Entries for July 2005
Does the Shitty Tipper Database seem wrong to anyone else? I’m all for underpaid service staff venting and attempting to raise public awareness about bad tipping (which, in the absence of poor service, amounts to an unjust pay-cut determined completely by some random idiot customer). But since when is anything under 17% considered shitty? $0 on a $125 bill, that’s shitty. 15% (on the pre-tax amount, I might add) is still the industry standard, no matter how much it sucks to get exactly the minimum for adequate service.
More importantly, what gives these people the right to take someone’s full name off of a credit card (procured on the job, BTW) and put it up on the web because of some completely subjective gauge of service provided? If I’m eating somewhere, my expectation is that my credit card is being used only for payment and not for any personal use by the employees of the restaurant. If I don’t leave someone what they think was deserved, they should catch me on the way out and ask me about it. Perhaps I forgot or miscalculated. Or maybe the service was a bit off in my mind. If I left no tip, I probably talked to the manager about why I did so and they’ll be hearing about it from them. But to be all passive aggressive and get my name from my CC and post it on some internet message board…that suggests to me that maybe they didn’t deserve a good tip in the first place.
As We May Think by Vannevar Bush. This influential essay that introduces Bush’s Memex concept was published 60 years ago this month.
Another take on why movie theater revenues are declining. The ads suck, the movies suck, ringing cell phones suck, and you can watch your Netflix at home on your widescreen TV. Again, no mention of piracy.
The folks at Danny Meyer’s Shake Shack go above and beyond the call of duty. When a birthday party shows up after an erroneously posted closing time, the manager has food sent over for them from the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park. Amazing service.
The importance of narrative in science. “Science and stories are not only compatible, they’re inseparable, as shown by Einstein’s classic 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect”.
Don Watson and Clive Thompson on the assembly-lining of thought and discourse via modern jargon. “That’s the true malaise of modern jargon: It forces people to treat any subject as if it were always a managerial problem of inputs and outputs.”
I missed this April article in New Scientist about Google’s plans to rank news stories according to quality and credibility of the sources:
Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.
The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google’s database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.
Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.
The second paragraph of the story mentions that this system has been patented by Google, but I don’t see how it’s much different than what PageRank does or what Metacritic has been doing with film, game, and book reviews:
This overall score, or METASCORE, is a weighted average of the individual critic scores. Why a weighted average? When selecting our source publications, we noticed that some critics consistently write better (more detailed, more insightful, more articulate) reviews than others. In addition, some critics and/or publications typically have more prestige and weight in the industry than others. To reflect these factors, we have assigned weights to each publication (and, in the case of film, to individual critics as well), thus making some publications count more in the METASCORE calculations than others.
I wonder if these systems will eventually let their users tweak the credibility algorithms to their liking. For instance, it won’t take long for conservatives to start complaining about the liberal bias of Google News. In the case of Metacritic, I’d like them to ignore Anthony Lane’s rating when he writes about summer blockbusters and put greater emphasis on whatever Ebert has to say. In the meantime, I’m readying my patent applications for RecipeRank, PhotoRank, ModernFurnitureRank, SoftDrinkRank, and, oooh, PatentRank. I’m sure they’re brilliantly unique enough to be recognized by the US Patent Office as new inventions.
Another use for Google Maps: getting out of traffic tickets in the courtroom. Many traffic cases are decided in favor of the state because of a lack of information on the part of the defendant…you’d be surprised at how good a chance you have of fighting a ticket if you show up armed with good information.
Philip Stewart has constructed an alternate version of the periodic table of elements in the form of a “chemical galaxy”. “The intention is not to replace the familiar table, but to complement it and at the same time to stimulate the imagination and to evoke wonder at the order underlying the universe.”
Ever wonder what the world’s best palindrome is?. “My girlfriend has a freaking weird name: Eman Driewgnikaerfasahdneirflrigym.”
Antarctic base will be built on skis. The movable station “will prevent the possibility of the base drifting out into the ocean on the back of an iceberg that has ‘calved’ off the shelf”.
From an article on mnemonics in the NY Times Magazine:
This might well be called the year of memory. Already, I’m able to click on the icon that marks the Find function on my little pocket Treo. Can’t think of a friend’s last name? I enter “Myrna,” and in a second the screen invites me to choose Davis, Greenberg or Lewis. Can’t remember the name of a book by Jonathan Spence? This time, it’s Google to the rescue: three clicks gives the answer: “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.” And that’s just the start.
Apple has just released Tiger, its latest operating system, which includes Spotlight. Just as Google searches the World Wide Web, this new feature uses a word or phrase to find a document inside your computer. Microsoft is at work on a new operating system, Longhorn, with similar capability. Such powerful assists to memory raise a question never before conceivable: Why struggle to remember anything?
I’ve been increasingly aware of this phenomenon with my own memory. Emails are forgotten seconds after they’re read; Mail.app will keep track of those. If I’m having lunch with a friend and they bring up something I’ve posted to kottke.org recently, it often takes me several seconds to remember posting it…my weblog (my outboard brain) is where I put things that I want to “remember”. I’ve never been able to remember people’s names worth a damn, but until recently, I knew hundreds of URLs. Now my newsreader keeps track of those for me. I know 3 phone numbers by heart: mine, Meg’s, and that of my childhood home (where my dad still resides); the rest are in my cell phone. Birthdays and special occasions are in iCal…I know a few friends’ birthdays and when the 4th of July is, but that’s about it. And Google remembers everything else.
I’m sure with all that storage space in my brain freed up for other things, I’m able to do so much more with my limited mental faculties. If only I could remember…
Apple unleashed a rash of Slashdottings when they turned on podcast support in iTunes. “It’s very bizarre. The only reason why I found this funny was because I have unlimited bandwidth in my server package. If I were some of the others who got caught unaware, I would probably be apoplectic.”
Racial disparities in tipping taxi drivers. African-American drivers were tipped 1/3 less than white drivers and African-American passengers tipped 50% less than white passengers.
More philosopher ratings, this time from Crispin Sartwell. “jacques derrida: there’s something to be said for the deconstructuive method, a tool which i’ve been known to throw around myself. otherwise, this is so, so, so full of shit. obviously, it’s intentionally obscurantist, which is i guess supposed to be part of the profound game of defamiliarizing language etc. fuck you.’
Pokernomics: Steven Levitt is researching the economics of poker. If you send him statistics from your online games, he’ll share the results with you.
The New Yorker recently ran a feature on how a couple of mathematicians helped The Met photograph a part of The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. That same week, they ran from their extensive archives a 1992 profile of the same mathematicians, brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky. The Chudnovskys were then engaged in calculating as many digits of pi as they could using a homemade supercomputer housed in their Manhattan apartment. There’s some speculation that director Darren Aronfsky based his 1998 film, Pi, on the Chudnovskys and after reading the above article, there’s little doubt that’s exactly what he did:
They wonder whether the digits contain a hidden rule, an as yet unseen architecture, close to the mind of God. A subtle and fantastic order may appear in the digits of pi way out there somewhere; no one knows. No one has ever proved, for example, that pi does not turn into nothing but nines and zeros, spattered to infinity in some peculiar arrangement. If we were to explore the digits of pi far enough, they might resolve into a breathtaking numerical pattern, as knotty as “The Book of Kells,” and it might mean something. It might be a small but interesting message from God, hidden in the crypt of the circle, awaiting notice by a mathematician.
The Chudnovsky article also reminds me of Contact by Carl Sagan in which pi is prominently featured as well.
According to Wolfram Research’s Mathworld, the current world record for the calculation of digits in pi is 1241100000000 digits, held by Japanese computer scientists Kanada, Ushio and Kuroda. Kanada is named in the article as the Chudnovskys main competitor at the time.
(Oh, and as for patterns hidden in pi, we’ve already found one. It’s called the circle. Just because humans discovered circles first and pi later shouldn’t mean that the latter is derived from the former.)
A list of films ordered by uses of the work fuck. A movie called Nil By Mouth has 470 uses; that’s 3.67 uses per minute.
BBC Radio 4 poll results for Greatest Philosopher Ever!!. 1. Karl “Boom Boom” Marx; 2. David “The Kid” Hume; 3. Ludwig “Van” Wittgenstein; 4. Friedrich “Freddie” Nietzsche; 5. Plato “Johnson”
An unauthorized electronic version of the new Harry Potter book is now available online. Rowling won’t do an e-book version of the Potter books, but one made its way onto the web about 12 hours after the hardcover was released in stores.
When the Fortune article on the Netscape IPO came out, I wondered why Jamie Zawinski wasn’t in it…figured it was something like this. “The article is out now, and I see my instinct was exactly correct: it’s not accomplishments or culture or technology, it’s just about price tags. And to this day, every time I read Mike Homer’s name my stomach clenches up.”
Los Alamos From Below: Reminiscences 1943-1945, by Richard Feynman. Today marks the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test which bomb Feynman helped build.
Here’s a list of reasons that Hollywood is in trouble, with nary a mention of the piracy bogeyman. “These trends do not appear reversible in the short run. It is not just that this year’s movies mostly stink.”
Molecular gastronomist Ferran Adria of El Bulli has his own Lay’s potato chips in Spain. “Having eaten the entire bag, we can now report that they were noticably better than your average potato chips; the crispiness was just a little grainier than usual, if that makes sense, and the flavor more pleasant.”
The Harry Potter book series as allegory for 1930s Europe. Voldemort as Hitler, Dumbledore as Churchill, and Potter as FDR’s America?
Whoa, each key on this keyboard is a little computer screen. I’d love to use the typeface of my choosing for my keyboard.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently purchased a painting called Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna. The Met paid $50 million for the early Renaissance piece, more than they’ve paid for any single acquisition to date. The New Yorker has the story of how they came to own the last Duccio in private hands. In the article, Calvin Tomkins explains the reason for the painting’s importance:
Small as it is, the painting has a powerful presence. It captures the eye from a distance, and commands, up close, something like complete attention. Holding the Christ child in her left arm, the Virgin looks beyond him with melancholy tenderness, while the child reaches out a tiny hand to brush aside her veil. Centuries of Byzantine rigidity and impersonal, hieratic forms are also brushed aside in this intimate gesture. We are at the beginning of what we think of as Western art; elements of the Byzantine style still linger—in the gold background, the Virgin’s boneless and elongated fingers, and the child’s unchildlike features—but the colors of their clothing are so miraculously preserved, and the sense of human interaction is so convincing, that the two figures seem to exist in a real space, and in real time. Candle burn marks on the frame, which is original, testify to the picture’s use as a private devotional image. It is dated circa 1300.
I had the good fortune to stumble across the Duccio at the Met a few weeks ago (I was there for the Diane Arbus exhibition and passed it by accident on the way to another part of the musuem). What struck me at the time was a certain oddity of the piece…almost like it wasn’t what they’d said it was but magical all the same. I know Jack about art[1], but after reading more about Madonna and Child, it probably seemed odd to me because it’s a transitional piece, not quite Renaissance but not quite Byzantine either. The piece is a thin slice of a phase transition that had barely begun, a moment frozen from when the artists of the day were collectively working out how a Renaissance painting would eventually differ from earlier European styles and represent the wider cultural changes then occurring. Marco Grassi writes in The New Criteron:
More importantly, the artist places the Virgin at a slight angle to the viewer, behind a fictive parapet. She gazes away from the Child into the distance while He playfully grasps at Her veil. One must realize that every aspect of this composition represents a departure from pre-existing convention. With these subtle changes, Duccio consciously developed an image of sublime tenderness and poignant humanity, almost a visual echo of the spiritual renewal that St. Francis of Assisi had wrought only a few decades earlier.
More more on Duccio, check out his biography on Wikipedia and some collections of his work (1, 2, 3), including other Duccio representations of the Virgin and Child),
[1] I wish I’d taken an art history class in college, but my 18-yo self wasn’t that interested.
Atom 1.0. The Atom format finally goes 1.0.
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