This is the view of the ocean (it’s back there in the distance) from where we’ll be staying in sunny Vieques, Puerto Rico, from Christmas through New Year’s. There should be lots of snorkeling, laid-back beaches, humongo mofongo, and a bay with glow-in-the-dark plankton (the bad news: it’s called Mosquito Bay, and apparently for a reason).
I’ve queued up a few “link dump” items that have been sitting in my scratchpad, waiting to be blogged, but this is probably my last “official” post of 2009, a year I think lots of us feel can be adequately summed up by the phrase “good riddance.”
Well, it’s snowing in winter, so that means it’s time for self-styled “skeptics” to start pooh-poohing the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming. Josh Marshall of the left-leaning blog Talking Points Memo offers some interesting insights on just how selective such “skepticism” can be: “What I’ve been thinking about for a while is how it is that very few people doubt physicists or oncologists when it comes to their areas of specialty even though theories come and go in those fields as well.”
Paul & Storm, a duo much beloved by hipster-geek types, brightened up the end of last year with 25 Days of Randy Newman.
This year they’re tackling another ambitious project with It Might Be Xmas (here’s their Q&A), a series of holiday-themed songs in the style of They Might Be Giants, another hipster-geek mainstay whom P&S have covered before, notably in a concert with Jonathan Coulton where they played the band’s supposed-to-be breakthrough album “Flood” in its entirety.
Lots of handwringing in the traditional media lately about the effect Google is having on the field: David Carr laments that because of Google’s aggregation of news content, “a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It’s a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that.”
Ken Auletta wrote a piece in New Yorker about it, but they’ve put the original behind a paywall and I can’t Google it. Auletta’s NY’er piece is a preview of his new book, which Nicholson Baker reviews, demolishing the notion that Google doesn’t contribute anything of value to society — a claim apparently offered by Auletta in his book.
Meanwhile Google’s Eric Schmidt offers some ideas on how Google can help traditional publishers: “We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free.”
Just how much Christmas spirit can you have if you’re not only an atheist, but also an Aussie, where Christmas comes in mid-summer? Tim Minchin, whom I’ve already mentioned in earlier posts, answers that question with “White Wine in the Sun” — this has been on YouTube before, but only in videos with slideshows or lyrics, not an actual live performance. This is truly beautiful.
Lots of animals have language of some sort, but only humans use syntax – combining different elements of language to convey different ideas.
At least, that’s what people used to think.
Researchers just found a species of monkey using syntax, a linguistic complexity that we used to think separates us from other animals. As Slashdot succinctly puts it, “For example, the word for ‘leopard’ gets an ‘-oo’ suffix to mean ‘unseen predator.’ But when that word is repeated after ‘come over here,’ the combination means ‘Timber!’ — a warning of falling trees. Scientists have known for some time that vervet monkeys have different warning calls for different predators — eagle, leopard, and snake — but unlike the Campbell’s monkeys, vervets don’t combine those calls to create new meanings, a key component of syntax.”
This is really cool to me, and probably only a very few other people. Fortunately, I got to marry one of those people.
Here’s the conversation that ensued when something came on the TV about it:
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I remember it, except even then the people in the know called it “the Internet,” not just “Internet” like the TV reporter does. “A revolution in which 15 million people are taking part.”
One of my big regrets is that I didn’t write down the date of the life-changing moment when I first logged in to Usenet. Another is that I didn’t register davewilliams.com immediately after learning it was available (I got around to it about 2 months later, and someone had snapped it up).
Every web person at every newspaper (or anywhere else) needs to read this right now.
Google found that having a page load in 0.9 seconds (instead of 0.4) produced a significant decrease in user satisfaction, even though users said they’d prefer to get 30 search results per page (0.9 seconds) instead of 10 (0.4 seconds).
That’s half a second, with a total page-load time still under 1 second. And it’s too slow — so slow that people find it annoying even if they get 3 times as much information during that tiny half-second.
Seriously, though, isn’t this Kay commercial even creepier than the usual jewelry ads? Or is it just that buying expensive jewelry is inherently creepy, what with the implied quid pro quo and the notion that love can be expressed in dollar figures (“My love for you has this many zeroes!”)?
Interesting insight: we like to dismiss sellouts because it frees up brain space for new heroes to worship. Cynical take: Guy who sold out now thinks selling out isn’t so bad after all.
My own theory is that when you’re young and accustomed to being poor(ish) and insecure(ish), you admire people who choose to stay that way. As you get older, and start to think about mortgages and retirement plans and such, you’re happy to see people you respect get some money in their pockets (like They Might Be Giants’ jingles for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee like the one above.)
