I have a list of about 20 hours of work I want to do to my site, because I’m too proud to start a Tumblog. In the meanwhile, here’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard in a podcast.

The Sound of Young America—Matt Braunger

13 Jul 2010 & Cetera, Nerdery & Sundry none permalink

I’m thinking about making this a continuing series. The Indian Communists have killed over 200 innocent civilians after they sabatoged a rail line in eastern India, causing a derailment Friday.

Neo-Marxist Arundhati Roy seems to think that war against these Communist insurgents, who have bullied, tortured, and killed the very rural villagers they claim to be saving, is “war on the poorest people in the country.” (c.f.: “Minutemen and freedom fighters.”) So exactly what is it when the Communists kill these civilians?

29 May 2010 Politics, War & Peace 1 permalink

The MTA is releasing a new New York City Subway map.

Next month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will unveil a resized, recolored and simplified edition of the well-known map, its first overhaul in more than a decade.

Manhattan will become taller, bulkier and 30 percent wider, to better display its spaghetti of subway lines. Staten Island, meanwhile, will shrink by half. The spreadsheetlike “service guide,” along the map’s bottom border, will be eliminated, and the other three boroughs will grow to fill the space.

A separate, stripped-down map will also be produced, to be displayed only inside subway cars. Neighborhood names, parks, ferries and bus connections will not appear on this version, making for a less cluttered composition that may be easier to read over a fellow rider’s shoulders.

If you want simplicity, maybe it’s about time we moved back to designer Massimo Vignelli’s classic 1972 map. Yes, tourists had problems with its abstract geography, but isn’t culling the tourist herds something we can all get behind?

29 May 2010 design none permalink

I loathe the fusion jazz that Pat Metheny excels in, but I will say this for the man: he knows and respects his over-genre. Thus, his takedown of Kenny G is simply astounding. On KG’s necro-duet with Louis Armstrong:

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician.

Let’s see Nies top that one. (Via Kottke)

20 May 2010 Music none permalink

With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system.

Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers.

Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it.

It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it.

Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter.

Exactly. I’m super lazy about taking pictures. If I’m going to go through all that work, I’m going to make damn sure a) I can get those photos back, and b) they aren’t degraded to a crappy resolution.

[Kellan Elliott-McCrea, via Chairman Gruber.]

19 May 2010 Technology none permalink

Russ Maschmeyer, a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York, created this beautiful visualization to find fans who martyr themselves to root for their team:

The Die Hard Index determines the quality of a sports team’s fans, or more specifically, the degree to which fans will continue to buy tickets, even when the economy is poor, ticket prices are sky high, and they have a losing team.

After a long night of looking at the numbers for the 2009 Major League Baseball Season, I arrived at the formula to the right, and the map below. I hope you find the results relatively congruent with your own home team experiences.

[via Information is Beautiful]

11 May 2010 Sport, design none permalink

Via a friend on Facebook:

Well, it would work out pretty well if the government weren’t easing the money supply and encouraging fiscally unsound lending to cause (1), Sen. Dodd wasn’t destroying the capital that startups need to experiment with alternatives to (2), and if the existing government regulations actually prevented (3). Yeah, looks like that hands-onny thing isn’t working so well, either.

11 May 2010 Economics, Politics 1 permalink

Or, “toldyousotoldyousotoldyouso.”

For years, James Taranto quoted novelist and journalist Mark Helprin in a running gag called “Homeless Rediscovery Watch”. In that quote, the latter (correctly) predicted the media would suddenly, magically, rediscover social problems that mysteriously disappeared from 1993 to 2001. Similarly, I’d like to introduce a new segment on this blog which will highlight things I predicted on Election Night to someone very close to me, when she asked why I wasn’t happy about something so “historic” happening. She can corroborate my story, though I no doubt bored her to tears with my sermon.

Today’s thing I predicted: the Obama administration and its Democratic Congress, despite being backed by tech pundits and the venture capitalists whose investments keep the employed, will destroy the capital necessary to keep the tech revolution going. The new bill proposed by retiring Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) will tightly regulate the financial instruments of any company it deems risky to the financial system. As the WSJ notes, that fly-by-night venture Apple Computers was once deemed too risky by state regulators:

[B]efore 1996, certain initial public offerings of stocks were subject to merit review in certain states, where the state decided if a security is a “bad” investment and thus not appropriate to be offered to its citizens. In fact, this is exactly what happened to Apple Computer when it first went public in 1980. Massachusetts prohibited the offering of Apple shares because they were “too risky,” and Apple did not even bother to offer its shares in Illinois due to strict state laws on new issues. What if federal bureaucrats had had the power to impose their judgment on a “risky” financial product (such as an IPO) on a nationwide scale, or every state followed Massachusetts’ lead? Would Apple have become the successful company that it is today?

So now we’re going to put this power in the hands of the Feds. Yeah, this is going to end well.

10 May 2010 Economics, Politics, Technology none permalink

Josh Ritter says DC is the new Ireland. I’ll accept that.

10 May 2010 Music none permalink

Great interactive graphic from the NYT mapping the top Netflix rentals of 2009 to various zipcodes in major metro areas. New York is predictable: Manhattan watches artsy crap, Jersey and Westchester County watch crap they heard was sophisticated from people at the last wine tasting, and the outer boroughs watch action flicks and minority-targeted fare.

DC is predictable, too, but the patterns are far more distinct. One can actually make out a dividing line between the more affluent, mostly white suburbs (MoCo, NW DC, Arlington/Fairfax Co) and the areas with higher minority representation (NE/SE DC, PG Co, Alexandria). The dividing line seems to be along I-295 and I-395, bisecting the beltway.

Minneapolis is very, very white. But you already knew this.

11 Jan 2010 Nerdery & Sundry, Pop Culture & Memes 1 permalink