The Heat Is On

NPR isn't really good for breaking news, but I've realized that people who cover breaking news don't do a good job. Their coverage is cursory, covering the surface. NPR likes to dig one level deeper. Many of their news articles wouldn't qualify as "news" as it could have been reported last week, last month, or a few months from now. However, they're usually timely to current events.

In particular, with the cost of gas so high (although recently, there has been a twenty cent decrease in cost per gallon, which isn't all that much, really, but enough to encourage people to want to travel this Labor Day.

High prices also encourage people to think about alternative sources of energy. Remember the last time when that happened? Maybe not? During the oil crisis of the 70s, many alternate fuel sources were considered. The top two were nuclear and solar power. But once gas prices went down, or more properly, stopped going up (for twenty years, it hovered around a dollar), these alternatives were less attractive.

What's happened to solar?

That's what NPR did an article on this morning. Most people think of solar as solar panels, that only require light to power them. Perhaps the most common solar appliance anyone has seen is the solar powered calculator. They seem rather scarce these days.

But there's another way to make energy from solar. It's called solar thermal. The idea is somewhat akin to using a magnifying glass to fry insects. Arrange mirrors in a parabolic shape, and you can focus light/heat to a point or a line. That line gets hot, hot, hot. Put something their to heat up, say, a pipe filled with oil. That oil heats up to 700F, and circulate it around. Boil water, create steam, and you can move turbines.

Of course, you can't do this anywhere. Desert areas with lots of sunlight benefit the most from this, thus, places in the southwest benefit most.

To be fair, the technology is not that new. I've heard of using reflection to heat up to twenty years ago, but interest has grown.

In any case, these are the kind of news articles that don't have the kind of paparazzi appeal that puts in on network news (and I hate to use that word to describe what they do), but exactly the kind of one-level deeper news digging that makes NPR much more compelling to listen to.

Why the Mac Rocks

This video is over twenty years old. Steve Jobs had a full head of hair back then. He wore a bowtie. He was the consummate showman. In this video he's introducing the Mac. From 1984. I was watching this video in a video listed, in one person's humble opinion, as one of the ten best presentations ever (in the English language, presumably).

Why was the Mac so exciting? You could see it nearly right away, though it may not be so obvious.

Fonts.

That's right. Fonts.

The first computer my dad bought for the family was an Apple 2e. No, no, to be fair, the first computer was this one hundred dollar Timex Sinclair. It had a membrane keyboard. Each key was a shortcut to some Basic keyword. In those days, personal computers had to run BASIC, at least, for those who cared to program.

We whined as kids at this cheap computer. Ah, so young, and yet so swayed by the desire to have an expensive computer.

I wanted an Atari. My friends had an Atari, with a tape cassette drive and a cartridge that could play space games. I thought it was cool.

Dad got an Apple instead. 64K of memory. Floppy disks that were actually floppy. No hard drives. No real OS to speak of. Certainly, no GUIs, no windowing, no threading, no caching. It hardly qualified as a computer.

And what was the killer app in those days? There were two. Spreadsheet programs which, honestly, haven't evolved a great deal since then, and the word processor.

In those days, just being able to capture words and save them and print it on a crappy dot matrix computer whose output sucked ass was the state of the art. It looked awful. It was awful. This wasn't the work of calligraphers who spent half a lifetime trying to write letters as if it were high art, every curve full of meaning, every flourish, a signifier of beauty. Printing and writing were monotonously efficient, a product of a lack of resources and imagination.

When the first Mac came out, Jobs must have thought "fonts". Fonts would distinguish the Mac. It would print letters that would be good enough to go in a magazine.

You know who I thought would have cared about fonts. Donald Knuth. Yet, look at TeX. It came in two fonts. There was the regular default font and there was the math font. Nothing else. Donald chose the font for us. How else could you explain the lack of choice of fonts in TeX which lasted many years after it became available?

It's all the more shocking because Knuth is an aesthete. He cares about beauty. He wrote TeX because he saw computers and programs taking over printing, and the high quality of printing once done laboriously by hand was disappearing, only to be replaced by something inferior.

Knuth, being both a computer scientist, and someone who cared about beauty, did what only a computer scientist could do. He wrote a program. It would lay out characters as only a master could. It would know something about kerning. It would know about ligatures. Alas, you had to practically be a programmer to get TeX to do its things, since it wasn't WYSIWIG. You basically compiled TeX.

And it didn't have fonts.

And the Mac did.

And it managed to print out using crappy dot matrix, those fonts. Characters were two or three times larger than the ones I would print out on my dad's old rattly Epson printer. But in that size increase came the early attempt at nice fonts.

That introduction to the Mac seems rather dated now. From Jobs clothing, to the crappy way the screens look, to the awful voice. Still, it was something people had never seen, and it drove the fans in the audience to orgasmic delight, as Jobs got his first taste of adulation, from those sitting in the front row, to those two balconies up right up to the rafters. And gloriously addicted he must have been.

I look back at that presentation, surprised I can hear the high pitched whine that was, sadly, not removed, and sadly, still within the threshold of my hearing (meaning, it probably runs at 14 Khz).

It was a nostalgic trip to a time when I remembered using the Mac, in the fall of 1986, two years after the world was first introduced to the Mac. It wasn't the fancy graphics (not so fancy), nor the white background (not the green/amber on a black background). It was the fonts that made the early Macs rock.

And ever since, everyone's had to care about fonts. And we're a better world for it.

Were it not for the fact that font cost money. You have to pay for art. If someone could make money on the alphabet they would. And making money on fonts appears to be the second best way to do it.

Although I'd rather fonts be freely available to all who care, at least there are fonts out there we can use, from the much derided Comic Sans, to the Skia that I'm using now, to the ubiquitious Times New Roman and Helvetica and Arial and Palatino.

Great fonts have pushed the computer beyond the number crunching automaton that it could have been, into something that can be thought of as creative and beautiful.

YouTube's Star Search

The two clips above are from You Tube.

Many months ago I blogged on the increasing popularity of videos on You Tube and Google Video. I had wondered, at the time, how creative content would develop on this medium, figuring there was still new territory to explore.

Basically, there have been clips from shows that have been willing to look the other way (Daily Show, Colbert Report), people who lip-synch.

But what's more intriguing is the human data-mining that goes on. In particular, I just read about two guys who have played Pachelbel's Canon on a guitar. The first video is "JerryC", which is Jerry Chiang from Taiwan. He took a home video of himself playing sitting on a bed. That was followed up by Jeong-Hyun Lim of Korea, who did his version with a baseball cap covering up most of his face.

What you notice about his version, inspired by JerryC, is little stuff. He, too, is sitting in his bed. There's a mouse on the desk in front of a desktop. There's a spindle of DVDs or CDs in the back.

But what this reminds me of, oddly enough, are lessons I took on the violin many years ago when my parents thought I should take a musical instrument. At the time, most Asian parents in the US favored one of two instruments: the piano or the violin (or both). My brother had piano lessons.

I'll tell you, I didn't care that much for the violin. Essentially you are holding a box of wood underneath your chin.

I knew others who took lessons. While they weren't going to be concert violinists or pianists (given how few people make a living in music), they took it seriously enough that I was often amazed after ten years of lessons that they would drop it to go to college. And some Asian kids were good enough to make a living as professional musicians.

What these two videos show is that an instrument we associate with American rock is still an instrument and people all over the world can pick it up and practice the heck out of it. But more importantly, we would never have heard of either of these musicians had it not been for the viral nature of You Tube.

I read a reddit link to a New York Times article who revealed funtwo's identity (the guy who did the second of the two videos).

Virtuoso guitarists have generally relied on being part of bands (say, Eric Clapton or any number of heavy metal guitarists) to show their skill or perhaps a movie like Rock School.

With a video camera and the ability to upload video and viral word of mouth, people can display their talents on the web, in a kind of Grigory Perelman sort of way (the guy who posted his proof of Poincare's Theorem on the web), and perhaps earnest fans can dig that content right out, and other people can see it.

Not being a guitarist, I can't quite tell you how difficult the pieces that the two guitarists are playing. I'll trust the Times in saying that these are challenging pieces.

Remember when Andy Warhol said that we would all be famous for 15 minutes? His prescient words seem to be more and more true in the You Tube age.

Poster Boy

These days, with the popularity of You Tube and viral videos, anything said by a politician can spread quickly outside of news sources. George Allen, senator of Virginia, pointed out an Indian in the crowd and called him "macaca". As an insult, it was pretty obscure. Even so, the intent appeared to be an insult and that was enough. Still, it might not have been newsworthy. However, the scene was caught on video, and it started making the rounds, and became news anyway.

Poster Boy, a film that was made two years ago, is now being released. It tells the story of Henry Kray, the gay (but not out) son, of conservative, Jack Kray, running for re-election as senator. He wants to speak at Henry's college and wants Henry to introduce him.

The family's pretty dysfunctional. The wife (played by Karen Allen! I didn't even recognize her!) is a Southern belle who married Jack because he was on the political ladder. He doesn't care much for her opinions. She drinks and smokes and they bicker a lot.

When I first heard about the film, I thought the son would be this shy kid, just coming out, and there would be this rather predatory guy, working for some activist organization that seduces him, and then feels bad about the situation. Quite the contrary. The son's pretty indepedent, and knows what he is doing.

Half the time, I thought this was a disaster of a film, mostly because of its portrayal of Jack Kray. Politics is so divisive that liberals look at conservatives and imagine that they must be hate-mongers, hypocrites, and leading lives of lies. They can't imagine how conservatives can be earnest in what they believe in, since they clearly don't believe in it.

To this extent, The Birdcage, quite a different film, at least tried to show Gene Hackman's character as being somewhat earnest, if perhaps a bit simple-minded, about his conservatism. Even so, there is controversy in the film when a fellow conservative Congressman dies when he has, if memory serves, sex with an underaged black hooker. (That film's main flaw was it's sexless approach to an elderly gay couple. Even so, I did find it amusing).

Michael Lerner plays the irascible senator, whose only concerned with portraying the perfect family. We know this, of course, because of a second blunder in the film, which is a flash-forward, where Henry is talking to a reporter, dishing the dirt on his family. Henry is trying to be earnest, trying to tell the situation as he sees it, but in so doing, he falls for the classic screenwriter's crutch: the voiceover. Technically, it's not a voiceover, but it serves the same function.

At times, the film seems like Tucker, the film's director, tries to pull out all sorts of film tricks, quick cuts in time, hand-held photography (amazingly, didn't make me sick). You feel like he's trying to hard to look hip and naturalistic for a story that's not headed in that direction.

The film is two stories. The first is about Henry's dad and mom visiting him and wanting him to make a speech for his dad. He's really not eager, so his people talk to the president of the College Republicans, a guy resembling young Al Franken, to keep an eye on Henry to make sure he shows up.

The other story is a gay activist, who lives with a woman that has HIV, which she caught from her now-dead boyfriend. She's on anti-depressants and is generally leading a dead-end life working in a bookstore. Their lives seem more interesting if only because it's less predictable. Still, they seem like archetypes.

It takes a while before the two groups meet, and of course, they do it in the oddest way possible. He wants to have fun on a college campus and go to a party. He spots Henry and makes the moves. A guy gets interested in her, but she has all her issues she's dealing with and feels this is a relationship that won't be successful, so she might as well not get involved.

Despite some parts that seem heavy-handed, from the characterization of the senator and wife to the stereotyped activist club (why do these scenes always feel like they are modeled after events in the 60s, as if no one has done any research to see what modern activists are like), to the son that, of course, is not only gay, but basically is a male hooker.

And still, by the end, the film seemed to be working on me, because it was treading along the lines of, well, you're going to laugh. A romantic comedy. You want the two guys to get together. Hey, it's not exactly perfect, but maybe a happy ending is warranted. The split up is kinda silly (the activist supposedly wanted to "out" Henry, but he's having second thoughts, and Henry ends up outing himself---even so, Henry's pissed at this betrayal).

Still, the story doesn't stoop to easy conclusions. Recall that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter. Most people wouldn't care when voting for him (not that he's probably going to ever run for elected office). She was kept in the background for the most part, not fighting her dad. (The film's even a little prescient, as it makes references to JonBenet, two years before the incident would surface again).

Ultimately, I think the story's too tied to its political leanings. I think it could have softened his character, and explored a more subtle interaction. I'll give it credit for not being too blatant about what it could have done. I'd give them film about a "C" because I did warm to it at the end, and the acting was decent, and it went in directions that I didn't quite expect.

Moves That Could Revolutionize Figure Skating

I know. I know. This is the kind of attention grabbing headline that frankly no one cares about. Are you an avid fan of figure skating?

Once upon a time I was. What did I learn about figure skating? That there has been very little in the way of innovation, especially with jumps. Most of the innovation has occurred in ice dance, and even then, with so many routines ending in dramatic death scenes, the powers that be tried to reign in control by making ice dance less about dramatic performance and more about dance (boo!).

Figure skating has long held that its practitioners care about beauty, not sheer athleticism. This is why a skater like Surya Bonaly, who was a tumbling champ turned skater, was criticized. Her moves lacked grace. Her crossovers were amateurish. But she could jump from a standstill and do a triple.

This is why backflips have been banned from figure skating. It made figure skating look far less graceful and far more like gymnastics. Indeed, a careful observation between figure skating and gymanastics would show that figure skaters are indeed more graceful. Gymnasts, especially young women, are able to tumble and make athletic moves, but that characteristic over-arch of the back and waves to the audience show a lack of elegance. Some of that comes from youth and the lack of height. Height can give you more in the way of elegant lines.

The martial arts moves in the video above would border right on that edge of athleticism and grace. Some of the moves are sideway twists, rather than the conventional spins, a cross between a spin and some of the flying spins that skaters already do. Note that these athletes land on their feet, and many skaters practice on the ground before taking their moves out on the ice.

For a sport that seems like it's caught in the ice age, to forgive a wintry metaphor, these side twists could a new spin to the sport of figure skating.

If only some figure skater was bold enough to try it.

Book 'Em, Dano (er, Joel)

Today, Joel had a dilemma. Seems like he has so many books, he can't figure out what to do with it. He wants to classify the books in some reasonable order, and thus, either he goes with Dewey decimal, or he goes with the Library of Congress classification.

Now, maybe Joel has a wide variety of books ranging from cookbooks to philosophy to history to literature. If so, his endeavor is reasonable.

But, if the Fog Creek library collection is what I think it is, the books will fall into several categories: programming language books, books on APIs, software engineering books, books by Joel himself, and books on management. If so, many of his books will fall in an extremely narrow category and the classification system won't do him that much good.

I would suggest that he come up with some broad categories first that make sense to him. For example, programming, programming languages, Joel books, management books. Within each category, he's likely to know which books he refers to all the time. Let's assume the "I use these books all the time" is a small subset of all the other books. Have a special bookshelf for these frequently used books. This is his L1 cache of F.U.B's.

Heck, while we're at it, let's have an L2 cache. Books that are used once in a while, but not anywhere near as often the frequently used list. The rest are rarely used texts.

Now, he's still going to want a barscanner, if for no other reason, that everytime you grab a book, you should scan the book, and claim you took it. As some point, you can return it. However, the actual sorting may not be so critical.

Point is, you have lots of books. But, more than likely, you care only about 20 of them (for those on the Joel Management Track, put those books in its own special bookcase) all the time, and you should have a special bookcase for that, so you can find it easily.

Of course, we could wait for Google to scan them all in, and you just find them online.

I have one more wacky idea. Ever been to a busy restaurant? Some of them give you this beeping thing that flashes light when a table becomes available or when the order is ready? If there were only such a thing for books, you could attach it to its side, and it would make noise and light up so you could find it.

Spencer Tunick

I first heard about Spencer Tunick from a documentary on HBO about his photography. Does the name sound unfamiliar? Tunick's the guy who recruits a bunch of people to take their clothes off and lie down some place. These days, he's got enough clout that he can get hundreds of people.

His photos aren't solely about titillation. Indeed, at the distances you see the people, it's hard to make out details other than they are bodies. His photos verge on the abstract, which probably makes it classier, and certainly less controversial than, say, Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photos drew controversy from folks who equated his work with pornography, and wondered how the government could fund his work.

Tunick isn't like, say, Helmut Newton, who was into big bosomed women. He's certainly not Mapplethorpe. He isn't into distorted nudes. Indeed, he's interested in humans as landscape, often having them either populate natural spots (deserts, beaches) or near manmade sites (roads, steps, escalators).

He's so noted for what he does that the only person I can think that's close was this guy named Christos who would wrap up large things (islands, and such) with cloth and keep it up for a few days. I don't know what happened to that guy. Haven't heard about him for years.

Tunick's models are often people who have never posed nude before, but perhaps have thought about it. He often takes his pictures in a hurry and tries to draw as little attention as possible, though some of his pictures suggest this isn't always possible. In particular, he'll try to have pix done at dawn, have people rush out for ten minutes and get set up, click away, and have people sent off.

I will say that I've noticed something interesting about his photos. The people are almost always white. I have no idea what this means. If he's photographing in Europe and the US, this may be the reason. I don't think he purposely avoids filming darker skins, but it may be that finding a country whose populace is dark skinned where he can take photos is not so easy.

I know. This smacks of political correctness. But it's the first thing that came to mind while looking at some of his photos. He certainly has no obligation to find predominantly dark-skinned participants, and that may be quite difficult, without heading to, say, Africa.

Tunick knows he has a gimmick, but the photos are interesting, and he has his signature stuff. I imagine there are other photographers that have more "talent" that wish they could get this kind of exposure, if you pardon the pun, and certainly nudity must contribute to his fame. Could Peter Greenaway, for example, have been successful without every film having some level of nudity? His material is often challenging for folks to watch, because he eschews traditional narrative. Tunick doesn't really have this problem, as he's only going for a particular visual.

I do wonder whether he'll stretch in other directions in his photography. For example, he has yet to create patterns with the bodies other than simple lines. I'm not sure what he'd do. Spirals, for example. Is he willing to interspese clothed and unclothed people together? How about the use of props?

It must be something to be recognized for these photographs. People strive to be known for something, and Spencer Tunick has found his niche.

Bollywood

As people have become increasingly aware of other countries (at least, some people), there's greater knowledge of Bollywood which is "Bombay" Hollywood. The film industry of India resembles that of Hong Kong or Hollywood from the 1940s, where films are cranked out with high frequency and modestly low quality.

While there are the occasional Indian art films, the average filmgoer wants to wants to go to the movies to have a good time, which usually means singing, dancing, a love interest (but nothing overtly sexy), and a bad guy to root against.

Indeed, most Hindi films are musicals because people want to hear songs in films. In the United States, music is disseminated by radios, CDs, and tours by bands. In India, popular songs are sung in movies.

Back when there used to be musical in the United States, it wasn't so uncommon to have other singers sing the songs while the actors lip-synched. Still, there was some likelihood that the actor/actress were singing their own lines. Julie Andrews, for example, had a fine voice, and would sing her parts.

In India, this is far less common. Almost all actors lip-synch their songs. This is because there's a clear delineation between those who act and those who sing. Those who sing are formally trained to be singers, rather than being "amateurs".

Unfortunately, this means that there's a certain sameness to Indian singing. Women's voices are almost always pitched a bit high. To Western ears, they are almost done in a falsetto, suggesting little girls singing. An Indian, used to such films, would probably disagree, but for example, there aren't singers (I would imagine) like Janis Joplin with a deep, husky, raspy voice that resembles yelling so much as singing. This is not to say that there aren't deep voiced women that sing. I'm told a certain kind of song called ghazals can be sung a bit more deeply.

Even so, I wonder how Indian audiences would react if both men and women that weren't formally trained were singing the parts. Would they think it sounds awful? Would audiences learn to get used to it?

Like Hong Kong films, which find audiences far beyond its own borders, Indian musicals have also found fans outside India. While it's not particularly popular in the United States, I'm told that it's popular in all of Asia.

Occasionally, there's a serious Indian filmmaker that gets to make films outside India. Mira Nair directed Salaam Bombay nearly twenty years ago. Shekhar Kapur directed Bandit Queen before direcing Elizabeth and Four Feathers. M. Night Shyamalan, on the other hand, although born in India, made films in the United States. Only one of his films have had Indian themes (his earliest, Praying with Anger).

The most famous of the art house directors from India is Satyajit Ray, who died a few years ago. I'm not that familiar with his work, but I'm told he wasn't all that popular in India, given the nature of his films (I'm guessing they're reminiscent of directors like Ozu from Japan).

I wonder if Bollywood will evolve into a different kind of filmmaking, but given the audience that their films are aimed to, it seems unlikely.

Permalinks and Trackbacks

Some terminology has appeared that I generally ignore, even if I shouldn't. Two of these terms are permalinks and trackbacks.

The first concept, permalinks, is pretty easy to explain. Think of any website that changes content frequently, say, an online newspaper or a blog. You see a cool post and you want to provide a link. However, if you point to the main page, the link will go "bad" quickly, because the article won't stay on that page for very long.

Most blogs (and news websites) can put each article at a "unique" URL, usually based on the year and month the article was written plus the title of the article. For example, if I wrote an article on August 19, 2006 title "Why I Love Bananas", the URL might look like:

http://chaileaves.blogspot.com/2006/08/19/Why-I-Love-Bananas.html

This the "permanent" location of the article. I put "permanent" in quotes because it's not necessarily permanent. If Blogger were to go out of business, I would lose this link. If I were to delete my blog, then the link would disappear. If I were to revise that blog entry, then it's likely the date that it gets posted on may change to the new date of modification, and again, this permalink would get lost.

However, it's certainly more permanent than someone referring to the main webpage. When I need to refer to someone's blog entry, I find it on their page, then click on their permalink, which changes me to a webpage with only that one article in it, and cut and paste the URL, i.e., the permalink.

Trackbacks are a bit trickier. Suppose I read a great article in Joel On Software. I could add a comment to the article. But maybe I want to write it in my own blog. Suppose I want Joel to know that I wrote about his article. I could notify him that my blog entry (using my permalink URL) refers to his.

Ideally, I could to this without having to do any work. This would happen if, for example, Blogger, the blog service I'm using, and whoever is hosting Joel's blog can talk to each other. For example, suppose I post my article. The blog service (a program) runs a program and notices I refer to Joel's URL in my article. It automatically tries to contact joelonsoftware.com and inform it that there's an article written that refers to the permalink, which then updates his article to have a link to mine's.

This might be fine except for a few annoyances. First, maybe I don't want Joel to know that I've referred to his article, or at least, not so that it adds a link to the end of his article that others can access. Maybe I've said something negative or stupid and even though I posted it, it's not what I want everyone to remember me by. Or perhaps he doesn't want to get spammed by trackbacks.

To be honest, I'm not sure how all the communication works to make it happen. It may be far more manual than that (I'm looking at Blogger's mechanism. They apparently have something called backlinks which is the same thing, and rely on blogs that are indexed by Google's Blog Search to attach appropriate backlinks to your blog).

Yeah, that was tougher to explain that I wanted, which is why most people probably don't care about it and don't understand it.

Two Faces of Clint

Clint Eastwood's career has been defined by two "roles". There was the anti-establishment cop, "Dirty" Harry Callahan, which he played in several films. He also played essentially the same character "the man with no name" in Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns. These Westerns were especially interesting, because they defied traditional Westerns with clear-cut good and bad guys. Clint's cowboys were often not that much better than the guys he fought. Films like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly have an epic quality that doesn't resemble the traditional shoot-em-up Western.

While Eastwood continued to act, he also started directing films. Clint Eastwood is just on the border of being a great director. Most people say Unforgiven is his best film, possibly by a longshot, enough so that some question whether it was a fluke. The popular critics tend to afford him a bit more respect. The Academy recently gave him best picture for Million Dollar Baby.

Eastwood's now about to pull his equivalent of Spielberg and Peter Jackson at the same time. He's filmed two movies, but unlike the sequels that most people film when they do back-to-back films, he's also culled the spirit of Rashomon, telling the story of the Battle at Iwo Jima in two films, one told from the American perspective, titled Flags of Our Fathers and one told from the Japanese perspective, Red Sun, Black Sun.

He has an opportunity with these two films to top his accomplishments with Unforgiven, and to see whether, the sum of two films told together build something in the viewer that is greater than either film told apart. The films appear to have the gritty realism of a Spielberg film and yet also an oldish quality resembling David Lean. The Japanese version is likely to be subtitled and, like Gibson's Passion of the Christ or Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, released in spoken Japanese.

Eastwood's view of the world has generally been murky. His characters are not good, and some are quite flawed, even in an attempt to do good. Certainly, he's not likely to produce flag-waving patriotism, at least one that the audience can join in on.

If Spielberg has issues with greatness, it's that he sometimes delves into the comical even in his most serious films, or he gets way too maudlin. For example, it would have been too tough, given his background, for Spielberg to have filmed Downfall about the last days of Hitler. The ending of Saving Private Ryan tries to echo the ending of Schindler's List, involving tears of regret.

The first film is expected to release in late October. The second in December. It will be interesting to see if both films end up being nominated for best picture. Eastwood may not always be considered the greatest living director, but the Academy has liked him in the past, with nominations or wins for Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby. I'd imagine one, if not both, films would take a shot at the title. The second would be quite interesting, especially if it won, since there's not been a foreign language film that's won (even if the director is American). (Life is Beautiful was nominated in 1998, Il Postino was nominated in 1995. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated in 2000.)

Although Eastwood can be an uneven director, the trailer for the film looks good, and although it speaks to a time when Americans thought what they did was fight evil, it may have something to say about the United States today by bringing to light events of a war we thought was justified, showing a side most Americans weren't told about.

Let's see how it turns out.

Err America

Bush has been in power for two terms. This may coincide with the rise of conservative "news". Originally, it was Rush Limbaugh who gave voice to conservative views during Clinton's own two term presidency. Then, Fox News network essentially was one long apologia for the president.

The "left" after two consecutive presidential losses, both seemingly decided on the narrowest of margins pondered the reasons for the losses. Other than conspiratorial reasons (voting machines made by two brothers that are major Republican resources), one factor was the need for a liberal news source, and thus "Air America" with form SNL guy, Al Franken.

But I wonder how well Air America achieves its goals. Left-leaning listeners would find themselves quickly changing the dial from Limbaugh since he would spend his show just insulting liberals. Name calling and lack of fair reasoning was so common on the show that listeners would wince.

As much as it's a stereotype, many left listeners tend to be more educated (not everyone, to be sure) and they simply didn't want to hear the same kind of dialogue that Limbaugh spewed coming from the left. The left didn't have to sink to this level of inanity. Indeed, the left would prefer to listen to a more even-keeled NPR than the spoutings of Franken.

Where the left have gravitated to are the twin shows from Comedy Central, namely, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, both which satirize and skewer politicians. And many viewers "watch" this through non-traditional ways, via You Tube rips.

Satire is a pretty rare form of comedy these days. Stewart and Colbert do it as well as anyone, partly because what they are saying makes some sense. Sure, sometimes they gravitate to the seemingly incoherent rambling of Congressmen discussing the Internet as a series of "tubes" (which is not really all that inaccurate). But for the most part, they do what they do in a thoughtful way.

I do find that Stewart has pointed out something highly relevant to politics, and he did this when he was invited on Crossfire lambasting left and right for endlessly bickering, taking obvious stances on the left and right, and not really trying to have an intelligent discussion. This criticism eventually rung so true that the show was cancelled.

It still rings as true now as it ever did.

America loves its sports. Fans can be rabid supporters of a local team, whether it be pro or college. Redskins fans love to hate the Cowboys. Maryland fans yell F*** Duke, even as Duke doesn't really care. Despite how partisan a fan may be, they can generally understand that their views are a bit silly. For example, ask a Maryland fan what they think of, say, University of Washington, and they simply don't care either way. It's off in the PAC-10. Their venom is set at Duke. Silly, but harmless. They can peacefully exist with, say, non Duke-ites, no problem. In the end, it's just a game.

Politics, however, has become completely divisive, that is, for those who care about politics, which is still a rather small percentage of the population. Many who don't care one whit about politics find the Red Sox-Yankees hatred much more to their liking. It's hatred in a fun sort of way.

On the other hand, devoted Democrats and devoted Republicans find they are rooting for their own team. Their passion is so strong, they can't understand the other side. Democrats are convinced that Republicans are uneducated country yokels with the Bible by their side and ready to put infidels on the cross to burn. Republicans are convinced that Democrats are tree hugging, heathens, lacking morals and conviction, believing in political correctness, and ready to give breaks to those of color even as whites struggle to make a living.

Indeed, elections are often framed as to why the opponent is the devil, rather than why their own party can do anything good. How many people can't stand Bush right now? You want a solution to this? Move to a red state. En masse. Red states are sparsely populated. Instead, there's a lot of soapbox ranting.

In the last election, the Republicans were able to mobilize a group of voters that often chose not to vote. Ironically enough, many of the religious right weren't voting. A wedge issue was brought up, and oddly enough, it benefitted both sides: gay marriage. Gay marriage pushed the agenda further for gays and lesbians who had not give much thought that gay marriage was something they should pursue at this point in time. It also created fear among religious conservatives that if they didn't go to the polls to vote against referendums, they would be legalizing something they found distasteful (which wasn't going to happen, but let that not stop someone from alleging this might be the case).

And, there were still plenty of folks who didn't care either way. They just want to buy a house, raise kids, get on with life. Meanwhile, a third of the population decides what happens to the rest of the country.

Sometimes I wish Ross Perot hadn't dropped out (though if he had stayed in, George Senior might have been re-elected). Although Perot's party, such as it was, was something of a cult of personality, it would have given rise to some other party, some other voice. We're so stuck in our two party differences that we are bankrupt in ideas about how to improve things.

Parties like the "Green Party" might have something to say, but third parties have been branded as the lunatic fringe, as if the majority parties aren't themselves lunatic. It's funny how the American populace deals with this. Every few years they just switch parties. Better the party they know then the party they don't.

People have picked their teams, and wave their flags for their teams. It certainly seems a lot easier than thinking.

Hikaru Dorodango

Apparently, in Japan, there's been a revival of hikaru dorodango. Essentially, the goal is to make a sphere of mud. The end result look like a small bowling ball, sans the holes. It lusters after being polished.

Perhaps the appeal comes from the fact that it takes some time to master the skill of making these mud balls, and yet the final result makes you wonder if they are indeed made of mud to begin with. The result is far more serene and beautiful than one might expect.

Have a look.

Snakes Alive!

Snakes, so the good book tells us, have been around for a while. These creatures slithers on their bodies and give many a person the willies. Like Indiana Jones. "Why did it have to be snakes?"

Snakes on a Plane is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated film this year. But not because people expect it to be any good. This is the anti art-house film. No costume dramas. No profound messages about racism in the United States. No cowboys out on the range. It is what it is. Snakes on a plane. And of course, Samuel L. Jackson.

Snakes on a Plane (SoaP) introduced the power of the blogosphere, in particular, one blogger, Brian Finkelstein, who started up a blog called Snakes on a Blog. He had one objective while waiting for the movie to come out. Get invited to the premiere. A successful objective.

In particular, they wanted to rename the film to Pacific Air Flight 121 a name that most would-be fans felt was a bit too lame compared the infinitely superior Snakes on a Plane. Even Samuel L. Jackson wanted that name.

Why did Jackson want to star in this film? Originally, Ronnie Yu was set to direct this film. Yu has directed Hong Kong films (being from Hong Kong), most notably, Bride with White Hair, which Jackson had seen. He figured whatever happened in the film, it would be weird and fun. Alas, the executives didn't think so. In particular, when Yu appeared as if he weren't ready to make a PG-13 film, he was let go.

David Ellis was hired to take over. He had directed Cellular and Final Destination 2, a film Samuel Jackson had admired (apparently, most of his career was spent as a stuntman). Jacksong figured he'd stay with the project.

The blogosphere forced the filmmakers to add a scene for the audience to savor, but which wasn't in the original film. "I'm tired of these MF snakes on this MF plane!" utters Jackson in disgust! Having audiences change the film is not uncommon, but this is perhaps the first time it's been egged on by the blogoscenti.

People are going to attend this film mostly as a guilty pleasure. People want to go see a "good" film. But people also want to see a good "bad" film where you can check your brain at the entrance, and just enjoy the sheer ludicrousness of what's going on.

But you know what? It's hard to make a good "bad" film. The one guy that's allegedly famous for this is Ed Wood who directed Plan 9 From Outer Space. Russ Meyers may also fit the bill (indeed, once in college, I caught a back to back Wood/Meyers film. It was Glen or Glenda, a short semi-autobiographical film about being a transvestite, and Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill about three tough women who kidnaps a girl and takes them to a farm run by an old coot, his powerful but not too bright son, and his other, more sensible son.

I can't exactly recall that last good bad film I saw. It might be Latter Days. I shouldn't have enjoyed the film as much as I did. Now, this is hardly a traditional good "bad" film. In fact, many people were profoundly touched by this film about a gay Mormon who is rejected by his family and church when he is outed.

The reason it works is that it has a pretty earnest idea. It believes in "true love", the love that has meaning, and how this plays with the shallow pretty boy who sees the Mormon as a conquest.

But a good "bad" film where people would agree it's bad? Bad, but fun. Hmmm. A lot of Jackie Chan would normally fit the bill. You can't say Jackie Chan makes good films, for the most part. And yet, he's so creative in his stunts that you're willing to overlook that. The best of this is his attempt to do Raiders of the Lost Ark in a film translated as "Armour of God: Operation Condor 2". Even its title is deliciously awful. There's a fight sequence in a wind tunnel. Even as you can't believe what's happening, it's really fun.

The reviews have been mixed. Some feel it achieves all anyone who is suitably prepared want. Certainly, the reddit guys agree as they've made their daily picture "Snakes on a Reddit".

Coming off the heels of the mass British arrest, this should provide some light fun for air travelers.

Posthumously Ali

Ali Farka Toure has been called the bluesman of Mali. His style of play has been compared to John Lee Hooker, a name I'm not that familiar with. I've always preferred Toure's style more than home grown blues, maybe because I like his voice more than the blues I listen to (which isn't much). I'd also have to say I like the fact that he doesn't sing in English. His voice then becomes more of a vocal instrument.

While Toure's music is uniformly good, there's is a feeling that if you've heard one of Toure's albums, you've basically heard them all. That may be a bias I have where you want musicians to change their styles or evolve it so that you don't say "that sounds exactly like song X".

Toure released Savane posthumously, meaning that he recorded it when he was still alive, but it was released after his death (of course).

I haven't put Toure into much rotation lately, so coming back to hear his music after that is refreshing. I do think, in his last album, that there are some changes. In any case, I'm going to listen to the rest of the album and enjoy.

Mark Cuban Goes To The Theaters

I'm one of those guys who goes to Landmark Theaters, the ones that Cuban is in charge of. Landmark Theaters have been something of a godsend because they show films that otherwise would be hard to watch elsewhere. My beef with it is that I have two choices. There's one in Bethesda, which is convenient to go to, and there's one in DC on E Street, that takes more work for me. You might think they would show the same movies, but E Street consistently shows the better films. It's almost as if they've decided that hip movies go to E Street, and the Merchant/Ivory films go to Bethesday (I know, Merchant passed away recently).

That's not what I wanted to talk about, however.

Recently, Mark Cuban issued a challenge, of sorts, to his readers. Mark is in the movie business. One of the issues that vexes Cuban is how expensive it is to get people to watch films. Most filmmakers would love a film like the second Pirates of the Carribean, which raked in a ton of money, on the strength of how much fans loved the first one (the second one, by the way, didn't live up to expectations).

Before getting to my idea, I want to think about why the filmgoing experience, for lack of a better word, sucks. First, obviously, is price. It costs around ten bucks to go watch a movie. I remember once upon a time when it cost 3.50 at non matinee prices. That was quite a while ago. Parents find the price of taking the whole family to be awfully prohibitive. A family of four might spend 30 bucks on tickets alone.

And food? Prices at theaters are like prices at airports or prices at some sports arena. Large Coke? I mean enough Coke to choke on? Four bucks. This is for like two liters of soda. Thanks for contributing to obesity. I know. Theaters have no choice. The distributors make the lion's share of the profits, and theaters only start taking a decent cut many weeks in.

Theaters need blockbusters, something that stays for weeks. And of course, they make money on outrageous prices. And people will pay for it too. Some classier theaters (like the Silver AFI) offer wine, beer, or Häagen-Dazs ice cream. They're overpriced too.

Because of the pricing, people are decidedly more selective when it comes to film watching, and it takes a lot of work to convince a person to shell out the money and time. Families like the idea that the cost of renting a DVD and staying at home costs, what? Five bucks? Instead of thirty or more? For those with small kids, it's a no brainer. And the theater experience? Have you seen the size of televisions these days? Fifty inches of high-def goodness.

Let's think about the after film experience. What do you do next? Hmm, well, you leave the theaters. Maybe there's a brief discussion of the film afterwards with the buddies, if you have a large group. But otherwise, it's time to head home.

Let's contrast this with television. Lately, television shows have been trying to hook viewers by having an ongoing storyline. What used to be anathema to television networks has now been seen as a boon. In the old days, if you had a series that hooked people so watching it in the middle would leave viewers stranded, then no new viewers would watch it. Not something the networks wanted.

But then came the saviour. DVDs! If you missed a few episodes, or a whole season, you could just buy the DVDs for the season you missed. The shows benefitted doubly. First, with rabid viewers who had to watch what happened next. Second, with Johnny come latelys who bought the DVDs so they could catch up. The premier show that does this is ABC's Lost.

Even shows that didn't have such a strong central storyline earned a following because fans simply liked the characters. Whether it be Whedon-philes who helped resurrect Firefly into a film (though the film was perhaps not the best thing for the series, as it tried to advance to many plot lines at the same time), or fans of Friends, Seinfeld, and so forth.

Television is offering the kind of hook that movies can't compete with. Movies must engross you in two, maybe three hours tops. You have to like the characters or the story really soon because there isn't a lot of time to do character development. You like a movie for its adrenaline rush, or its deep issues, or for its quirkiness, but once it's gone, you have to wait a while before the next film comes out.

I want to address all these problems simultaneously, although it would take some money to make it happen, and I can't guarantee how well it would work.

Before I give you the idea, I want to tell you that I've begun rereading Ender's Game for maybe the third or fourth time. I'll blog about this in another entry, but I have an idea for how to direct this film, even though I lack any experience as a film maker. I won't go into those details now, but I did want to talk about its history.

Orson Scott Card wrote Ender's Game in 1977, the same year Star Wars came out. He had submitted his story to Analog magazine, at the time, one of two science fiction serials (the other being Issac Asimov's Science Fiction). His novelette was expanded to its current form in 1985, where it won Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel.

My point? Card got his start with a much shorter form, and there was a forum for his short story.

Here's the idea. Start creating movies that last half an hour to an hour tops. To attract viewership, these films should be shown in coffeehouses and bookstores. This is where it gets a little expensive. Coffeehouses and bookstores would need to be retrofitted to have theaters that hold, say, 60-100 people in three rooms. Charge people five bucks to watch a film. Refreshments are part of the coffeehouse/bookstore.

Where are we headed with this?

First, why short films? Several reasons, but first and foremost. They are short. Unlike a two hour film, where you have to get tickets, wait in line, and watch, and leave. By the time the film ends, you've spent three plus hours on this evening. Short films mean less of a cost to watch a film.

Secondly, because it's shorter, it should cost less money to make the film. Indeed, the next Orson Scott Card of film might be able to distribute these films to eyes that would never have seen them before. Established filmmakers may want to try more experimental subjects on a shorter time scale.

And, you could get fans to vote afterwards about how much they liked the film. If there's enough groundswell of support, it could be used to dynamically adjust what films are shown at other theaters.

Lesser known fare, such as anime, could be shown as well. People used to watching anime at home could now watch it on Anime Thursday and have a discussion group afterwards to talk about it.

Why put it in a coffeehouse or bookstore? This is to tap in to the next problem with movie theaters. When you're done, there's nothing more to keep you there. You simply leave. But bookstores, for example, (and coffeehouses) potentially have the space to hold a discussion after the fact. That could be an informal discussion, such as you and your friends. Or it could be more organized with a person ready to lead up discussions. Bookstores already invite people to come over to talk about books. Movie makers could come by. Someone could sponsor a series of films and try to get patrons to come by.

How to start this off? First, try to get a few of the big names to make not just one short film, but a series. This harkens back to the days before television. Serials have worked out well for television, and used to be the mainstay of theaters. Thus, Steven Spielberg make a two hour films, but breaks it up into four half hour chunks.

Each half hour chunk costs five bucks to watch. The whole two hours? Twenty bucks! People spent ten bucks for two hours, now spend twenty for the same twenty bucks.

Now, again, why bookstores and coffeehouses. People already spend a lot of time in bookstores and coffeehouses, often hours. Maybe one person likes to read books, open up a laptop, and just hang out. You tell your friend, hey, I'll be watching the anime that just came on for half an hour, and I'll be right back after that.

This is why the short time is necessary. It makes the cost of watching a film much more palatable. You're hanging out at the bookstore. It's showing something every half an hour (you'd likely need to stagger theaters every ten minutes, and then have one room that is empty per half hour, so it could be cleaned).

What we have here is synergy. You get people to show up to watch a film. They hang out at a bookstore/coffeehouse afterwards or beforehand, a place they might not otherwise have gone to. Or, they already hang out at such a place, and you give an option that they can take without a great investment in time or money. Advertise? You can now go to some other techniques, such as email, with previews (should a person want to watch) or read about.

And it should benefit filmmakers. The Orson Scott Cards of films of the world would get their start in short films then graduate to full-length features. If you want to get more, you could watch two films in a night. They're short enough. I think you'd find directors like Lynch or Soderbergh or numerous others willing to try a much shorter format. Also, by putting films in coffeehouses/bookstores, you might actually improve the quality and diversity of film being made.

Well, there it is. Something to think about.

James McAvoy

Not since Ewan Mcgregor burst on the scene with his starring turn in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting have we seen an acting talent like this from the shores of Scotland. James McAvoy costars with Forrest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland about a Scottish doctor who becomes official physician to Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda in the 70s.

Well, perhaps I'm exagerrating. To be honest, I've never heard of James McAvoy until watching the trailer. The first thing that struck me was his accent. So, I figured, fine, I'll search for his name. And what do you know? He has a webpage devoted to him.

Although he's been in about a dozen films, showing that he has some level of popularity, is it enough to warrant a website? These days, actors of any level often get a website. You don't have to be all that famous to have one made for you. Few, if any, match Wil Wheaton's geekiness. I have to give him props for running his own website, something that is far beyond most actor's technical ability or desire.

It's tough to tell whether these sites are "official", i.e., made with the blessing of the actor, or made by a zealous fan who often works on it for six months to two years before abandoning it in a fit of short attention span, fad switching outburst. Usually, fan sites say clearly that they are a fan, because otherwise they are inundated with email of other fans wanting to build a special bond with the actor.

So I picked James McAvoy, but there are literally hundreds of other relatively unknown actors I could have picked that have their websites. Some are there for noble purposes. They use it as a public face for charities they support.

Sometimes I miss the early days of the web when everyone tried to create their garish, but simple, websites, maintained it for like six months, and then decided not to pay the money to keep it around longer than that. A website takes work, work that could otherwise be spent meeting people, going out to events, reading books, or getting plastered (or feeding the baby).

One day I hope more actors are like Wil Wheaton, who are able to run their own website. I see that happening in two ways. First, the websites become easier to run. Second, actors, and thus people in general, become more savvy about computers. Oh yes, and actors find that they like to maintain the website.

I've restricted this discussion to actors, but honestly, it could be anyone. Musicians, athletes, cooks, bus drivers, what have you.

We're leading increasingly public lives and the Internet is enabling that (oh, I hate to use that word).

So good luck Mr. McAvoy. We'll see if you have the cojones to be Ewan McGregor.

Cold Day

I suppose it had to happen. With Kathy Sierra blogging on passionate users, hammering us in the head about how we must make users kick ass, she would eventually write an article that I, that I, that I....agree with.

Kathy recently wrote an article about how she was taking a class in digital photography, mainly to learn how to use her digital camera better. She's a smart woman. She started off in home economics, then discovered the programming bug, became a trainer of sorts, and helped start up the "Head First" series of books. She regularly speaks on the topic of creating passionate users.

Despite her sparkling resume, she's never been able to take full advantage of her digital camera, and thus, she signed up for a course. She wonders why she needs to do this? She can get a book on how to use her camera, but she notes, the book merely describes what the various knobs and buttons do.

They don't tell her why the knobs and buttons are there, and why she should care.

Hallelujah!

This is so freakingly common, especially in consumer electronics, to have devices that have hundreds of options. Frankly, I blame the Japanese with their fastidious need for controls and options and more options. This desire has permeated all of consumer electronic-dom so that even American technological products are stuffed to the gills with features.

It's not that the features are so bad, because once we discover them, we wonder how we ever did without. The problem is discovery. Give people too many choices, and they ignore them all. I have a new camera, and I can hardly tell you what all the features are. I almost never use the movie mode, except when a button has accidentally switched to that mode.

A good manual should tell you not only what the features are, but why they are there, and frankly, when you should use them, and how important they are. For example, white balancing. Digital camera sites will tell you "white balancing" is important. I barely know what that means. It has something to do with what humans perceive as white being mismatched with what the camera perceives as white. Humans can see white in shadows and white in bright sunlight, and think them the same. Cameras treat them differently.

I'd also love for manuals to tell me what's not there, though they aren't likely to do so. For example, tell me that I can't do aperture priority or fill flash. Think of their best camera and mention what this camera lacks relative to the big ones. There's one good reason for camera companies to do this. It gives customers incentives to pony up more money for top of the line cameras.

But the point is, I'd like to know that it's missing so I don't have to go look for it. I just don't want companies to go hog wild and purposely leave off features off their low end cameras to make me feel bad for buying them.

But Kathy's right in general. So many tutorials (books for dummies) just don't understand how to explain things to people. Here's a feature. Here's another feature. I won't tell you if feature A is killer, while feature B, you can live without. A good manual tries to convince people that they should learn this and how to go about doing this.

Alas, it's tough to find people who will write such books.

As Barry Schwartz, professor at Swarthmore, says, too much choice is debilitating. You always think you can do better. And even worse, as you get the thing you bought, you never fully utilize it the best you can. Companies need to seriously look at how to make these things better.

Every electronic product should come with a DVD or several, where nice friendly people step through the most important features and tell you when and where to use them. That's what people really want. To be told what to do, and to make the best use of what they want.

Well, Kathy, I admit it. This is a major gripe for me as well. Can't stand consumer electronics manuals. Painful to use!

Ginormity

A few weeks ago, a friend wrote a summary of his business trip and used the word "ginormous". I suppose, to the uninitiated, the word looks like "gih-normous" since it starts with a "g" and people like to pronounce that with a hard "g" sound, rather than "jy-normous", which suggests the real roots of this made-up word, "gigantic" and "enormous".

Americans are fond of creating new words all the time. Slang phrases become part of normal vocabulary, such that "diss" which comes from "disrespect" (is that even a word) becomes part of day-to-day language. I'd have to give credit to inventive phrase (and music and dance, etc) to African Americans. The rest of the U.S. picks it up well after it's been first coined.

I had thought "ginormous" was just a clever phrase, made up just for the occasion, but now I'm seeing it everywhere. Did ginormous just take a leap in popularity? And when did it do this? I looked at Google Trends to see if searches involve "ginormous", but apparently, while it's common to use the word, few search for it.

It's just the kind of word you think is pretty old (maybe like "fantabulous") this mashup of two or more words, and yet I've only noticed it recently, which typically means it's been in limited use for some time before that. For example, when did goatees come back in style? Last five years? Last ten? Probably have to go back to 15 years ago, and yet it looks so modern and recent, even though it isn't (admittedly, it was a look that came back in vogue after it had been popular in the counterculture movement of the sixties, then faded into obscurity through much of the 70s and 80s before surfacing again in the 90s).

Speaking of searches, there was a snafu at AOL when anonymized searches were put up on the net for the purposes of research. Apparently, it never occurred to AOL that maybe these queries, despite being anonymized would provide enough clues to the person making the queries. Thus, age, location, ethnicity, even anger to recent breakups find themselves in queries.

This put egg in AOL's face, a company already suffering from its heavy handed tactics of preventing customers from easily leaving AOL for greener pastures.

But the original intent, using queries for research, is still possible, and despite the revealing nature of the kinds of queries people make (showing either anger or kinkiness), there is something more interesting. That's the query itself.

When I use Google to make queries, my queries are keywords. For example, I might say "Ruby Rails Tutorial". But many of the queries treat searches like oracles, such as "Find me a good tutorial on ruby on rails". I would imagine such queries are harder for search engines to work with since there are so many extraneous words that are just so much noise. Of course, the folks who know about this first hand are the search engine folks. After all, they're the ones that have to process these queries.

I wonder, though, if there will come a time when we'll head back to something that Yahoo once tried to be: a directory for the masses. The problem with Yahoo's approach is that the list of links they provided were simply that, a list. There was no way to rank the links so that more relevant ones went up, and less relevant ones went down.

I can imagine, for example, a list of common things, say, databases, or tutorials on Ruby on Rails (or Django or Erlang + Yaws) where people post links to tutorials, and then users vote them up or down. The key is how stale the rankings are. The idea is to find someway to determine relevance based on people who know. Right now, Google uses its page rank system to determine relevance based on links by important websites. This has worked really well for Google (think of how many spam you get as results--hardly any).

Anyway, it's a ginormous world out there. Because you know, neither gigantic, nor enormous, by themselves, convey the sheer size that ginormous does and it's creative to boot.

OK Go Tops So Far

Alas, it's another crappy video. However, this one's the one so far to beat. Again, the white shoes help.

Having seen this video a gazillion times, you can break down the video into segments.

Let's break it down. It's long.

• Arms near head, leg to side This is the opening move. Most of the times, I see the arms a little too straight up and down, and the leg movement done a bit too fast.
  
• Line up with arms on shoulders Errors here involve distance relative to one another, and assertiveness by lead guy to move arm out of way.
  
• Hand roll while legs move
  
• Arms wide and up Mistakes typically include arms too far up in the air, instead of out wide.
  
• Hand roll, side to side step Hand roll can be off.
  
• Half hearted bow Most people don't do this slow enough.
  
• Pop up arms out spin around (oh such grace, oh such beauty). Failure to look forward, arms in wrong position. Remember to smile, and face front when you can.
  
• Finger snap, knee bend Look coordinated
  
• Fists up and down, not rolled
  
• Four way, John Travolta move This is hard for most people too. It typically looks wrong.
  
• Michael Jackson handshake move
  
• Push side to side Another tough move. Often doesn't look like the person is being effectively pushed.
  
• Support two guys Often doesn't look like two guys are being held up.
  
• Two guy dance Often rushed, and not up-and-down enough. Must look disinterested too.
  
• Lead guy does four way move Again, this often doesn't quite look right when done.
  
• Chicken dance move People often mess this up by putting hands under arm pits. Kicks to left and right are sometimes too agressive or too bouncy.
  
• Above head two hand fist roll by lead A little hard to do.
  
• Lunge move Often not slow enough, with enough lean to look like a good lunge.
  
• Arm swish move (Upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right). Usually, most people do this pretty well.
  
• Left right hop with arms Sometimes not jumping up high enough
  
• Circle gun movement Steps taken can be too big. Should be tiny. Lead guy should face us even as he moves to the right side.
  
• Left right hop with arms as in two moves ago
  
• Hand clap on knees, backing up to straight line formation Often, ends up a little too spread apart.
  
• Macarena move This is right arm to opposite shoulder, down the line, left arm to opposite shoulder, facing to right, then facing to left, then the cross arm up and forward alternating. Needs to be assured. Fist cross movements need to be assured. Hands above head should not cross (one fist on top of other)
  
• Gun fight Also a really tough sequence for most.
  
• Cat pawing move Two guys need to be far apart, not a true cat pawing movement.
  
• Matrix move Arm goes over head of guy. Arm needs to be nearly horizontal. Guy needs to face us (not up). Two guys need to be pretty close. Perhaps the hardest move to do well.
  
• Hold hands and pull while circling each other Tiny steps while doing this.
  
• Punches cause both to fall back and be pushed up People often don't fall back that well.
  
• Arm slide vertical, then horizontal and head down Often done too quickly.
  
• One arm in air, wrist roll Wrist roll not always done well
  
• Hula move
  
• Chopping, four step, forward backward move
  
• Sexy crossed arm, lift, and arms above air move Usually not done slowly enough with punch at the end.
  
• Lift guy up Right guy should look up. Left guy looks back.
  

The video above nails most of it. The weak parts are the chicken move and the matrix move, but most everything else is solid.

You Can Call Me Al

Reading another article, this time in USA Today.

The gist of the article is this. Al Gore isn't nearly as green as he should be. Gore has been presenting his views on global warming throughout the US, but mostly through his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

While the author's point is well taken, this is a borderline "ad hominem" attack. Most people don't seem to mind such attacks because they don't understand debate ("of course Plato wanted philosophers to be kings--he was a philosopher!"). Ad hominem attacks (attacking the person rather than the arguments they make) happen a lot.

Let me put it this way. Al Gore could drive a gas guzzler. He could spray CFCs into the air all day long. He could burn coal for no apparent reason. While this would make Gore a complete hypocrite, this would not necessarily make him wrong.

To give an analogy, suppose our leadership claims that the war is important. Thus, volunteers to fight a war is important. Thus, joining the military is important. Yet, count the number of politician's children have entered the military. I've heard maybe two congressmen's kids are in the military. Why? Is it possible that they don't want their kids killed? Probably.

Even so, the argument may not be wrong. They may feel this war is necessary (not that I do). They don't send their kids to participate in this war. This may be the height of hypocrisy, but the arguments may still make sense (well, not to me). All I'm saying is that you have to debate the arguments on its merits rather than base it on the actions or history of people saying it.

The article claims that Al Gore wants us to change our lives drastically and yet he refuses to. First, is he asking us to change our lives drastically? Turn off the lights, don't drive as much, and so forth? Presumably, those people who find this drastic lifestyle change too harsh wouldn't have changed their habits regardless of how Gore behaved. If Gore was a green saint, they're likely to say he was a kook. Nader advocated (back in the 70s) people use more fuel efficient cars (he was one of the earliest consumer advocates). People were trying to dig up dirt on him, but it turns out that he did live the lifestyle that he advocated (though during his recent presidential bid, someone discovered he had made some prudent stock investments, so he was making some money).

Point is, Gore may still be right, even as he lacks discipline to follow through.

The article mentions going "green". This is one of those weird bits of accounting I don't entirely get. In principle, people can pay for "green". Now, that mostly (I imagine) directs cash to places that provide green power. The actual eletricity you get is on some grid, and there's no particular way to guarantee (short of trying to use local solar or windmills) that the electricity reaching your home really came from a green source. Indeed, even as you might be paying for green power, is there anyway to create more forms of green power with the money? That's the real key. How do we increase use of green power? And why does it have to be more expensive? What is the accounting behind all of this?

It's not that I don't want the country to be more "green", it's that I want it to be more obvious that we are going green. In the 70s, Carter tried to get Americans to be more green. But with coal and gas still a lot cheaper, and the technology not up to par, wind and solar still aren't nearly as viable as it could be. Believe me, it would make a lot of sense if we could cut this dependency (part of the way to do it is nuclear power, but Three Mile Island scared a lot of people off nuclear--Chernobyl didn't help matters either).

The reporter has a point though. Individuals have a hard time changing their habits. It's easier for corporations to change their habits, though, for economic reasons, they may choose not to. It's easier to change habits when not doing so is painful. Thus, people are getting hybrid cars not because they want to be kinder to the enviroment but because gas prices are so high. They simply want to save money. Why the car industry doesn't push more hybrids is beyond me. The reason cars are as fuel efficient as they are is twofold. First, the oil crisis of the seventies did push manufacturers to make more fuel efficient cars, and that did help.

Second, because California has rules about how fuel efficient cars has to be, and because they are a big state (much like how Texas, the huge state that it is, influences what books are used in schools because they buy such a huge amount), their standards (mostly with emissions) affect standards of all cars (though some car manufacturers have found ways to cheat their numbers).

The lesson to be learned? The government can do some good, even as companies are sometimes too short-sighted to see it. Companies look to the short term, and don't think about how best they can wean us off our gas habit.

Car Wars

Just perusing over this New York Times article, which says that, despite the increasing prices of gas, Detroit intends to roll out "muscle cars", i.e., big gas guzzlers.

I'm old enough to remember, back in the 70s, when there was an "oil crisis" and gas prices jumped to a dollar. Gas had been something like 40 cents or so then, so the jump to a dollar was huge. Worse still, there were shortages so people had to get in line to get gas (presumably because some places were closed).

During the 70s, there was a push to smaller cars, and imports gladly filled the void. The German VW bug was popular, and small Japanese models were also popular. The US has often had trouble keeping up due to its history of large cars and the belief in the industry that what Americans wanted was large cars.

During the 70s, car ads almost always listed gas mileage. You were told how well the car did in city vs. highway driving. By the 80s, when gas prices became stable around a dollar (and even into the 90s), this information was dropped off the ads. Why tell people how fuel efficient the cars were? Instead, car manufacturers wanted to push bigger cars. SUVs and minivans became people's joy and pride. (Well, maybe not the minivan, but it became essential for families with kids, replacing the less sexy station wagon).

That's what I think is happening in Detroit. They had no idea gas prices would stay this high this long and probably planned these large cars from the get go. With the designs nearing completion, they're simply going to push the cars on the market anyway, and hope advertising will convince Americans that they should spend, spend, spend.

But there's a more insidious reason to push bigger cars. More profit. Smaller cars have smaller profit margins, so Detroit, in its short sightedness says they won't build cars that won't make them money. Meanwhile, people are more likely to buy smaller, more fuel efficient foreign cars.

Remember the 70s? Chrysler was in big trouble, and asked the government to bail them out with a loan. Chrysler managed a comeback on the strength of its charismatic boss, Lee Iococca, and was able to pay off the loan (one imagines). Are we going to face such a situation again where Detroit complains things aren't fair? Rather than have the Japanese to blame, they have themselves and high gas prices to blame.

Red Alert

With the latest alerts, we should think back about how things used to be. 9-11 was a big deal because it was the first real terrorist act on American soil since, well, who knows when. Americans were used to such problems occurring overseas. Remember all those IRA attacks in England? Perhaps not. After all, it did happen over there.

But back in the 70s, it was common for airplanes to be hijacked. The government wanted the airlines to increase security, but they balked at the idea. Too inconvenient for customers, they said. The event that caused airline security to go from zero to minimal was a hijacking where the hijackers said they would run the plane into the Oak Ridge nuclear facilities. Until then, hijacking was seen as an inconvenience. The plane was typically diverted to Cuba, but no one was hurt.

These days, many passengers are put through a great deal of inconvenience to avoid an attack here or there, which, to me, is a disproportionate response to what's going on. For example, no one much seems to care that a drunk driver could hit them at any time. Somehow, the reassurance of controlling our own cars, and the relative safety of going to work and back day after day makes us think this is highly unlikely. We feel it won't happen to us. It'll happen to someone else.

And that's really how our attitude should be towards airline travel. I'm not saying the government should do nothing, but sometimes the reaction is overreaction, meant not to prevent acts from occurring, but to give people who have no idea how unlikely these events are from getting worried. And still, they get worried.

In the DC area, there was a sniper attack. The two guys killed perhaps 7 people or so. But they were out in suburban areas, attacking people at Home Depots, and the like, not isolated to inner city neighborhoods that some people feel are where violence is mostly contained. Still, the odds went from very small to a little bit more than very small. This drove people nuts. They would try to avoid going to gas stations.

Admittedly, I wasn't immune to it either. All of a sudden, I thought people were hiding in shadows. I was nervous getting gas. I even knew that this reaction was irrational. The odds were simply in my favor, at least, with respect to this. I really had more to worry about with a car accident (as do you) because we drive every day.

This overreaction also makes the government look good. They are looking for our best interest. But this reaction means lots of money spent to avoid problems that are unforseen, and therefore leads to paranoia. And the problem with paranoia is that you want to find something, otherwise people wonder what you're spending all that money on.

I believe we should be prudent about this, but we probably won't be. Rather than the government looking to help improve our lives by doing positive things, we have one that promises to protect us from evils. Frankly, I'd prefer the first kind of government.

Island Time

Ah, the people who posts remarks to a blog. I recently wrote that many African/Carribean, etc. restaurants are slow. It may sound "racist" to say that (the educated reply was "you are an idiot"), but I've been to several restaurants where service was slow. I've read reviews of restaurants that are slow. Is this every restaurant? No. If I find a speedy Cuban restaurant or a speedy Jamaican restaurant, I'll go, but they are far less common than other places.

This is a cultural difference. In other countries, eating at a restaurant is a relaxing experience. It's not meant to be rushed. That's fine. I'm just not heading to restaurants that do this, unless I have time.

The people.

Best Ok Go So Far

I've been scanning the various Ok Go A Million Ways on You Tube. Ever since the video spread around in the fall of 2005 (not sure how I missed that, but anyway), there's been many a group that wants to do the dance.

Most of the times, the group is four guys. Usually, these are high school aged guys, either for a talent show in high school, or possibly something more Asian. Indeed, the dance appeals, for some reason, to Asians, perhaps because Asians are both geeky and like to dance.

I've seen two all-women groups perform the dance. I've seen some co-ed folks do the dance.

The one I've included above is the best I've seen so far. It's too bad the video is so crappy. There's way too much hand jiggling. The reason it comes closest is the lead guy is the closest to capturing Tim Nordwind's performance. He's even got the bald look and white shoes to boot. He lacks the glasses, the sideburns, but otherwise, does a good job imitating Tim, which is half of pulling off the video.

I just saw one with all four women, but they purposely dress up like guys (I'll include the video at the end). Their impersonation works because, surprisingly, of the hair. If you get the hair right for the three other guys, that's part of getting the attitude right, especially for Damian Kulash.

I'll rattle off a list of things that go wrong when doing the dance. First, to be like Tim, you need to face the camera a lot. At times, the person doing Tim is facing away. You also have to exaggerate the facial reactions because that's what Tim does. People have a problem doing his chicken dance because they put their arms underneath their armpits, when Tim has it closer to his side. Tim impersonators roll their hands, when Tim does more of a shake.

In the circle gun part, some people take steps that are way too big. Again, Tim tends to face the camera, so impersonators take heed.

Many, many people get the Tim bow down wrong, and then the Tim arms up in the air. He has a slow deliberate bow, then pops up joyously, and stares at us. When he rotates in circles, he again, tends to favor us. The dance move with the two guys shortly after that is often not done slowly enough, nor with enough lilt (get up on those tip toes).

There is the push Tim side to side. I've seen ones where I don't believe he's being pushed. Then, when he holds the two guys to the side, they don't seem like they are being supported.

Later on, there is the side by side macarena like move. I've seen guys stand too far apart to do that. You need to be pretty close to each other. Also, people cross their wrists to make too much of an "X", when it's more like one fist in front of the other (this is when the move their arms alternately up and forward).

The fight sequence is always tough, especially the Matrix move. Two keys to the Matrix move. First, Damian is awfully close to Tim. Look at his legs relative to Damian in the video. Second, Tim faces the camera when he ducks under the arm. Some people face up.

The lunge move, which you would think would be easy, doesn't always come out that well. You have to leeean into that move.

There are a few things people seem to nail, however. For example, the Damian impersonator usually does the part where Damian unbuttons his jacket at the beginning. (If anything, the video at the top is weak in its Damian impersonation). Also, when they get in a circle as if they are aiming guns, the guy doing Damian usually gets right that Damian is staring up. There is also the four points hand shake movement (upper right, upper left, lower right, lower left).

Half the groups do the hopping moves all right. Some even hop a bit better than the original.

If I had two pieces of advice, I'd say that some moves need to be slowed down a bit. I know the moves are being done to music, and that dictates a certain pace, but there are some parts that are done too quickly. The second is to pay attention to Tim. He lends weight to the central role, and the lead person has to do the same.

I'm a little surprised that most of the groups are so young. I suspect young teens find it easier to find time to practice and do something wacky than people closer to the ages of Ok Go.

For some reason, the dance almost always elicits quite a response, even if the audience has never seen the original (which is highly likely, given the original made the rounds via Internet video). The women tend to get pretty enthusiastic, probably partly because of the guys dressed up in suit and tie.

Here's the other video that's pretty good, especially in the look. They do mess up the chicken arm movement. It's a much better made video since the one at top was probably somebody bringing a portable video camera without a tripod, where the one below was likely done with a tripod.

Ok Go Redux

I've been hooked on watching A Million Ways, the Ok Go song that became a viral video success. The dance seems rather amateurish, yet no one can deny its basic coolness. I had thought, after watching their followup Here It Goes, performed on eight treadmills, which tops the first in cleverness, was indeed a bit more skilled than at first imagined.

By watching about four or five versions of A Million Ways, you begin to see why it's difficult to get the right look. People can imitate the movements, to some extent.

So here's my guide to figuring out this infectious dance. The first key is Tim Nordwind. In most of the homages, none of the performers sing. They are dancing to the music, even the person playing the Nordwind lead role. That's a mistake. Part of the reason the dance works is that you pay attention to Nordwind. He typically faces the camera when he can. Some of the imitators get a little caught up with staring at their arms rather than to the audience.

In fact, watching the video yet again, Nordwind's expressive singing is really the key to the dance working. He's confidently assured, and the rest of the band is serving as disinterested backup. Another small, but key element is his white shoes. This makes him stand out more than the others (so does his baldness, and the thick framed glasses and beard).

The first place in the dance that starts to create problems is early on when he does his spin with his arms up in the air. Then, there's the part where Nordwind gets pushed back and forth. There's also the four sides arm shuffle (to the upper right, upper left, lower right, lower left). Even the chicken arm movement can be a little difficult to imitate.

How close do you stand to the person in front? Can you arch your back at the key moment? How fine should the steps be when they do the circle, I'm holding the fake gun bit?

The other lead, Damian Kulash, serves as the main disinterested guy. The rest of the guys are serving backup, and so their faces tend to never get too excited, unlike Nordwind.

Of the performances I've seen, the closest one to working is a bunch of high school guys. But the problem with their performance, as crisp as it is, is it lacks the Nordwind lead. The lead role looks like the backups, and that makes it far less effective than it should be. Most of the dance is about his confident dancing.

Even a geeky dance like this requires a certain level of style and coordination.

Keep this in mind, oh ye imitators of the Ok Go band Million Ways dance.

OK GO

With a name that sounds like some sort of Japanese t-shirt, this band from Chicago got some fame for a "viral video", the one above that was filmed in the backyard, and choreographed by one of the band member's sister.

Both Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy said it required a lot of practice to appear impromptu in Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise. The initial sense you get watching the video is "I could do that". After all, they have the coordination of water buffalos in heat. (To be fair, I don't know what water buffalos in heat look like, but I think the phrase is funny, nevertheless).

The second thought is "that's rather clever". The band members look like geeks dressed up in suits, their moves practiced just enough to admire the cleverness, but without that precision that Michael or Janet Jackson were noted for in their videos. There's a Ethel Merman, synchronized swimming quality, in some of their moves.

If this video is appealing, it must be because it is silly, and yet the band members are keenly aware of how silly it is. It is a low-fi version of the ultra-polished dance moves from boybands and the Jacksons.

They've followed this up with a clever video done on eight treadmills. Just the thinking it took to do this video puts in the pantheon of other organized geekiness, like the water fountains of Bellagio video done by two guys with hundreds of liters of Diet Coke and Mentos.

And you know what? The songs are catchy too. These are infectious pop ditties that don't take itself too seriously.

And it's one of the first videos that have caught on in the You Tube generation, where millions of users look for clever videos, being human data miners, then post the best of these to websites like reddit or Digg. I don't think we've seen where You Tube (and others--Google Video, etc) are ready to take us. Small bands with cool videos are likely to be one of the more sucessful users of this new technology.

Of course, armed with the video, it's a small matter to read up on the band. As with many bands, they have their MySpace page. They have a Wikipedia entry. Apparently, they've been associated with They Might Be Giants, also another favorite geek band. Perhaps one of the more clever ideas is to use Tim Nordwind, the most distinctive looking of the band members to do the lip-synch, even as Damian Kulash is the lead singer.

The band's touring now, mostly through Europe.

I've got the CD being sent to my place, and hope to give it a listen on Tuesday.

Wanted: Books on IDEs

Although I haven't coded lately on C++, I remember enough (especially with a book or some online resource) that I could manage something if I had to. What I don't know, because I don't have much experience, is how to use the Visual C++ IDE. But it's really a pain to find a good book on IDEs. Eclipse is perhaps the only IDE that has books dedicated to it, that aren't about, say, Java. Eclipse's IDE is suitably complex that you want to learn how to do things, like create a project, use CVS, debug, add a plugin, and so forth, that are beyond simply programming.

For some reason, this idea of using an IDE effectively has not really hit the Visual Studio languages. Most of these books assume you want to learn the language first. It's amazing, however, how few books realize that being effective in an IDE and being an effective programmer are two different things.

There's many a great author who stuck stubbornly to a typewriter. Why? Because the user interface for most typewriters did not change. Indeed, even most modern keyboards are still fundamentally a typewriter, plus a numeric keypad, plus some function keys. Some have a few more keys beyond that, but few folks who design keyboards add too many weird keys. Amazingly enough, computer keyboards have stayed roughly the same for many years.

It's the software that caused authors to avoid computers. With a typewriter, they knew what to do. They knew to buy paper. They knew how to roll it in. They knew how to type. That's it. You could explain how to use a typewriter in fewer than five pages of text.

Sure, the typewriter lacks all sorts of conveniences. You can't email the text. It's hard to make a second copy. It doesn't spell check. You can't really format it easily. It's hard to type any math related symbols. In many ways, it sucks compared to a good word processor.

But by contrast, it requires hundreds of pages to describe what a word processor does. However, books are pretty good about doing that. Few books on Word actually talk about how to write. They aren't tomes on English writing.

On the other hand, nearly every book on Visual Studio, be it about Visual Basic, Visual C#, and so forth, are about the language, not about how to use the environment to do useful things. What are the short cuts? What is the expected work flow? How do you debug? How do you integrate with other applications?

Surprisingly, for all the work Eclipse has done with Java, there's not an equivalently good version to run C++. For any other language, you never hear Eclipse as the first choice as the IDE, mostly, it seems, because all effort has been focused on Java (perhaps in an effort to kill languages like C++). I once asked some folks what a good Javascript editor is, and they said, sadly, there aren't really any. Surely, given the popularity of Ajax, there must be someone who'd like to write a good non-browser based Javascript interpreter/debugger, etc.

One reason there are so few books on IDEs, I suspect, is because people invent new IDEs faster than new languages. The basics of C++, Java, C# change slower than the IDE market. Indeed, many writers of programming language books decide they won't talk about any IDE (except possibly Java with Eclipse) for fear their books won't sell with an IDE the user doesn't use.

There's a simple solution to this. Write books on IDEs. Then, a programmer gets one book on the language, and another on the IDE, whose purpose is to write a few simple programs (assuming the user knows some of the language), but illustrates the features of the IDE. It's such a simple, fundamental idea, that you wonder why computer book publishers fail to see this market.