December 2008 Archives
Hi everyone, Just a quick note before I run out the door en route to Peru for a week.
Thank you all for a wonderful year. It was an absolute blast and I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to all of the readers of the site for helping some of my projects get off the ground.
Anyway, thanks for everything and I'll be doing some 2008 wrap-up type stuff when I get back. (Also, I'm not bringing my computer with me, so if you email and I don't respond that's why. Oh, and if you've emailed me in the last two weeks or so and I haven't responded, sorry about that too, I'll be back to my regular emailing ways come January.)
Thanks again, happy new year and best of luck in 2009.
- Noah
PS - Sorry for the brevity here, I'm literally being picked up in 10 minutes.
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A really solid (and long) profile of Detroit from the Weekly Standard. The city's numbers are astounding: 10k unsolved murders since 1960, no new textbooks for schools in 19 years, 24.9 percent graduation rate, 60k vacant dwellings and, of course, an 0 and 16 football team. It goes beyond the numbers, though, also doing a bit of a profile on journalist Charlie LeDuff who sounds like quite an interesting fellow (I've got the Slaughterhouse piece he won a Pullitzer for waiting to be read).
Part of what struck me in reading this was thinking about how much it sounded like the Baltimore depicted in the Wire (of which I'm now on Season 5).
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Tags: detroit
How come no one told me there were seven Muppets with their own YouTube accounts? Sam the Eagle (patrioticeagle), Gonzo (weirdowhatever), Swedish Chef (deumnborkborkbork), Statler and Waldorf (heckleu247), Rizzo (rizzratz), Fozzy (wockawockabear) and Beaker (meepmeepmeepow). I have no idea if the videos are official, though the production seems pretty good.
(Be sure to check out Beaker's Ode to Joy.)
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Tags: muppets, video, youtube
One sentence in particular stuck out in this Crooked Timber entry about predictions of the economic crisis: "The big problem for the Cassandras (and we were certainly both correct and disregarded) was that it was easy to see that the bubble could not continue and much harder to foresee how it would end - it's one thing to say that dark matter must exist and another to work out what it is really like."
As Virginia Postrel pointed out in the Atlantic recently, there is a human tendency towards bubbles. In the article she talks about a very interesting experiment: "take a bunch of volunteers, usually undergraduates but sometimes businesspeople or graduate students; divide them into experimental groups of roughly a dozen; give each person money and shares to trade with; and pay dividends of 24 cents at the end of each of 15 rounds, each lasting a few minutes." It's an "efficient market" where everyone knows the same as everyone else and they all know exactly how much the securities are worth. However, every experiment turns up the same thing: "the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes." Bubbles, it seems, are a fundamental part of who we are as people.
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Tags: bubbles, culture, economics
Paul Goldberger, architecture critic over at the New Yorker lists his top ten buildings of 2008. Out of curiosity, I collected links to pictures/descriptions of all of them: Herzog and de Meuron's extraordinary Olympic Stadium, Norman Foster's Beijing Airport, the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (the official CCTV writeup with renderings), the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, by Renzo Piano, the New Museum, on the Bowery in New York, by SANAA Architecture, Art Gallery of Ontario, the new Cathedral of Christ the Light, in Oakland, by Skidmore partner Craig Hartman, Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building, at Yale (now renamed Paul Rudolph Hall), by Gwathmey Siegel, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, on the Lower East Side, by Walter Sedovic and Olafur Eliasson's extraordinary New York Waterfalls Project.
I think my personal favorites are the Birds Nest and the new Cathedral of Christ the Light, neither of which I had seen before reading this.
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Tags: architecture, bestof2008
An interesting thesis from Momus: "Only a medium which is seen as 'realistic' can inspire moral panics -- in other words, that moral panics correlate to the perceived power of a medium to represent." He then proceeds to go through panics in television, video, music and video games, making a pretty good case for his thesis that moral panic doesn't come along until the medium is a real "threat" for the masses.
I'll let Momus wrap it up: "Ambitious young media turks take note -- don't waste your time dabbling with Daddy's toxins. No moral panic, no credibility. Not inappropriate? Not appropriate."
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Tags: culture, media
One of my favorite ways of telling that a link or idea is really worthwhile is that I find myself mentioning it fairly frequently after reading it. This has happened with Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide entry "General Remarks" where he goes over the basics of what makes a good ethnic restaurant. It includes simple economic rationales for how to choose the best ethnic dining like, "The best ethnic restaurants are often found in suburban strip malls, where rents are lower and the degree of feasible experimentation is greater. Small and cheap ethnic restaurants are often better than large ones." It's worth a read wherever you live (but especially if you're in DC which is where it's focused).
(Also on the food and economics tip, Paul Krugman and Stephen Dubner explore why food isn't so good in the UK.)
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Tags: economics, food
I've been watching The Wire (currently halfway through season 3) and the thing that I've been thinking about most is how amazing it is that the police department gets the amount of information they do. In this way, the show seems a lot more accurate than the other cop dramas on TV which go around finding clues on their own (I assume at least). Basically, these cops just walk into a bunch of places (stores, phone companies, etc.) and ask for info on people. If any of these spots were to turn them down (which, to my knowledge, they're fully in their right to do) they'd be shit out of luck.
Now it's easy to find this valuable on the show where they're using the information to bust drug dealers and the such, but it's also quite frightening to imagine it happening to you or I. If we were suspected of something how quickly would the services we trust (phone company, email provider, etc.) turn over all their records. I know there was a hubub about this a few years ago with Yahoo!/Google, but I guess I never thought of it in these terms.
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Tags: police, privacy, thewire
Most people who have used Twitter have received the question/statement, "why would anyone ever use it? No one cares what I ate for lunch today." I particularly liked this answer for Crooked Timber, "By the way, if you neither like nor understand Twitter, that's perfectly OK: no-one is making you follow anyone."
Basically, who cares who cares if you care? Or, in a slightly less cryptic way, what's the difference if anyone is listening or not you're enjoying yourself?
Anyway, I've said this before when asked if I had advice for grasping what's going on online: Go screw around. If you don't like what's happening, that's totally cool, at least you've got your own opinion. I think it's a much better way to be.
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Tags: internet, twitter
Last week I bought the domain econdicator.com (economic + indicator) for the express reason of creating a site for cataloging all the economic indicators I keep reading about. I haven't gotten around to it yet (and may not), but I quite enjoyed this roundup of 15 indicators from sex to NASCAR. In summary: An economic crisis has brought more sex and babies, less lipstick, more pantyhose, more beer, smaller college endowments, a bankrupt but more tourist-friendly Iceland, fewer divorces, more people eating spam, less recylcling, fewer company holiday parties, more people buying used cars, cheaper sports tickets, higher paid free agents, more psychic predictions, fewer NASCAR advertisers and less plastic surgery. (Oh, and as I mentioned on Twitter last week, more stubble.)
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Tags: culture, economics
[Editor's Note: This is really geeky and non-bloggers probably won't care about it. Feel free to ignore and move on.]
Very happy to finally read someone complaining about Google's blog search RSS feeds. As of a few months ago, they started updating every time someone who linked anywhere on their homepage added an entry. What this means for us bloggers is that you get an update every time someone who has you in their blogroll writes a new entry. I know it must sound like a dumb complain, but it's actually super annoying.
For those of you feeling the pain, this seems to be the only Google response: "We do expect to fix the problem you're seeing. We'll use the full page content, but exclude the content that isn't really part of the post. I'm not sure if we'll be able to make the change before the end of the year, but we are working on it and are pretty confident that it can be solved." (Apologies again for all who found this boring, will get back to more interesting topics ASAP.)
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Tags: blogs, google, search
I hat to interrupt all the serious stuff around here, but every once in a while (read: day) the internet tosses you something truly outstanding. Today's oustandingness is Fuck You, Penguin. The idea, as explained right under the site's title, is simple: "A blog where I tell cute animals what's what." (Except it says all that in all caps.)
Entries include Red "Panda" trying to steal panda thunder, Platypus: the ultimate buzz-kill and Moose are the biggest dorks ever. Enjoy.
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Tags: animals, funny
Pat Kiernan, one of the morning anchors on NY1, does this thing every day where he reads the New York morning papers (something way more popular on European TV than US). Well, now he's started a blog, Pat's Papers, where he does the same thing for the nation's headlines (along with links to the stories). It's actually a really good way to get a topline on the days news (the videos are around 5 or 6 minutes) and fits in with an ideas I mentioned last year about people's motivation for news consumption being mainly social (you consume it to discuss it, therefore you only really need the talking points).
As a side note, apparently Kiernan is also a bit of a NYC cult star. Who knew?
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Tags: news, video
My buddy Colin recently interviewed Abe Burmeister about his new clothing line for bikers called Outlier. Abe and I have known each other for awhile (since he killed on something I wrote I believe) and he's a very smart dude. Anyway, I found two ideas especially appealing from the article. The first is about Hans Monderman, a traffic engineer who believed "that a lot of the traffic infrastructure we have is designed not to actually make streets safer and more usable, but to make us *feel* safer." (I remember reading that more people are hit by cars when they have a walk sign than a don't walk sign because they are paying less attention to the world around them.)
The second idea is about different types of motion: "What I set out to design, and what Tyler [Clemens] was working on before we linked up, is clothing that gives the complete freedom to move through the city on a bike. But my moving we don't just in the traditional physical sense, but instead we deal with three very different vectors of motion: physical or mechanical motion, liquid motion and social motion. ... [Ultimately] we really are focused on social mobility. People need to feel comfortable where ever they show up, and that means wearing clothing that matches the setting. Living in the city puts you in an extraordinary range of social situations and we wanted to make clothing that allowed you to travel between as many of them as possible on a bicycle. From home to work and then out a restaurant and then perhaps the club, after party and hotel lobby. You need to feel clean and fresh and be confident you look good. Riding a bike makes that a challenge and we aim to solve that." Go read the whole thing.
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Tags: bikes, fashion
So a few weeks ago I was having a drink with Matt, Seth, Mike and Eric and I mentioned an idea I'd had wanted to do for the last few years: To have a party the evening before New Years Eve. The idea is pretty simple, I hate NYE and wanted an excuse not to go out. I figured a party the night before (and the hangover that would like result from it) would be just that excuse. So, after about 48 hours of emails we got it all organized and it's going to be awesome. So come on down (and bring your friends).
New Years Eve-Eve Party (on Facebook)
Where: Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard Street, New York, NY
When: Tuesday, December 30th, 10pm - 3am
Come party with us on the night after the second to last day before the evening of the last day of the year.
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Tags: me, nyc, party
This news is a couple days old now, but TechMeme announced that they are adding a human editor. As they explained, "Any competent developer who tries to automate the selection of news headlines will inevitably discover that this approach always comes up a bit short. Automation does indeed bring a lot to the table -- humans can't possibly discover and organize news as fast as computers can. But too often the lack of real intelligence leads to really unintelligent results."
It'll be interesting to watch how these sites evolve over the next year or two. More and more of what's going on around the web at the moment seems to be about combining the intelligence of humans with the power of algorithms for a better result that either could get at alone.
(As a side note, there's also a really interesting point about news bias in the post: "I'd like to note here that Techmeme isn't fair because life isn't fair, and Techmeme will always be biased because humans have built Techmeme. And because news judgement, by definition, is bias.")
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Tags: news, technology
On Friday the Obama-Biden transition team announced a new feature of their Change.gov website: Your Seat at the Table. The idea is simply to make all the documents from meetings the team takes with outside groups available for review (and comment) from the general public. As they explained in the announcement, "Talking face-to-face with advocates and experts is a vital part of the Transition. But in past transitions, meetings like these took place behind closed doors and lacked the public input and transparency we're working hard to provide."
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Tags: obama, politics, transparency
There was a really interesting article in last month's Wired about the Wii, Guitar Hero and iPhone as our realization of virtual reality that I mentioned at the PSFK Good Ideas in Digital Salon the other day and thought I should link to here.
Essentially the idea is that in the early days of computers we imagined a virtual world where we put on big goggles and walked around this funny universe. As Levy explains in the article, "Turns out you don't need total immersion to interact naturally with a digital world: The games of Wii Sports allow you to perform the same actions you do in the athletics they simulate. When you're hitting a Wii golf shot, you simply swing the remote like it's a five iron. Tennis? Swing the Wiimote like a racket — its accelerometers and sensors translate to digital. Because your gestures are totally intuitive — no disembodied strangeness — you can focus on the screen the same way you would zero in on your opponent across the net."
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Tags: culture, technology
I made two comments today that I wanted to share ...
In response to Grant's post about why TV advertising has remained consistent as ratings have dropped: "At the end of the day, the problem with agencies and clients hasn't changed as much as media has: Agencies are work for hire and therefore subject to a different set of metrics than clients. Those metrics, for better or worse, are still about reach. Getting any significant reach on the web takes a lot more work. What's more, I think we're seeing the same thing in the online display advertising market. While most in the industry recognize the inadequacies, it's still the easiest way to guarantee your message gets in front of a whole bunch of people on the web (whether or not they look at it, of course, is a whole other thing)."
And in response to a post about where the revenue stream for Facebook Connect is: "I agree with you that the data thing is a funny angle, but something still isn’t sitting quite right with me. As you wrote, 'Google AdWords sit between queries and results, but Facebook sits between people and their friends. That’s where the money in Facebook Connect is.' That spot Google sits in is valuable because it allows advertisers to target based on consumer mindset/step in the purchase process. But why is sitting between people and their friends valuable? As the New York Times reported, 'just 57 percent of all users of social networks clicked on an ad in the last year, and only 11 percent of those clicks led to a purchase, IDC said. And it turns out that marketers are not so interested in advertising on pages filled with personal trivia and relationship updates.' How does this make that situation any better/different? I totally buy that it’s a power play, but I don’t necessarily think Facebook knows to what end."
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Tags: advertising, marketing
A buddy of mine was asking me whether he should get an iPhone or BlackBerry or what (he's coming from an old-school clamshell). I responded with this (which I found kind of amusing after I wrote it).
The iPhone is great if you want an iPod + internet/game device that's decent for emailing/calling.
The BlackBerry Bold is great if you want an email device that's decent for internet (I don't know about calling).
The Google phone (G1) is for people who want to make a statement by not getting an iPhone.
The BlackBerry Pearl is a pretty good phone and decent email device (probably equal or better than iPhone).
Now I've only had two of these four devices (iPhone + Pearl), but I think the other descriptions are pretty accurate.
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Tags: mobile, technology
A well-written and passionate Washington Post piece arguing that thinking of Obama as black is wrong. "We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between."
While the author doesn't discount the importance of Obama's win to black people ("The long, arduous battles that were fought and won in the name of civil rights redeemed our Constitution and brought a new sense of possibility to all minorities in this country."), she also sees it as a milestone in hybridness ("The world has become too fused, too interdependent to ignore this emerging reality: Just as banks, earthly resources and human disease form an intricate global web, so do racial ties.")
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Tags: politics, race
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