I just had a come to Jesus moment on a well-indexed site for mass real-time blogging.
We heard some rumbling far off. Sounded like fireworks. But I couldn’t see them. Lots of rumbling. Walked around the house. Still couldn’t see them. More rumbling. Not a trace on the horizon.
So I went to the LAT online and searched for fireworks: nothing. Went to Google News: same. Searched Twitter: Dodger’s game.
Oh, OK.
apple has introduced a feature called the genius sidebar for your music listening pleasure.
it may be very smart at finding related music but it has a funny bug: an occasional sign of social immaturity. the genius is intended to be a personal assistant. as such, it should know when to be quiet.
for example, if the assistant doesn’t have something relevant to say, better that it keep quiet:
i don’t need a shill for top 40 radio following me into every room of my life.
it’s very hard to turn a dance into a pratfall; to make a well-timed step appear clunky – or funky. on a new error, moderat turn a clean four/four into something quite different with a series of beguiling transitions. what appear to be mistakes at first listen, merge together to become a very fresh accent. well done.
Learning to play means learning another person’s set of rules. Or writing the rules together with them.
Playing sports is a terrific way to experience the benefits of compromise (peace, profits) on a small scale and that’s where real change happens.
Video games offer a similar opportunity for co-operation. Yes, there are “death squad” games but then there’s the wildly popular Super Mario Galaxy – 4m units sold in the U.S. alone. Nintendo has made a fortune creating progressive games. That’s quite remarkable. Because profits, without peace, are pretty much useless.
And the market in which video games are consumed is evolving quickly.
Today, I saw a very nicely done movie trailer for a book. Yes, a movie trailer for a book – on a popular video sharing web site. That’s a true (not forced) multimedia experience. The book itself is noteworthy for being a playful genre: the remix. And commercially successful. (i.e., Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.)
Perhaps, the U.S. will develop its own form of sms novels. And the electronic novel which breaks through will be written together by all its players.
let’s say you needed to create intermediaries between us and the other mammals. if a machine can learn sign language by watching TV, couldn’t one learn horse, dolphin or crow?
to do so, it would have to be more than a computer but rather an autonomous robot, capable of following its pack, mimicking gestures, touch. it would also, most likely, have to be introduced to its assignments as a “newborn.”
whether we’d ever get instinct right, however, is another matter.
the life of mammals with David Attenborough is not just a documentary – it’s an excellent movie. surprising, delightful, funny. confident. it excels at what movies were made for: surreal pleasures. case in point, a montage where Attenborough appears a few feet away from wild animals doing their wild things. all the while, he delivers his lines, coolly, like a shaken martini. it’s like magic.
there’s a good documentary somewhere inside Dolphins: IMAX, you just have to peel off the music layer. and the voice over. the facts and footage are remarkable.
science fiction spin-off: humans discover dolphins are more evolved… than humans.
The Hour Glass, a comment by Salon user jafi12:
Part of the problem is the hourglass marketing strategy. Low end cheap stuff, high end expensive stuff, very little good value decent quality stuff in the middle. Companies prefer high profit margins on their products. The hourglass strategy is designed to maximize margin. There a few low end washers and dryers, and then boom you’re into the pricey front loader sets. Not much in between these days.
last night i bought a pair of flip flops online. at around 8 pm PST. they arrived this morning. that’s very fast.
that’s, like, as long as it used to take the local grocer to do a food delivery when webvan was up and running. only those were local deliveries.
where is zappos again? oh, right, everywhere. zappos has reached incredible efficiency at scale.
They believe that speed is the key to their success. In fact, they’re making sure that items get picked and ready to ship about 12 minutes after customers click the “submit order” icon. And to make that happen, they keep careful stock of everything that they sell and they don’t make an item available for sale unless it’s physically present in their Shepherdsville, Ky., facility.
in the midst of a global downturn, zappos is currently hiring.
Ana says responsible breeders are essentially lending dogs to owners. Like life banks, if you will. Where you pay full price up front.
They’ll totally, with a smile, take back that life form they sold you if something in your life has changed. And some provide refunds past year two.
That’s a very interesting agreement. I wonder if that kind of lifetime guarantee (literally!) can scale up very high?
(Origin? Ana suspects it’s animal husbandry – the selling of animals as tools. You’d definitely want a tool to have a lifetime warranty. The best designed tools are the most expensive to replace.)
beware adults who treat other adults as children. “they don’t need to know” or “they can’t handle the truth” is never an appropriate stance for leadership. the motto of a democracy is “politicians report, voters decide.”
The BBC: “Israeli transport chiefs spark Arab anger with a plan to replace traditional Arabic names on signposts with Hebrew versions.”
Imagine if during the time of Prop 187 the California State Legislature had decided to rename Los Angeles to The Angels, San Francisco to Saint Francis, etc.
From today’s NYT, currently the most-emailed:
The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.
Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”
I’m not old enough to remember what spurred the backlash against Disco music but I think we may have finally reconciled the thesis (disco) and antithesis (rock) of that era with bands like Daft Punk and MSTRKRFT. The synthesis being dance music with distortion.
As an immigrant and a typical American, I’ve moved around for most of my life. Last year, however, I decided to stay. With my parents’ help, we bought a house. Since then, I’ve become very focused on what a house does, how it works, what each room does. And how furniture works.
Let’s say furniture works in two ways: first, as a product in our marketplace which requires resources both material and human to produce. Second, and more importantly, as a device to structure our leisure, our social activities and our work.
Most furniture available for purchase in the U.S. works “OK.” Not great and certainly not “insanely great.” In this way, the furniture market resembles that of the personal computer. As the Storm botnet or a recent Pew study would suggest, most consumers and their so-called personal computers are, at best, “acquaintances.”
While “power users” have exploited the tremendous potential of today’s computer systems in the personal and commercial spheres, most users have yet to do so. (This also varies greatly around the world.)
There are a few exceptions to this trend, the most significant of which is the popularity of the iPhone.
Which brings me back to the lack of affordable, well-made and well-designed furniture. Over the last year or so I’ve gotten into more than a few discussions with furniture dealers, interior designers, architects and curators on why good furniture is considered a luxury item in the U.S. Mostly, I’m told, it’s because: 1) well-made furniture is inherently expensive to produce and 2) good taste is rare.
Both of these arguments are contradicted directly by the iPhone. In the midst of a global economic crisis which has confounded economists, corporations, governments and consumers, alike, Apple sold one million units of the iPhone 3GS in its first weekend.
Tell me, now, how a piece of furniture is inherently harder to make than an iPhone? Or how consumers don’t appreciate a well-made device?
The problem, instead, is that there is no system of companies (suppliers, developers) in the furniture space as there is around Apple. Just as there is no Apple to make obvious what we so often overlook: that good design can make life easier and more pleasurable.
Lately, I’ve come to read a great deal of writing around furniture design and very, very little of it shows the self-awareness and ambition required to make an effective – indeed, a revolutionary – product.
Last night, there was an outdoor game nearby. Soft waves of ah’s and oh’s rolled in for an hour or so.
Spectator sports are a game of hopes and disappointments. We become fans to remain hopeful and to learn to lose.
Related: Invincible.
A paraphrase of Chris Rock in 2008: George W. Bush fucked it up so bad that a white man can’t run for president.
Rock on when white people can say… is just another reason why he’s a genius.
Earlier I wrote all sorts of hype about Buraka Som Sistema. Good for a party. But, really, my summer belongs to The Field and “The More That I do”. Especially the first three minutes.
Update: And this, too, was wrong. If anything, the summer playlist was a mess. There was some new disco, some new rock, some new dance music. All overlapping in waves.
via MeFi, Watching Whales Watching Us:
Whales, we now know, teach and learn. They scheme. They cooperate, and they grieve. They recognize themselves and their friends. They know and fight back against their enemies. And perhaps most stunningly, given all of our transgressions against them, they may even, in certain circumstances, have learned to trust us again.
And more, much more:
As Beto spoke, I thought of another bit of interspecies cooperation involving humpbacks that I recently read about. A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.
For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.