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Monday, 21 July 2008
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Roundup
[
roundup | language | funny | general
]
Although I am a late adopter, eventually I get it.[1] These days I am thinking about big TVs and about e-book readers (list here). Ack, the price.
Who’s Mindful of Who’s Apostrophes’?. "It was not the brightest day for the English speaking world when the apostrophe invaded its books." If its/it's bothers you, you might want to read a little history here. As I might have noted before, wouldn't it be easier to just do away with the possessive apostrophe? [via fritinancy]
Goliath - Official IFC Trailer. (video) "Goliath is missing. And that's just the beginning."
Starbucks Closure List: All 600 Stores, searchable. In the comments (couldn't resist): "Oh no! Where will I go for overbrewed, burnt tasting, hyperexpensive coffee?" Sarah comments: "It's a little pathetic how many of these Starbucks I've been to." [via Scott Hanselman]
Butchered Title Requests. From a librarian. Example: "Fire Hydrant 415," "What Color Is My Umbrella?". It might be fun to see if you can guess what the patron intended by looking only at the requests. [via growabrain]
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10:05 AM
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Monday, 21 July 2008
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Shakespeare's editors
[
general | readings | editing
]
A short while ago, a guy strolled into the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., which is one of the, or the, preeminent repository of Shakespearean stuff. He wanted to know if the First Folio he was carrying was the real item. As it happens, it was; it was a volume that had been stolen 10 years ago from the University of Durham in England. The dude is currently a guest of the state in the UK while they sort out the story.
The First Folio is an edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, plus some other plays. That the First Folio exists at all is unusually good luck; that we have so many copies, doubly so. Much of the work of other Elizabethan playwrights has vanished, since their work was either never written down, or written down and not printed, or printed but lost. As Bill Bryson points out in his Shakespeare Lite study:Only about 230 plays survive from the period of Shakespeare’s life, of which the First Folio represents some 15 percent, so Heminges and Condell saved for the world not only half the plays of William Shakespeare, but an appreciable portion of all Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The First Folio was printed after Shakespeare’s death, but it was assembled by people who had worked with him. This gives you an idea of what-all has been lost:To aid recollection, they had much valuable material to work with—-prompt books, foul papers (as rough drafts or original copies were known) in Shakespeare’s own hand, and the company’s own fair copies. To which he adds "all now lost." There had been previous printings of Shakespeare’s plays; some editions were good, but others ... not so much. The latter, for example, might be "versions set down from memory (often very bad memory, it seems) by fellow actors or scribes employed to attend a play and create as good a transcription as they could manage."
Aware of these less-than-stellar editions, the compilers of the First Folio sought to create definitive ("True Originall") versions of the plays. Had they not done so, we would likely not know about 18 plays of Shakeaspeare's for which we have no other source.
And yet. It was not just Elizabethan spelling that seemed to lend itself to only the most casual discipline; printing was not subject to the most rigorous QA. Bryson explains:In fact, the First Folio was a decidedly erratic piece of work.
Even to an inexpert eye its typographical curiosities are striking. Stray words appear in odd places—-a large and eminently superfluous "THE" stands near the bottom of page 38, for instance—-page numbering is wildly inconsistent, and there are many notable misprints. In one section, pages 81 and 82 appear twice, but pages 77-78, 101-108, and 157-256 don’t appear at all. In Much Ado About Nothing the lines of Dogberry and Verges abrupty cease being prefixed by the characters’ names and instead become prefixed by "Will" and "Richard," the names of the actors who took the parts in the original production.
The plays are sometimes divided into acts and scenes but sometimes not; in Hamlet the practice of scene division is abaondoned halfway through. Character lists are sometimes at the front of plays, sometimes at the back, and sometimes missing altogether. Stage directions are sometimes comprehensive and at other times almost entirely absent. A crucial line of dialog in King Lear is preceded by the abbreviated character name "Cor.," but it is impossible to know whether "Cor." refers to Cornwall or Cordelia. Either one works, but each gives a differ shading to the play. The issue has troubled directors ever since. What these guys needed, of course, was the services of a good editor.
posted at
01:17 AM
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Friday, 18 July 2008
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Roundup
[
roundup | language | general
]
Mostly language-y stuff.
Blackjack? Mark Liberman asks about a playground rhyme he wasn't familiar with: "Blackjack, no tagbacks." The comments for the post involve a lively discussion of tagbacks, cooties, opposite day, and many other terms from the protocols of childhood. Fun even for non-linguists.[1]
three and a half things you shouldn't say to a mathematician. Plus a 4th one (4th-and-a-half?) in the comments. [via motivated grammar]
Clear Writing Done Easy. "Inept writer" (Motto: "An inept writer trying to become more epter") offers four (4) sets of guidelines for good writing. All in 134 words. Plus this bonus definition: "Good writing is good because of what words are not there rather than what words are."
Hering-Bau WCmatic Automatic Public Toilet #3 - Seattle. eBay auction: our very own City of Seattle is selling off its super-duper self-cleaning public toilet ... pod things. "City officials have decided to pursue other options for public bathrooms and are now offering the APTs for immediate surplus sale." Since you prolly won't see this for long, here are a couple of pictures from the auction:
[via grow-a-brain]
posted at
02:53 PM
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[
general | technology | readings
]
Where I live, a homeowners association keeps tabs on your groundskeeping.[1]. They don't insist that you have a lawn, but if you do, you have to make sure that it's looked after.
In the current issue of the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert examines the lawn, its history, its upkeep, and its possible future. Such interesting things we learn.
The stereotypical suburban lawn is a product of entirely unnatural horticulture. None of the grasses used for lawns are native to the US. If left alone, grass goes through a natural life cycle in which it develops seeds. We thwart this natural lifecycle in various ways. One is to mow:Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction. From the gardener’s perspective, the result is a denser, thicker mat of green. From the grasses’ point of view, the result is a perpetual state of vegetable adolescence. With every successive trim, the plants are forcibly rejuvenated. Grass also goes dormant when conditions are not favorable. In its dormant state, it gets brown. People don't like that, so we have a way to prevent that. One is to pour hundreds of millions of gallons of water onto the lawn. Another is to use chemicals:[...] repeated applications of synthetic fertilizer could counteract turfgrasses’ seasonal cycle by, in effect, tricking the plants into putting out new growth. Sensing a potential bonanza, lawn-care companies began marketing the idea of an ever-green green. The Scotts Company recommended that customers apply its fertilizer, Turf Builder, no fewer than five times a year. Fertilizer is non-discriminating; it will happily feed grass, weeds, whatever--in short, anything that can use nitrogen. But wait; we want grass, but we don't want "weeds". (Further) better living through chemistry:With the advent of herbicides, in the nineteen-forties, still tighter control became possible. The new herbicides allowed gardeners to kill off plants that they didn’t care for with a single spraying. One of the most popular herbicides was—and continues to be—2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4-D, as it is commonly known, a major ingredient in Agent Orange. Regrettably, 2,4-D killed not only dandelions but also plants that were beneficial to lawns, like nitrogen-fixing clover. Oops. Well, if you can't solve the problem, redefine it:To cover up this loss, any plant that the chemical eradicated was redefined as an enemy. “Once considered the ultimate in fine turf, a clover lawn is looked upon today by most authorities as not much better than a weed patch” is how one guidebook explained the change. Ah, at last: a beautiful, unsullied carpet of green grass. Alas, you're not done yet:The greener, purer lawns that the chemical treatments made possible were, as monocultures, more vulnerable to pests. The answer to this chemically induced problem was to apply more chemicals. [...] the first pesticide popularly spread on lawns was lead arsenate. Next in line were DDT and chlordane. Once they were shown to be toxic, pesticides like diazinon and chlorpyrifos. The insecticide carbaryl, which is marketed under the trade name Sevin, is still broadly applied to lawns; it is toxic to tadpoles, salamanders, and honeybees. In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.” Your pristine green lawn is poisoning you, your kids, and your pets. But it doesn't end there:Rain and irrigation carry synthetic fertilizers into streams and lakes, where the excess nutrients contribute to algae blooms that, in turn, produce aquatic “dead zones.” A 2002 report found traces of thirty-seven pesticides in streams feeding into the Croton River Watershed. A few years ago, Toronto banned the use of virtually all lawn pesticides and herbicides, including 2,4-D and carbaryl, on the ground that they pose a health risk, especially to children. Or in the case of the Northwest, a health risk to, among others, salmon, which spawn in small streams that are the first to get runoff.
I used to have neighbors who kept an immaculate lawn and garden. One of their secrets, so to speak, was periodic visits from a company that unblushingly named itself ChemLawn. (Since acquired by the more benign-sounding TruGreen.)
In case you're wondering, I do have a lawn. In our 1/4-acre plot, we have 600 square feet of grass. I cut it, but I don't water it or feed it. Nonetheless, like my fellow Americans, I like the look of a neat clipped lawn. There you go.
I wonder whether we will see a cultural change in our attitudes toward lawns. If so, it will take a while ... several generations have grown up believing in the aesthetic -- yea, verily, moral[2] -- superiority of a perfect lawn.
posted at
07:18 PM
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Thursday, 17 July 2008
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Roundup
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[
technology | writing
]
The 140-character limit in Twitter has brought out a lot of ingenuity in people. Some creative ways in which people are working within Twitter's character limit include recipes, poems, and stories (sometimes referred to as TwitLit).[1] In fact, many people believe that constraints are a spur to creativity. Famously, for example, people believe that the sonnet form—a tightly structured format for verse—can result in some very fine poetry indeed:What Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton and our other great poets discovered is that the very constraints of the sonnet lend power to its ideas and arguments, providing a logical framework through which they can progress. Its conventions can be used or indeed abused, and the choice that is made can itself speak volumes. The English language is a gloriously unstable, organic thing but, like a rare allotrope, it can sometimes be formed as a perfect, crystalline gem.
—from "Sonnets in English Literature" There's more to read on this topic; for those what be interested, there are some links below.
So: brevity is the soul of Twitter.[2] Given such tight constraints on the length of your text, then, it seems a little unfair to have to spend so much of that text on URLs. You want your tweet to link to something, but the flippin' URL is, like, 30% or 40% or 50% of your allocated length.
Solution: URL tinyfication. Even before Twitter, there was a market for products that can shrink the size of URLs. Probably the best-known of these is tinyurl.com, which goes back to 2002.
Tinyfication services work as redirect services. You give them big honkin' URL like this one:
http://www.mikepope.com/blog/AddComment.aspx?blogid=1996&showhitcount=yes (73 characters)
The tinyurl folks generate a small URL like this:
http://tinyurl.com/5accnk (25 characters)
You include the small URL in your Twitter post or wherever. When users click or type the URL, the request goes to the tinyfication service, they look up the address they've generated in their database, and they then redirect to the original URL.[3]
To keep the URLs tiny, and to expand the possible number of URLs that they can tinyfy, the services use both numbers and letters in the URLs, which gives them (at least) base-36 math to play with.
There are more of these services than you might imagine. The creator of notlong.com, one of these services, has compiled a list of 41 sites currently active, and he's missed at least one (snurl.com).
Given so many, I was curious about how these services distinguish themselves. The crudest distinction, it seems to me, is in how compressed their URLs are. The tinier the URL, the better, right? Well, sure. In that case, the length of the service's URL becomes a factor in the overall length of the tinyfied URL. By that measure, is.gd probably wins. The notlong.com site plays this differently, adding a subdomain in front of their own domain, so that the 73-character URL above becomes http://heijao.notlong.com (24 characters).
But given that the services all produce URLs whose length is plus or minus just a couple of characters, how else do they distinguish themselves? Again lifting from the handy comparison provided at notlong.com, these are some of the factors that come into play:- Expiration: How long the URL is guaranteed to be good. A lot of the services guarantee for 5 years. (Some say that the URLs never expire, which means "not until our own Web site goes dark"). There's a long list of one-time tinyfiers, so it's by no means certain that your brand-X service will be around as long as the content you want to link to. (The notlong site lists sites that are claimed to be defunct or non-free, although a sampling of the list suggests that it's not 100% accurate.)
- Editing: Can you change the target URL of a tinyfied address?
- Custom URLs: If you have a yen to specify a particular sequence of characters rather than letting them generate one, some of the sites let you. As with URLs generally, the likelihood of being able to pick any sequence you want diminishes greatly over time.
- Statistics: Some of the services can provide you with stats.
- API: The easy way to generate a tinyfied URL is to go to the service's web site and enter the URL that you want to reduce. Some of the services have APIs that let you do this programmatically, meaning you can generate tinyfied URLs in your own web applications. Various folks have created browser plug-ins that use the APIs in order to make it a one-click operation. (Example) There's a complementary set of tools to expand—or "embiggen"—tinyfied URLs.
There are other features to throw in a matrix as well, but these are the ones that are the most interesting to me. Meta-features that a service can't easily list on their matrix are reliability (uptime)[4] and performance aka throughput under load.
Some, perhaps most, of these features, like expiration and editing ability, probably are not that useful for Twitter, given the ephemeral nature of tweets. Uptime and throughput, on the other hand, are probably more interesting.
Downsides
As useful as tinyfied URLs are, they have their downsides. For starters, the URL is meaningless; it doesn't tell you where you're going. To help prevent you from landing on a site that you don't really want to go to—people use tiny URLs to send traffic to sites for commercial purposes, imagine that—some of the services let users preview the target site before they actually go there. While I appreciate the feature, this seems like it would be quite an annoyance to users who don't care about your URLs and just expect to get to another page.
Also, some large web sites ban tinyfied URLs. This includes MySpace and Facebook. (They ban other types of links as well, and probably ban tinyfied URLs in order to prevent people from getting around the first set of bans.) A quasi-official reason is that tinyfied URLs can be used to link people to malicious content, but that's true for lots of URLs, so it's an extreme defense against that sort of ploy. Twitter, of course, is pretty much obliged to support tinyfied URLs.
Beyond Tiny URLs in Twitter
Shrinking the size of URLs is certainly a big win for posting links in Twitter. The folks at shorttext.com go one further: they can take an entire Twitter post and store it for you. It's a clever idea: you type away in Twitter and ignore the ominous character countdown as it goes into the red. When you're done, you "twitzer" the post. The shorttext people chop your post off to less than 140 characters and add a link to the rest of the post, which they keep on their site. When a reader clicks the link, the entire post is retrieved and displayed.
It's cool, but in a weird way, it neutralizes the very constraint that characterizes Twitter posts. As noted in the beginning, the constraint brings out creativity and ingenuity. Shortening URLs does not really violate this spirit (imo, anyway), because URLs are something beyond your control and not really content.
Providing what becomes a much, much larger space in which to tweet, however, removes the need to distill the post to its essence. On the contrary, it encourages blather. Heck, using twitzer, you could even do entire blog posts on Twitter. And that would be no good. :-)
posted at
11:27 PM
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Sunday, 13 July 2008
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Up, Up and Away
[
personal
]
Many years ago, when I was turning 40, my kids asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I said "a balloon ride." They hadn't hit the double digits in age at that point, so that wasn’t exactly practical. But they didn't forget, and a decade later they surprised me with, whaddya know, a certificate for a balloon ride. That certificate has been pinned to my wall for a while. But Seattle weather weather has turned balmy, finally, so I called them up. Not so surprisingly, when I told Sarah I was going to make an arrangement to go flying, she wanted to go, too. Sabrina wanted to come watch. Today was the day.
The way it works it that you call them at 5:00 am (which, I'll just point out, means 5:00 in the morning). They tell you whether it's a go and tell you where they're intending to launch from. You drag your tired self or selves to their meeting place by 6:30. (AM.) Balloonists share with rowers a hypersensitivity to the effects of wind, and like rowers, they get up insanely early in order to have the wind working in their favor, i.e., not too strong, not too unpredictable. (As the sun heats things up, our man said, you get unexpected and unwelcome thermals, for example.)
At the office, there is the predictable amount of milling around, but eventually you pile into a van that's dragging a trailer, and they drive to their preferred take-off spot. In this case, it's an open lot next to a medical facility right in Snohomish. The vans act as chase vehicles, which in this case included Sabrina. There were two balloons, each hauling eight passengers and a pilot.
Basket and trailer
Then it's all hands on board, so to speak, and the assembled mob is enlisted to drag the balloon out of the trailer.
Unfolding the craft
The crew starts up a big ol' fan to inflate the balloon, which initially looks like a rainbow slug.
Huff and puff
When it's inflated enough, the pilot dude fires up the propane burners. The balloon turns itself vertical, and then it's time to go. The take-off couldn't be gentler. One moment your standing in a basket on the ground, with this behemoth of a balloon above you, and the next moment you're rising off the ground. And up you go.
Our fellow balloon just after takeoff
The balloon has no way to steer, of course, so the pilot's job is to control vertical ascent and descent in order to catch the small differences in the prevailing winds. (Well, breezes.) To go up, the pilot fires his propane burners, and the balloon rises. The trick there is knowing the latency; the balloon doesn't pop up like a cork in water or anything. To descend, the pilot yanks on a rope that opens a panel in the balloon to let out some of the hot air.
Intrepid pilot
Putting the pedal to the metal
Dang, what a ride. I'm normally nervous about heights, which had worried me slightly, but it was no problem at all. We drifted serenely over Snohomish County, moving up and down as the pilot maneuvered the craft. Which did have some effect on the "serene" part, because that burner is loud. That aside, the ride is silent, and we could look down on horses in the pastures, guys fishing in the Snohomish (and their dogs splashing in the river), stuff like that. Everything looked clean and tidy from our altitude. The view was stupendous. We could see the towers of downtown Seattle in the distance, and could even see Mt Saint Helens all the way in the south.
Drifting along
We like this
Per the pilot, we had perfect conditions, so we drifted several miles further than the usual ride (so he said, anyway). The pilot had a field in mind where he wanted to land, and we descended so as to be able to hit the field. Tricky stuff, that. At one point we were low enough to scrape the trees next to the river, although a couple of shots of gas took us back up and over.
Coming in low
Our shadow
Hello over there
We did come into the field perfectly and had a landing that was just as gentle as our takeoff.
The other guys landing
Our chase crew was there, and they collapsed the balloon, took things apart, and got us to help them stuff it all back into the trailer.
Disassembly
Then it was back to the office for a champagne toast and a little snack. Excellent birthday gift, don't you think?
PS Sabrina took pictures and a some video. If you don't mind downloading ~4MB of video, you can see some of the setup and a landing as well.
posted at
11:05 PM
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Friday, 11 July 2008
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Roundup
[
roundup | general | technology
]
A Friday sorta collection.
Vintage Car Logos. Gorgeous. Shot with an iPhone(!) [via grow-a-brain]
Hummer's Heyday Could Be Out of Gas. Speaking of vintage cars ... GM might discontinue the "iconic" (their word) Hummer brand.
Handwritten Typographers. "The handwriting of typographers intrigues me because it raises so many questions, big and small: Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don't? Does a typographer's handwriting influence the typefaces they produce?" I'm not sure the question is answered, except possibly in the case of Mark Simonson.[1] [via Friend Alan]
Bubble Calendar. A productive way to release your inner child. [via grow-a-brain, among others]
posted at
01:35 PM
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[
general
]
I can't believe that this still happens, but I guess there's always a new crop of folks.- Someone mistakenly sends an email out to everyone in the company.
- Clueless Person 1 hits Reply All, says "Why did I get this?? Please remove me from this list!!!!!"
- Clueless Persons 2-n hit Reply All, say "Me, too!!!!!"[1]
- Helpful Persons 1-n hit Reply All, say "Stop hitting Reply All!!"
- Return to Step 3.
posted at
09:21 AM
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Thursday, 10 July 2008
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The Golden 50s
[
books | politics | history
]
The nostalgic spot that the good ol' 50s have in American culture has some economic justification. In some ways, it was indeed a golden age. Charles Morris, writing in The Trillion Dollar Meltdown:
Birth rates dropped sharply during the Depression years, so the generation of men entering the labor market in the 1950s was an unusually small one and was much in demand. The pay gap between young workers and older workers therefore became unusually narrow, facilitating early marriage and family formation. All measures of social disruption, like crime rates, dropped like a stone. Earlier marriage and greater economic security also made couples more willing to have children. Thus, the 50s of "Leave it To Beaver" and the great explosion of the American suburbs, so fondly remembered, were the result of unique social conditions. These circumstances were not (and are not) the norm.[1]
Moreover, the very benefits that the 50s brought to the US carried with them the seeds of their own destruction:
When the boomers reached school age, elementary schools everywhere were forced onto double and triple sessions; it was even worse in the suburbs, where schools had to be built from scratch. As they hit their teens, juvenile delinquency moved to the top of the social agenda. Struggling to cope, police forces became more selective about the behaviors that elicited an intervention, a process that Daniel Patrick Moynihan later called "defining deviancy down." And so on.
This is in the intro to the book. Morris is merely recounting the economic (and incidentally social) history that has brought us to our current economic, um, situation. He goes on to cite the predicted and successful rise of the Republican party (culminating in Nixon's 1968 victory over Humphrey). From this point, I believe we will be going on a wild ride through the inflationary 70s, the 80s Reagan era, the boom years of the 90s, and the confluence of events (and technologies) that have brought us to where we are.
The only positive notes that have emerged from the intro so far are that a) the US has seen strong hits to the dollar before (and recovered) and that b) the Japanese economy went through something like we are experiencing (tho in their case, government inaction has prolonged the pain a long, long time). But we'll see, won't we.
More as I encounter interesting tidbits.
posted at
10:27 AM
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