Michael Lewis has a fantastic article on major league baseball’s obsession with power in this weeks New York Times Magazine. While it pays due diligence to the steriod controversy, it focuses instead on the roots of our national pasttime’s obsession with homers. High percentage players definitely have an advocate in Lewis, though I think he may overlook the impact of Ichiro on the renewed interest these types of hitters in the farm system.
Yes, that’s right, the Steves are blogging. Some of the posts are initialled, some aren’t. I’m starting to think of the two Steve’s as a single organism, kind of Norman-Batesy Econojournalist (in a nice way, though) or perhaps a better analogy would be a symbiotic relationship such as the oxpecker and the hippopotamus (I’ll tactfully skirt the issue of who is which;-). It’s a very necessary relationship, I think. Levitt can certainly write well enough for an economist, as evidenced by his papers, but economists are evolutionarily inclined to be enamored of details the rest of us generally find inane (we rather prefer just to consume the stunning conclusions that inevitably result from giving those seemingly inane details a good working over). Journalists are think are the hermit crabs of this little ecology metaphor (I really should have paid more attention in biology) and need someone’s ideas to crawl into and inhabit for a while. What results is a beautiful synthesis of ideas and communication rarely achieved by either on their own. Did I mention you should buy Freakonomics? You should.
…with Hayes Carll & Walt Wilkins - any one of which would be a damn good show in their own right. I shouldn’t even have to give you a link to the Mucky Duck. Oh yeah, and here’s Mando’s Website.
My reaction to this was a little bit like finding out your two best friends are engaged to be married. It’s really great and you’re really happy for them, but you’re also a little freaked out about what this will mean for your relationship with each of them individually.
I’m a bit scandalized by the idiocy of some of the reporters covering the story though. Terrance Nielan is a might bit clueless about what these companies’ products actually do. He describes Adobe as a “document-design software company” which is a bit like describing GE as a lightbulb manufacturer. Photoshop gets a mention near the end. He then refers to Macromedia’s products as “the Dreamweaver and Flash web-design software used mainly in digital video production.” Since when is web-design software mainly used in digital video production? Dammit Terrance!
Yeah, I know, for all my pretensions to geekiness I just didn’t see that much point in text messaging. 99% of the time, I’d just rather call someone and talk to them. Google SMS just changed all that. Text the number “46645″ and add a query such as “pizza” or “John Doe” and some parameters such as a zip code “77043″, hit send and wait a few seconds. Google texts you back with the results - name, address, phone number, distance, &tc.
My favorite travel blog Gadling had a post the other day that hit kind of close to home, riffing off PRI’s piece on Bizarre Place Names, it singled out Texas, quite deservingly, as home to some of the weirdest. “Cut and Shoot” was first on the list, I put the quotes there because I always thought it was Cut n’ Shoot. If I find a definitive answer I’ll post back here later. I’ve heard a couple of variations on the origin of the name, generally from dubious sources, although those seem to be the only kind who have any thing to contribute on the subject. All agree it has something to do with a violent conflict that arose over the appearance of a certain minister in the town and literally refers to the act of cutting and shooting. In some versions an argument erupts over the shape of a new steeple, in most I’ve heard, an out of town minister was invited to speak in a new church, some didn’t like what he said, some did, and they settled it the way some Christians do (but shouldn’t).
James Watson is not just smart, he’s wicked smart (as we mainers would say) and yet he’s as down to earth as he could be. It was wonderful to hear the man in person, speaking at the Farfel Lecture last night at the University of Houston. Particularly gratifying was the revelation that Nobel Prize winners can be bad a math (he thinks a C in Calculus kept him out of CalTech), and he attributes much of his success not to great intellectual prowess (although we can assume) but to his ability to get along with people like Francis Crick. In another funny and eye-opening account, he told of Lawrence Bragg’s desire to get rid of Crick, thwarted only by the fact that at 35, Crick still hadn’t completed his PhD. More poignant was his discussion of Rosalind Franklin whom he seemed to believe would have discovered the structure of DNA herself if she had been more open to the kind of collaborative relationship he and Crick shared. He returned to that theme in the question and answer period in which his principle advice to anyone who was engaged in research was to find a partner, someone to bounce ideas off, someone to disabuse one of ones conceits and prejudices.
A note on the Farfel Lectures, the U of H PR department is apparently big on whisper-campaigns and I only found out about Watson’s talk through a Google News alert from some medical journal, but I have since discovered the UH Newsroom buried on the website. Coming up soon… Cornel West. They also let you know about the latest 5% tuition hike… guess they’ve got to pay for all those new buildings somehow.
PBS did an interesting documentary on American speech patterns across different regions. Texan, of course, got a lot of coverage. I had assumed the Texas drawl was slowly but surely disappearing into homogenous twanglessness under the weight of in influx of non-texans (fereners) and the exodus to metropolitan areas like Houston. I was pretty surprised to find out that the Texan dialect is actually spreading, particularly the use of the flattened vowels and of course, “y’all.” I can never understand why others can’t see the necessity of “y’all.” In my humble but correct opinion is by far the superior second person plural.
UPDATE: Marginal Revolution just happened to post this map of the generic name for softdrinks. It makes me wonder though, when a trademark like “Coke” is widely used in a generic sense to refer to any kind of carbonated sugar-water, does it present a problem for it’s status as a protected trademark?
So back when Google purchased Keyhole, it was assumed that this would eventually happen, but who could have guessed how cool it would really be? To try it, type in an address at Google Maps and when the map comes up, click the “Satelite” link at the far right. I g-mapped all the places I’ve ever lived.
The colors are kind of fascinating. I could have guessed that Maine would be green, since it’s 98% undeveloped forest land, but I had forgotten what a concrete jungle Boston was. It would be nice if the there were a time sequence to the satelite imaging that would let you select from a range of available photographs, see the progress of development. It would be nice to see Maine in the fall, for instance.
Every now and then some industrious soul comes out with something so ingenious, so beautiful and simple that I seethe with self-righteous that I did not somehow think of it first. Such is the Annotated New York Times, which rather artfully marries the blogosphere to the grey lady of dinosaur blogs. Let the lawyers commence!
A press release in my inbox today informed me that Ascender Corp received “venture capital funding to launch an entertainment division to be based in Hollywood for its new TV show: “Pimp My Font.” Apparently Pimpmyfont.com is a font geek’s feeble poke at humor. The producer of “Pimp My Font” is <gag>Ms. April Foo</gag>.
