American Idle

American Cowards

2010-03-12T00:45:10Z

The whole history of our post-9/11 brain damage doesn't need to be rehashed here. But the continuing use of terrorism as a political tool, and the success it has, speaks a great deal about the character of the nation. Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's hysterical attack on the Justice Department is part of the right's attempt to undermine the credibility and the legitimacy of the Obama administration. Without demonstrating in any way that the "al-Qaeda 7," the DOJ lawyers who did pro-bono work for Gitmo detainees, have broken any laws or ethics rules, young Cheney is doing the same work as old Cheney, that Dick: giving al-Qaeda legitimacy as a force in determining the way the United States functions.
Indeed, the right has so successfully torqued the country into what our enemies believe it is, it's almost as if the GOP is a subversive arm of al-Qaeda. They have nearly bankrupted us, thus making any great social advances impossible; they have turned mild dissent into sedition; and they have turned the Constitution into a loophole-ridden contract, filled with more fine print than a subprime mortgage. They did most of that shit when they were in power. Now, out of power, the right is seeking, as it did in the Clinton years, but even more insidiously, to undermine the very functioning of government. And, frankly, it ain't like the Obama administration is doing a whole lot to stand up to these political forces. Close Gitmo. Try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. Say, "Fuck you, cowards everywhere. This is what a country does that ain't intimidated."

Here's the dirty secret: we were pretty fucking safe prior to 9/11. We aren't really much more safe after. We should be vigilant and strong. We should be infiltrating groups and breaking them up. We should be negotiating with other countries. Ultimately, though, you can use all the technological geegaws in the world, you can get DNA and feces samples of everyone coming into the country, you can drown every detainee, but you're not gonna stop the lone fucker who wants to crash a plane or blow up his balls. It's the price of living in these armed times.

And, honestly, on the whole, for those of us who remember the Cold War, it's a little easier to live with the odds of a terrorist attack versus the odds of an earth-destroying nuclear war. (But we were still told on a daily basis to bug out over Commies.) At some point, we have to decide if we are a nation of principle or a nation that capitulates to the merest threats.

I think we've decided. And we've decided to be terrorized.

Metaphor Maps

2010-03-12T00:17:53Z

I love these maps by Christoph Niemann on the New York Times site. Especially this one:

Here's the artists bio from the site:

Christoph Niemann's illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Newsweek, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. His work has won numerous awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club and American Illustration. He is the author of "The Pet Dragon," which teaches Chinese characters to young readers. The Abstract City chapter "I LEGO N.Y." has been released as a board book. After 11 years in New York, he moved to Berlin with his wife, Lisa, and their three sons. His Web site is christophniemann.com.

Google Maps for Cyclists

2010-03-10T18:21:40Z

I'm happy to report that Google has finally gotten around to adding directions for cyclists in Google Maps.

After a long wait and more than 50,000 signatures on an online petition, cyclists will be happy to know that Google has finally added bicycle routes to Google Maps.
In Google Maps, users can now find "Bicycling" in the tool's "Get Directions" drop-down box. After choosing the option, bikers can input two addresses and find the bike route that will get them to their desired destination. Like Google Maps' other modes of transportation, the mapping tool provides turn-by-turn directions and an estimated travel time.

The new Google Maps bicycling feature is available in 150 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. The tool boasts over 12,000 bike trails. When users look for directions, the company's mapping algorithm weights trails more heavily than roads for safety reasons. If cities have bicycle lanes, those are also weighted more heavily than roads without them.

I tried a few routes and got mixed results. The route from my house in Emeryville to where I work in Hercules put my on the Ohlone Greenway bikepath, which is awesome. However, plotting a course from Emeryville to Mt. Diablo has me going over Shepherd Canyon, which has about 20% grade at the top—probably not the best route for most cyclists.

It's in beta, so it's no surprise that it's far from perfect. I sent feedback into Google, as I suspect thousands of other eager cyclists will do. When Google Maps for Cyclists is ready, it's no doubt going to be a fantastic and incredibly useful tool.

UPDATE FROM GOOGLE:

The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions - similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select "Bicycling" from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible. Just like Google pioneered with driving directions, you can click-and-drag your route to customize it as you'd like. You can also access the other features in Google Maps, such as Street View, so you can tell exactly where you might need to turn on your route or preview how wide a bike lane is, and Local Search, so you know where you can take a water break or where the bike shops are along your route. Biking directions provides time estimates for routes based on an algorithm that takes into account the length of the route, the number of hills, fatigue over time, and other variables.

In addition to directions, a new bicycling layer for Google Maps, accessible via the "More..." drop down menu at the top of the map, will display an overlay of the various bike-friendly roads and trails around town. The layer is color-coded to show three different types of paths:

* Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
* Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
* Dotted green indicates roads without bike lanes but are more appropriate for biking, based on factors such as terrain, traffic, and intersections.

Also, check their blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/biking-directions-added-to-google-maps.html

Lovesey on Holmes

2010-03-10T01:01:03Z

I took a break of my tour of Scandinavian mysteries and picked up Peter Lovesey's The Last Detective. I enjoyed it as a nice change of page. But I really loved this money quote at the beginning of Chapter 5 where Lovesey takes him most famous predecessor to task:

In the modern police, as any detective will tell you, a murder mystery is rarely, if ever, solved by scintillating deductions from clues that baffle inferior minds. Unless the killer's identity is so obvious that the case is cleared up in the first hours, the investigative process is likely to be laborious, involving hundreds of man-hours by police officers, forensic scientists and clerical staff. If any credit attaches ultimately to a conviction, it is diffused among numerous individuals, and has to be qualified by administrative delays, false assumptions, and sometimes fatal errors. These days criminal investigation is not a sport for glory hunters.

Never Could Resist a Good Venn Diagram

2010-03-09T17:26:43Z

Here are some famous movie quotes graphed.

Tron: Legacy

2010-03-09T17:23:07Z

Makes my inner geek smile.

You Might Have Trouble Reading This

2010-03-09T00:29:22Z

Have trouble focusing? Can't seem to get through a book any more? This might explain why.

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial " brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets'reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I can still get through books and am always reading something, but more then ever, I find myself switching between books, giving up after a few pages. My memory is shot and I can't spell anymore either. Why do I need those things when I have Google? It's a little scary. I wonder how this is going to affect the generations growing up without knowing a world without the Internet. If it's this bad for us, how will they be able to read anything longer than a few pages or paragraphs?

Pt. Richmond

2010-03-08T02:13:34Z

Just returned from a great afternoon ride up the coast to Pt. Richmond and back. I was fighting a headwind most of the way north and west which kept me at a paltry 13.8 mph on the outward leg. But with the wind at my back on the way home, I was hammering down the coast at 25 mph. Super fun. Details to come soon.

News Critique

2010-03-05T00:33:35Z

It really is that stupid:

(added 10MAR2010) and then there's this:

Dogs in Slo-Mo

2010-03-04T23:59:30Z

Shot at 100 fps for a Pedigre dog food ad:

Crack Smokin'

2010-03-04T22:26:17Z

Just got this in my inbox:

Dear Andrew,
My name is Justin and I'm a recruiter at Axelon Services Corporation, formerly known as Algomod Technologies Corporation. Our records show that you are a professional with attnetion(sic) to detail. This experience is relevant to one of my current openings.

It is located in Vallejo, CA.

Computer Technician
Vallejo, CA
3 Months

Pay rate is $10/hr

Candidate must have own vehicle

I love this for so many reasons. I don't how anyone looking at my resume would think for a second that I would be interested in a temporary job that paid 10 bucks an hour. Unemployment pays almost that. I could make that at the local Starbucks. I haven't had a job that paid that low since I worked for Ted Turner. But the best part is that this recruiter managed to spell "attention" wrong in a sentence about "attention to detail". How classic is that?

Captcha This

2010-03-04T22:12:29Z

Spam has basically put the kabosh on whatever community I had on this site. I got so many comments that I had to put up the firewall of registration to stop it and it was just too much for people to register or login in comment. Can't really blame them.

Now that Facebook is around and my posts here are automatically published on my FB account, whatever comments people tend to have are posted there. It's sort of annoying as FB is so ephemeral. I suppose you could find all all your posts if you were willing to dig far enough, but what a pain and there's no searching for them. The posts live for a while on the wall and then, for all intents and purposes, they are gone. That's just they way it is.

So I don't know if this is going to bring back commenters to my site, but registration is no longer necessary as I finally got around to installing a "Captcha" to prevent spammers from attacking the site. It's not going to stop them from trying. It's just going to stop them from succeeding. A few weeks back I turned off registration after having it in place for a few years and I was bombarded by a mountain of spam comments. I immediately turned it back on. I was defeated, but only momentarily.

The Captcha is sort of ugly, but it only shows up once you start typing your comment. And if it's going to stop spam, I can live that.

Essential Ebert

2010-03-03T23:03:52Z

There's a really interesting profile of Roger Ebert in Esquire.

It has been nearly four years since Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak. Now television's most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, but his words have never stopped.

* * *

Roger Ebert can't remember the last thing he ate. He can't remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn't happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory -- it wasn't as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz's ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren't they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.

Ebert's lasts almost certainly took place in a hospital. That much he can guess. His last food was probably nothing special, except that it was: hot soup in a brown plastic bowl; maybe some oatmeal; perhaps a saltine or some canned peaches. His last drink? Water, most likely, but maybe juice, again slurped out of plastic with the tinfoil lid peeled back. The last thing he said? Ebert thinks about it for a few moments, and then his eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he looks out into space in case the answer is floating in the air somewhere. It isn't. He looks surprised that he can't remember. He knows the last words Studs Terkel's wife, Ida, muttered when she was wheeled into the operating room ("Louis, what have you gotten me into now?"), but Ebert doesn't know what his own last words were. He thinks he probably said goodbye to Chaz before one of his own trips into the operating room, perhaps when he had parts of his salivary glands taken out -- but that can't be right. He was back on TV after that operation. Whenever it was, the moment wasn't cinematic. His last words weren't recorded. There was just his voice, and then there wasn't.

Like many of my generation, I grew up watching Ebert argue with Gene Siskel over whether a movie deserved a thumbs up or down on At the Movies. After Siskel passed away, I didn't watch the show much anymore. I wasn't a huge fan of his replacement.

I would hear about Ebert here and there, but it wasn't until I heard a story on All Things Considered about this company from Scotland that was reproducing his voice from old recordings so he could speak that I heard anything about his health issues.

I find what has happened to him both sad and uplifting. I wish him all the best. Clearly he's getting along just fine despite what must be an almost intolerable situation. It's certainly nightmarish to contemplate it happening.

More info:

rogerebert.com

Wikipedia: Roger Ebert

Blaupunkt Ad

2010-03-01T04:09:03Z

PS3 Online

2010-03-01T03:22:53Z

I'm still not sure what I did or how I did it, but I managed to solve the problems I was having with my TV recognizing my newly acquired PS3, but it's working now. It's a serious relief because I didn't want to deal with getting my money back from the dude I bought it from (via craiglist)

I don't have any games yet, but I'm online and can stream Netflix movies. The first movie we watched was The Taking of Pelham 123. Not a great film, but entertaining enough. The selection on Netflix is on the small side, but growing.

The bluetooth DVD remote came in the mail today (via eBay), so I don't have to navigate DVD menus with the Sony game paddle, which is nice. I also picked up an HDMI cable (also via eBay) so I can connect at a better resolution.

I'm off to check out the PlayStation Network.

(Just after I got my console up and running, I saw this.)