Jack Schulze. He's talking about design:

4) Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists. Design is about cultural invention. There are some people who want to reduce the domain of design to listable, knowable stuff, so it's easy to talk about. Design is a glamorous, glittering world and this means they can engage without having to actually risk themselves on the outcome of their work. This is damaging. It turns design into something terrified of invention. Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome.

On one level, I really respect people who believe that a craft, or a career, should be about Solving Problems, and that everything else is ego, excess, decoration, distraction.

On another level, really? The world is just a set of problems to be fixed? Wounds to be healed? Boxes to be checked? Doesn't seem correct.

I like Schulze's word: invention. Maybe we need more self-identified inventors.

Just the Gentlest Crease

Robin says,

It's just barely-folded paper.

Games and Novels

Robin says,

Joanne McNeil finds a tasty nugget about games and novels.

I like the idea of writing a novel the way you'd write a game. Maybe the end-product is completely traditional -- two covers, 300 pages, plain ol' paper -- but the behind-the-scenes process is very different. Dozens of little Ruby scripts. You combinatorially create 10,000 character sketches and put them all on Mechanical Turk to see which ones resonate. Then drop those characters into a text-based world simulation. Make them autonomous agents with goals and desires. See what happens. Mine the simulation for interesting interactions, and then write those up into polished prose.

That's the key: You use the tools and techniques of video games not as the final product -- you're not trying to generate "automatic fiction" here -- but simply as powerful scaffolding to help you write an interesting story. This combinatorial/probabilistic thing is a huge part of the natural creative process anyway; in this scenario, you just admit it, and then augment it. Plug it into a server cluster.

This is probably not what any of the people in Joanne's post are talking about. But I think it sounds fun.

Related: The widely-linked game/poem Today I Die is a weird little delight. Takes five minutes... if you're smart!

Crack This Code

Robin says,

Wow. Gotta say... even in an era of wireless internet, touch screens, and 3D games, the Enigma machine looks pretty badass. It's completely info-steampunk. And the rotor system is sooo evocative. Like magic medallions. Really, Indiana Jones shoulda had his hands on an Enigma machine at some point.

Oops, Turns Out That's Poison Ivy After All

Robin says,

I agree with Chris: iPhone-assisted species detection sounds totally wonderful, and futuristic in a sort of unexpected way.

The Ideas! The Ideas! Part... Whatever

Tim says,

Charlie Jane Anders, "Why Dollhouse Really Is Joss Whedon's Greatest Work":

The evil in Dollhouse is harder to deal with than the evil in Buffy because it's our evil. It's our willingness to strip other people of their humanity in order to get what we need from them. It's our eagerness to give up our humanity and conform to other people's expectations, in exchange for some vaguely promised reward. And it's our tendency to put any new piece of technology to whatever uses we can think of, whether they're positive or utterly destructive.

And that last bit, about technology, is the other main reason why Dollhouse is Whedon's most accomplished work, especially if you love science fiction like we do. Unlike Joss' other works, Dollhouse really is about the impact of new technology on society. It asks the most profound question any SF can ask: how would we (as people) change if a new technology came along that allowed us to...? In this case, it's a technology that allows us to turn brains into storage media: We can erase, we can record, we can copy. It's been sneaking up on us, but Dollhouse has slowly been showing how this radically changes the whole conception of what it means to be human. You can put my brain into someone else's body, you can keep my personality alive after I die, and you can keep my body around but dispose of everything that I would consider "me."

Obama's Promise To A Soldier

Tim says,

Shhh -- don't ask, don't tell's days are numbered:

H/t to Howard Weaver.

Videos in B Flat

Robin says,

Oh, this is too cool. Musicians record simple videos, all in the same key. Play, pause, mix-and-match at will.

Letters That Aren't Letters

Robin says,

There's a building on a pier near Current HQ in San Francisco. Written on the side of the building, black against very dark gray, are giant letters. Or, at least they appear to be letters. Some definitely are -- one's an E, for sure. But the others are just on the edge of comprehension: Is that an N? Is that one a W? You run through the permutations in your head, trying to settle on a combination that forms a word. Nothing works. You can feel your brain spinning its wheels -- but not giving up, because come on, recognizing letters is what brains do! After too many tries (and trust me, I've tried it a lot) it's actually a bit painful.

Here's that same experience, only thousands of times deeper and more beautiful. Maybe still a bit painful, though?

Upcreation

Robin says,

Okay, so. I feel like we are all sitting around joking about swine flu and arguing about Twitter and Kevin Kelly is sitting in his study in Pacifica unraveling the secrets of the universe.

Help Me Build a Set of Short-Story Feeds

Robin says,

I really like A. O. Scott's suggestion, via David Hayes, that there might be a new, more vital market for short stories sometime in the near future, thanks mostly to the Kindle (and maybe the iPhone, too).

I want to build a quick list of places on the web where new short stories are being posted with some regularity. Here's what I have to start:

• The New Yorker

Hmm. Yeah. Gonna need some help here.

Bonus points for sources that are outside the MFA-matrix... I'm especially looking for short stories with a popular sensibility. But I'll take anything. I'm sure you've got a few, just off the top of your head...!

NPRbackstory

Robin says,

Joshua Benton over at NiemanLab is right: NPRbackstory is brilliant. Mostly because it's so simple: A script takes trending Google searches as input, queries the NPR API, and spits out related stories. But the related stories aren't necessarily new; sometimes they're years old. And that's a feature, not a bug.

"The NPR content is more rich in its breadth than it is in timeliness," Keith said. "That's probably true of most news archives. But the Internet places a high value on timeliness, and I was looking at the API saying, 'There's nothing timely here!'"

So he hit on the idea of providing the backstory to subjects currently in the news. "I think there's this yearning for meaning in our content," he said. "We want a lot of the same information, but packaged differently. I thought something that looked at the context or the background for something would be something I'd welcome seeing in my Twitter feed."

Reasons to like this:

1. Gives good journalism a boost up out of the archives and back into view.
2. Reveals hidden context behind the things people are talking about today. (P.S. Our memories are short.)
3. The entire app is a few APIs stitched together with Yahoo! Pipes. How can you not love that?

Here's the Twitter feed.

Michigan Boy Makes Good

Robin says,

There are some good lines in Larry Page's commencement speech at U of M. Here's the one-sentence summary of how to change the world:

Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting.

Also, how to know if you're taking big enough risks:

You're probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm.

It's a Weird, Weird World

Robin says,

I admit it, I had to read up on Mine That Bird, the out-of-nowhere Kentucky Derby winner. This bit of backstory is from ESPN.com:

So why did he win and win in a runaway? It had to have been a combination of factors, starting with the track condition. He caught a sloppy track, which had to have moved him up. With a limited sample, sire Birdstone is producing 23 percent winners on the off going. (Ironically, Birdstone ran eighth in the 2004 Derby in the slop in one of the worst races of his career). He is out of an unraced Smart Strike mare and Smart Strike is among the better slop sires out there. His offspring win 19 percent of the time on wet tracks.

Slop sire? Jeeeez. Horse racing is the only sport (or whatever it is) that actually involves heredity as a, like, strategy, right?

"The Problem With Cable Is Television"

Tim says,

But, it turns out, the problem with television is sports:

The broadband business is doing fine, as costs are coming down. Cable executives do worry that if costs rise as they expect because of surging online video use, they will need to find some way to get prices going up the way they are used to in their video business.

The bigger question is what happens to the video business. By all accounts, Web video is not currently having any effect on the businesses of the cable companies. Market share is moving among cable, satellite and telephone companies, but the overall number of people subscribing to some sort of pay TV service is rising. (The government's switch to digital over-the-air broadcasts is providing a small stimulus to cable companies.) However, if you remember, it took several years before music labels started to feel any pain from downloads...

The wedge that breaks all this may well be sports. ESPN alone already accounts for nearly $3 of every monthly cable bill, industry executives say. With all these new sports networks pushing up cable rates, at some point people who aren't sports fans might start turning in volume to Internet services like Netflix. We're not there yet, but looking at the industry in the last quarter, you can see the pressures building.

Fascinating (and quick!) look at cable companies' businesses. [Everything in bold is my emphasis.]

Turn of Phrase

Robin says,

I like it:

A shower in the middle of the day grants precisely the feeling that eating breakfast for dinner or rearranging the furniture in your room does. It's pleasing because it is different and voluntary but not immediately repeatable.

It's hard to say what exactly Magic Molly's subject is. Strange food, city people, and the things you notice sitting alone in a room, mostly. But all wrapped up in one of the best written voices on the web today.

Unique Viewers / Unique Readers

Tim says,

Translator/critic Wyatt Mason sums up a year of terrific writerly blogging for Harpers:

According to the webmaster, some hundreds of thousands of people (or "unique visitors," in the creepily Rumsfeldean turn) have read my posts over the year. Yes, in the web-world, where a nipple slip can net you a million sets of eyes in a breathless blink and click, these are Lilliputian numbers. In my world, however, those are towering digits, enormous for what they might say about the reading life: that there is still, in our noisy culture, a quiet but forcible interest in finding good books to read, and in debating what makes books good.

We "unique readers" know this, in our solitary hours. But it is pleasing, at times, to have company in that knowledge, to know that one isn't alone in one's enthusiasms. For my part, I have taken great pleasure in the enthusiasm of readers for this space, and am grateful for the time you've spent here. For now, know that I'm turning my attention to other tasks, with the expectation, at some point future, of returning to one not unlike this.

I can't quite put my finger on what I like about this farewell address (other than that I really like Mason's blog) -- all of the sentiments and tropes are expected, but their subtle, daisy-chained resonances are so gracefully done that it feels both fresh and sincere.

Google Me

Robin says,

Ha! Google Profiles is offering free business cards:

Kinda wish it didn't have the profile URL at the bottom. Then it would feel like a more honest representation of what people actually do in to check each other out in 2009.

Supermap

Robin says,

If I lived in NYC I would buy one of these maps now. There's technology and whimsy at play here; good combo. Rationale for the map:

Because the ability to be in a city and to see through it is a superpower, and it's how maps should work.

Via Waxy.

Alas, One-Click

Robin says,

OMG I am spending so much money on Kindle-ized books. Amazon has already made its margin on me twice over, I am 100% sure. Guess I should recommend some, huh?

• A Free Life by Ha Jin. Sublime tone. I just cannot get over the fact that Ha Jin writes this well in his second language, which he learned relatively late in life. It's a modern immigrant story, full of detail and surprise.
  
  
• The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll. I thought this book was going to be 50% Bin Laden family, 50% Osama Bin Laden -- something like that. Nope. There's plenty of OBL, but he's really just a small piece of the tapestry. You gotta read about Salem Bin Laden, the patriarch of the clan for a big part of the 20th century. He is as strange a character as OBL himself -- and couldn't be more different.
  
  
• Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells. Mentioned this already. Makes the Dark Ages seem rich and textured -- not just, uh, dark.
  
  
• Stealth Democracy: Americans' Beliefs About How Government Should Work by John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. Actually, I think I'll save this one for a different post. Very counter-intuitive findings.
  
  
• Daemon by Daniel Suarez. The Da Vinci Code meets Cryptonomicon meets Advanced Topics in Network Security. Lots of adjectives and adverbs here, but if you're in it for the ideas, not the crystalline prose, it's very worthwhile. Embedded in the Clancy-squared plot machinations are solid signals about the future of the internet.

Also: If you've got a Kindle, check out Hatchet, via JKottke.

Crucial update: It wasn't on Kindle, but I read, and loved, Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I haven't read a ton of his other books, but this slim little volume was a dream. Hard to tell to what degree the translation reflects the original, of course, but the language is wonderfully direct and down-to-earth. Add it to the growing of canon of work that says: It's not about bright, blinding genius; it's about hard work -- where "it" is the creative, technical, or athletic endeavor of your choice.

Nom De Whatever

Tim says,

Intriguing aside in this Slate article by Huan Hsu on office workers in China adopting English names:

In the United States, people tend to view names and identities as absolute things—which explains why I agonized over deciding on an English name—but in China, identities are more amorphous. My friend Sophie flits amongst her Chinese name, English name, MSN screen name, nicknames she uses with her friends, and diminutives that her parents call her. "They're all me," she says. "A name is just a dai hao." Dai hao, or code name, can also refer to a stock's ticker symbol.

h/t: Saheli

You Want Bookporn? Oh, Man. We Got Some Bookporn.

Tim says,

VERY mature books (is 8000 BC old enough?) with an astonishingly sexy zoom feature -- similar to Google Maps, but smoother and more natural, especially with a two-finger trackpad. It's all yours, for free, at the World Digital Library.

Chromatic

Robin says,

This random Google Chrome commercial is bouncy and appealing. I love the suggestive skeletons of big websites. (Via Waxy.)

Eat Sunlight Instead of Oil

Robin says,

Wow. Has Michael Pollan been using this phrase for a while already? It is genius. From the latest Long Now email newsletter:

Eat sunlight instead of oil, and eat as if your health depended on it. American agriculture and food marketing can be reorganized around those goals.

It's like a chemistry lesson and a parable, all in five words. Poetic, scientific, and mythic all at once. Totally abstract and symbolic, but it also renders a vivid image: Mmm, warm sunlight! Eww, gross oil.

Pollan is doing a Long Now talk next week in SF. Very excited.

Videotextvideotext

Robin says,

I realize these self-links are a little lame. But... I like what I said here: What's the future of the book in the age of video?

The Right Investment

Robin says,

Science!

Finding Würde in America

Matt says,

Been recently fascinated with learning more about health care, reading a lot of Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, catching up on essays by the likes of Paul Krugman and Atul Gawande. And the best thing I've read so far is this wonkish-but-accessible interview with health care policy super-couple Uwe Reinhardt and Tsung-mei Cheng. The interview teases out a number of distinctive policy critiques and ideas that aren't surfaced in most of the layperson-friendly health policy lit I've come across, like this point about the oft-derided drug company profiteers:

If you look at total drug company profits in a given year, of every retail dollar sale, drug companies who manufacture the stuff get 75 cents. And of that, they make 16, 15 percent profit. So if you multiply that out, we have about $220 billion in drug sales; that's about, say, $25 billion in profits. Now, that is a lot; you can buy two Princetons for that. However, if you then divide $25 billion through $2.2 trillion in national health spending, you get 1.2 percent; that is, drug company profits are 1.2 percent of total national health spending.

This was from Frontline's excellent "Sick Around the World" documentary, where they profiled the health care systems of five developed countries and compared them to the US system. See also: Frontline's follow-up, "Sick Around America." (Note: T.R. Reid, the correspondent on "Sick Around the World," refused to participate in "Sick Around America" after he found that the producers shafted the option of single-payer health care in the final edit.)

Swine Flu and the City

Robin says,

There's a lot to process here, but it's worth it: BLDGBLOG's post about disease and urban planning is the most interesting thing you'll read all day.

The roots of modernism in sanatorium design. Office space built around the transmission properties of the common cold. Settlers of Catan: Outbreak Edition. Doctors holding seminars in the sewers of Paris.

Like a little virus in its own right, this post will take up residence in your brain. It's made all the more satisfying for seeing its roots -- early symptoms -- over on @bldgblog.

This Is How a Public Intellectual Works Today^TM.