free variable

DFD, RIP

Will Benton — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:32:04 +0000

Sunset on the Ridge

Will Benton — Mon, 14 May 2012 04:01:41 +0000

In my experience, it’s hard to pay attention to nagging worry or ennui when presented with a scene like this:

Indeed, in these situations my only difficulty is avoiding singing something like this too loudly I sail along in the cool evening air:

Om levende blev hvert træ i skov,
og var så hvert blad en tunge,
de kunne dog ej Guds nådes lov
med værdelig røst udsjunge;
thi evig nu skinner livets lys
for gamle og så for unge.

What Maurice Sendak Can Teach the Church

Will Benton — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:08:02 +0000

What Maurice Sendak Can Teach the Church: a nice reflection from Russell Moore on fear, wildness, and redemption — and on how some truths are universally written on human hearts.

Translating across cultures

Will Benton — Tue, 01 May 2012 02:30:24 +0000

I’ve been idly thinking about translation lately, so I was happy to run across Scott Cairns’ poem “Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous” this morning. If you’ve spent time in the neighborhoods of the liberal arts that I used to haunt — or even if you haven’t — you’ll probably find it as delightful as I did. (via Alan Jacobs.)

What to do with your liberal arts degee

Will Benton — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:56:02 +0000

From McSweeney’s: “This is NASA, not Grinnell. I don’t have the time or patience for your renegade attitude and macho bravado.“

The sad decline of Bleecker Bob’s

Will Benton — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:06:06 +0000

Back when people still used to go to record stores, I’d make a point of going to this one whenever I was in Manhattan.

Unfriend me not in the time of old age

Will Benton — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:16:52 +0000

Lately I’ve been thinking of Facebook and Twitter as a sort of digital Pompeii — evidence of peoples’ past activities will persist, barely-comprehensible and frozen in time, even after the posters have stopped writing about the great runs they just had, the hilarious and poignant antics of their kids, the dated pop-culture references they share with you, and so on. Unlike Twitter’s firehose, which privileges novelty above all, Facebook’s interface calls out prior events and actively encourages you to participate and interact in certain ways, which can lead to points of surprising emotional resonance.

For example, Facebook sometimes reminds me to send a message to a deceased friend on his birthday. I usually react to these sorts of notifications with a mixture of renewed thankfulness for my friend’s life, including all the memories that have occasion to surface once more, and renewed sadness at their present absence. It merely traces along scars, though, to receive an automated suggestion that my friends who have gone to their rest are good candidates for demotion to the “Acquaintances” list because I don’t interact with them all that often these days.

Land of perverts and Nazis

Will Benton — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:04:22 +0000

If reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wasn’t enough to remove any doubt in your mind that Sweden is absolutely chock-full of perverts and Nazis, maybe this story about the Swedish culture minister’s baked-goods preferences will clarify matters somewhat.

Parenting successes: real-food edition

Will Benton — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:31:38 +0000

Andrea was out of the house at suppertime today, so I ate with the kids by myself. I made them grilled cheese sandwiches and steamed carrots, but I made myself a spinach salad with avocado and salmon. They ate all of their carrots and most of their sandwiches before taking about a third of my salad. WT was pretty polite about it (“Dad, could I please have some more salmon with spinach and salad dressing on it?”), but Maggie was content to serve herself from my plate, one handful at a time.

Next time, I’m just making one big salad.

Anyway, here’s the dressing my kids loved so much; it’s pretty simple, but I consider that a point in its favor.

Avocado and citrus salad dressing

Blend together the following until smooth:

juice of one large orange or 4 Tbsp lemon or lime juice
5 Tbsp avocado oil
1/3 large, ripe avocado
salt and pepper to taste

This is probably enough for four salads unless you’re in the habit of really drowning your greens. It’s also great on sweet potato fries.

Dear St. Olaf College

Will Benton — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:40:56 +0000

Dear St. Olaf College,

Although I may never totally let you off the hook for selling WCAL, ignoring the myriad helpful suggestions I offered you in the enthusiasm of youth, and raising tuition and fees by over 250% in the last 12 years, I still love you — after all, you introduced me to my wife and many of my lifelong friends, you more than adequately prepared me for additional higher education, and you taught me to like Haydn, among other things.

As you surely recall, one of my favorite pieces of apparel is this sweatshirt:

I’ve had it since I was 16 (i.e., for more than half of my life!), and although it is faded, too large, and frayed at nearly every seam, I intend to keep it until it completely disintegrates, because there hasn’t been a St. Olaf sweatshirt since that’s worth the great memories I associate with the Hill. I thought I’d lost it once. In the frenzied post-graduation move-out exodus, a friend accidentally liberated it from my coatrack peg in the Huggenvik House, believing it was hers and she’d left it behind while hanging out. I was despondent until it showed up, neatly wrapped, as a surprise wedding gift over a year later. (Well played, Wilsons!)

Although I continue to hold out hope otherwise, I’m beginning to doubt that you will ever make a piece of St. Olaf-licensed apparel that is nearly as great as this classic sweatshirt. What I’m realizing now is that you may not have to. You see, this afternoon, I received a small parcel from one of the officers of the St. Olaf Cycling Club. It contained the items pictured below, either of which is almost certain to steal affection from my venerable sweatshirt:

I’m pretty sure that wearing a cycling cap off the bike, even for demonstration purposes, is a Rule #22 violation, but it runs afoul of Benton’s Second Sartorial Law in any case. So mea culpa BUT GOOD GRIEF IT SAYS “UM YA YA” ON THE BRIM. Fortunately, I should still have some long-sleeve weather left this spring in which to wear this excellent kit, and I expect to find myself thinking “Fram, fram!” instead of “sur la plaque!” while so doing.

Seriously, though, you should fix the sweatshirt situation, because the cycling club is just embarrassing the bookstore here. I’m pretty sure that the climbing wall, the fancy science center, the sommelier service in Rand, the heated and asbestos-free practice rooms, the chairlift on Old Main Hill, and whatever other decadent amenities you’ve installed since I graduated wind up tasting like ashes in the mouths of students who can’t enjoy them in worthy licensed apparel.

best,
Will Benton ’00

Mulch omelet

Will Benton — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:54:36 +0000

Waterloo

Will Benton — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:52:18 +0000

I bet you were thinking that your day wouldn’t be complete unless you could hear ABBA’s “Waterloo” performed in the style of the Ramones. Well, consider your day complete.

Lessig on Scalia and PPACA

Will Benton — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:57:57 +0000

I’m a big fan of Lawrence Lessig — especially his generally excellent work on copyright and technology policy — but many of his public statements of the last few years seem to betray an increasing naïveté. His credulous 2008 endorsement of Obama could have been written by a particularly enthusiastic high-school junior and this weepy finger wagging is downright embarrassing. Lessig is too smart not to realize that arguments might matter and that there are consistent philosophies not motivated by political considerations that might regularly lead to outcomes that he doesn’t prefer.

Kids are awesome

Will Benton — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:58:17 +0000

Kids are awesome because they don’t yet know that you can’t always just point out when something is horribly wrong.

Advice to young computer science students

Will Benton — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:28:26 +0000

Here’s my best advice to young computer science students, especially those who are interested in building systems: “I will engage in a heroic engineering effort and …” is always a far worse starting point for a course or long-term project than “I will engage in heroic system characterization and ….” The sooner you learn this, the happier you’ll be and the better work you’ll do.

(I originally posted a shorter expression of this sentiment on Twitter.)

Web services for improved web application usability

Will Benton — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 05:59:52 +0000

Via DF, Ziptastic is “a simple API that allows people to ask which Country, State and City are associated with a Zip Code.” This is truly excellent, and it addresses a longstanding pet peeve of mine.

In a similar vein, I’m pleased to announce my latest project. Ageist is a simple API to determine whether or not an individual is older than 13 given his or her birthday. (As an example, click here to see how old the Pixies album Trompe le Monde is, if you want to be really depressed.) While it does not (yet) calculate one’s racing age, I suspect certain race-registration websites could employ some combination of Ziptastic and Ageist to eliminate most of my user-experience complaints.

It’s not you, it’s me

Will Benton — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 01:41:08 +0000

We recently cancelled our pay television service because we have watched approximately 90 minutes of live or time-shifted TV¹ in the last six months and six months’ worth of subscription fees amortizes extremely poorly² over 90 minutes of programming. This isn’t a knock against our former pay-television provider, which has always provided a good product at a competitive price with excellent and friendly customer service; it’s just that theirs is a product that we don’t wind up actually using often enough to justify a continued subscription.

As you might expect, I had to address a friendly customer service representative’s numerous scripted objections, discount offers, and repeated suggestions that I just put the service on hold and cool off for a while before doing anything rash, all before I could get the cancellation processed in the first place. However, I was surprised that they’ve called me twice in the last week with special offers to try and get me to sign on again. I sincerely appreciate such aggressive customer-retention efforts, but this is quickly becoming more awkward than a teenaged breakup.

¹ I am not counting the half of the Timberwolves-Clippers game that I mostly slept through while recovering from one of our many kindergarten-originated stomach bugs, since I was in such bad shape that it may as well have been a test pattern. Furthermore, we have watched DVD movies, iTunes content, Netflix streaming, etc.; I am emphatically not questioning the utility of the television itself.

² I’m actually having trouble coming up with a way to spend more money on less entertainment without being deliberately wasteful, like buying recently released video games and grilling them, unopened, over direct heat.

Perception and Today Records

Will Benton — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:39:31 +0000

BBE recently released a two-disc compilation of soul, funk, and jazz from Perception and Today Records. It’s great and a total bargain as a $10 download. Highly recommended.

Simpler cue sheets

Will Benton — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:06:43 +0000

I can’t possibly be the first person to have had this idea. With that said, I like it a lot:

As for the ride itself, it was overcast and certainly too cold to refrain from second-guessing wardrobe choices. (Bibs and knee warmers: bad idea. Shorts without knee warmers: worse idea.) Even so, we were doing pretty well until we hit Mt. Horeb and a thick fog rolled in. Just a couple of miles north of town, we were blind beyond about 100m, which seemed like unnecessarily bad odds for us given the size of the shoulders and the speed of traffic.

So we went back to town under rapidly-increasing fog cover and surveyed our options for a few minutes. We considered going to the Grumpy Troll and trying to wait for some sun, but it was before 9 AM and neither of us had any cash. We considered calling Andrea and begging for a ride, but that seemed too pitiful. Anyway, if you were wondering whether it is possible to ride the Military Ridge State Trail from Mt. Horeb to Madison on road bikes with 20 spoke rims and 700×23 tires, the answer is “yes, but only slowly.” (For out-of-towners, this is about 20 miles on crushed limestone and dirt.) I probably wouldn’t do it by choice, but it’s always fun to ride that trail and I don’t think my wheels are too far out of true. And — as an unexpected bonus — I’m pretty sure I can speak Flemish now.

“The Beauty of Creation”

Will Benton — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:02:58 +0000

Richard Dawkins on parsimony: “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing—that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?” Read the rest of the article for a different approach to this question.

Interaction design failure

Will Benton — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 17:09:00 +0000

I recently registered for an athletic event using a ubiquitous online-registration service that will remain nameless. Sadly, the process was embarrassing even by the low standards of the domain. First, it required me to enter my birthdate twice on consecutive forms. This is pretty ridiculous by itself, but the second form also asked me for my age on race day and for my assertion that I was older than 13, both of which could have been trivially calculated from my birthdate.

I often get annoyed when I have to enter even the tiniest amount of redundant information on barely-usable web sites (e.g. city, state, and ZIP code even though the first two are entailed by the last) but perhaps I’ve set the bar too high.

On the influence of indie music blogs

Will Benton — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:35:23 +0000

The Economist‘s Prospero blog reflects on the declining importance of indie-rock blogs like Pitchfork, using the story of Lana Del Ray as an example. If (like me) you don’t pay much attention, the article is worth it for its discussion of Ms. Del Ray’s career arc alone; I was awfully confused by her sharp transition from wunderkind to object of revulsion as it happened.

Inappropriate commuting gear

Will Benton — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:44:00 +0000

Dear Amazon, you know I’m your pal. I still have that handwritten thank-you card you sent me on my fridge, although my motivation for keeping it is at least 60% ironic. So when you do something like this, it hurts me all the more:

As someone who has been nearly maimed by clueless aero bar users in multiple mass-start road cycling events and who has had pleasant commutes sullied by weirdos who (1) are using aero bars on a bike path and while so doing (2) insist on attempting to draft someone who is riding a steel fixed-gear bicycle at sub-competitive speeds, I must plead with you to never again mention bicycle commuting and clip-on aero bars in such a way that someone might construe them as being somehow related to one another or (worse still) part of a desirable combination for shaving 15 seconds off of their Cap City Loop time. Thanks in advance.

The dumbest generation

Will Benton — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:06:07 +0000

“… half of [Millennial voters] either do not know ‘how Washington works,’ or they are stupid.”

Abandoning common sense

Will Benton — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:25:49 +0000

I was in the “sports nutrition and quackery” aisle at Target last night buying Kind bars and was dismayed to notice that the “hCG diet” craze has apparently made its way out of email spam and on to store shelves. Certainly, the desire for weight loss often causes people to abandon common sense, but I can think of few things I would want in my bloodstream less, even if we’re merely talking about some proteins that mimic it.

Technology, Bible translation, and linguistic survival

Will Benton — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:24:29 +0000

Alan Jacobs writes about the boom in crossplatform e-book technology driven by Bible translators, and its (positive!) implications for the survival of dying natural languages. (Be sure to read the passage he cites from the Hawai’i Pidgin translation of Acts 1.)

Norman Ramsey likes Lua

Will Benton — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:08:14 +0000

High praise for the Lua programming language from a respected PL and runtime-systems researcher. Ramsey’s observation that the design effort surrounding Lua “could not have been done at a North American university” rings especially true.

Peer review failures

Will Benton — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:31:10 +0000

Here’s a good article by John Regehr on failures of peer review. This point, about the consequences of disciplinary conservatism, is pretty spot-on: “In computer systems, paper submissions from non-PhDs in industry are not uncommon. Usually these papers doesn’t quite look right and they often get rejected. In a number of cases I’ve seen reviews so blisteringly ugly that nobody in their right mind who received them would ever submit another paper to that community.”

Training and racing

Will Benton — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:41:55 +0000

I liked this reflection on training and racing from pro bicycle racer Neil Bezdek, and especially appreciated this sentence: “I train a lot because it’s fun, and racing professionally gives me an excuse to do so.”

Goals for 2012

Will Benton — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:43:58 +0000

My friend Cara recently encouraged some people, including me, to post quantifiable personal goals for this year. Here are a subset of mine:

Fitness

Run at least 500 miles and bicycle at least 2500 miles.
Finish a half-marathon in under 2:00.
Finish the Centurion 50 in under 2:15.
Enter and finish an Olympic-distance triathlon.
Enter and finish at least two cyclocross races.
Lose at least 20 pounds.

Creative

Capture, process, and post to flickr at least one good photograph per week.
Compose, record, and produce at least ten songs in any genre or texture.
Complete at least two currently in-flight carpentry or woodworking projects.
Read seven good books not related to fitness, photography, or computing; at least two must be fiction.

Professional

Submit at least one paper to a good conference or journal.

I’ll be tracking these activities on RunKeeper (mostly restricted to my “street team”), flickr, and audio.willbenton.com; I’ll summarize occasionally with posts here that are tagged “2012-goals“

The role of theories in engineering research

Will Benton — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:36:43 +0000

Dirk Riehle unloads on publication standards in his neighborhood of computer science, which he regards (rightly, I think) as favoring technical improvements over theories and models with better explanatory power.

PayPal’s inflexible counterfeit-goods policy

Will Benton — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:46:45 +0000

Is this PayPal policy a stupid tragedy or tragic stupidity?

Multi-use products

Will Benton — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:05:33 +0000

What popular consumer-product packaging is not merely an adequate vessel for conveying a mediocre coffee-like beverage?

Visualizing last summer’s road cycling

Will Benton — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:13:01 +0000

I recently plotted some of my local road bike rides from last season using TileMill, the TIGER map data from the US Census Bureau, and exported activity routes from RunKeeper. I had a pretty good sense of what ride I do the most often (a fairly flat 18-20 mile out-and-back that I can complete in under an hour unless car traffic is awful — great for time-constrained rides and intervals), but I was interested to see where else I’ve gone. The results turned out pretty well, so I’m posting them here. I only plotted road rides in Dane County, only rides on a geared bike (i.e., no commutes), and I chose only a subset of all my rides. The paths are lighter or darker proportionally to how frequently I traveled them.

The figure above is a close-up of the section of the map including the UW Arboretum and the Capital City Trail. This was by far my most common ride in 2010, but I did it much less frequently in 2011. (In fact, I think I rode this route more frequently on my fixed-gear than on my road bike in 2011.)

This is a detail of some of my favorite short hill-climbing loops near Paoli, WI. The loop to the lower left is more challenging (and more rewarding) but I didn’t do it as often. To the upper left is the beginning of a fast and fun route to Mt. Horeb, WI that also serves as the beginning of the WI Ironman cycling loop. I’m hoping both of these will be substantially darker at the end of next summer!

Finally, here’s the whole map, cropped to include Madison (for context) and the parts of western Dane County that I actually rode in.

I did these manually, so the obvious next step is to write up a little program to generate these automatically. I’d also like to have a more interesting visualization (like making paths thicker instead of darker or perhaps incorporating elevation and average speed data somehow). Overall, though, I’m pleased with these results. I was quite impressed with how easy TileMill was to use, and am optimistic that this toolchain, combined with some additional cleverness and care, could produce a really compelling presentation of these data.

Regarding static analysis

Will Benton — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 03:59:57 +0000

John Carmack shares some thoughts on static program analysis for finding defects. The whole article is a good read, but I especially appreciated his tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Microsoft’s pricing model for their analysis tools (free in the Xbox developer kit, but very expensive in the Windows developer kit): “I read into this that Microsoft feels that game quality on the [Xbox] 360 impacts them more than application quality on Windows does.”

Also, see this related and hilarious photo, especially if we went to grad school together. (Photo link via Pascal Cuoq.)

Our little Christmas present turns two

Will Benton — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 05:01:01 +0000

Happy birthday, sweetheart! Dad loves you. It was an exciting Christmas Day when we got to meet you¹, and you’ve sure kept it interesting since. You were so excited about your second birthday (we’d ask you whose birthday we were going to celebrate on Sunday and you’d gleefully shout “The baby Jesus! and Maggie!”), and we had a lot of fun celebrating with you. Here are some of my favorite memories of you from the last year:

You started to walk in early Spring. At first, we had to nag and plead with you to take a few steps — you weren’t sure it was for you! But now you only have two speeds: running (when you aren’t tired) and being carried by Mom or Dad (when you are). You had a lot of fun hiking this year; some of your favorite trails were in the UW Arboretum, at Blue Mounds State Park, around Peninsula Point, and at Governor Dodge State Park.

You were an early talker, and you had many words at your command quickly.² Starting this summer, you couldn’t help but describe everything you saw, many times in complete sentences. (You still use some fragments, though: one of my favorite is “Too loud!” to describe anything noisy, whether it’s the sound of high-volume music or the sight of a vacuum cleaner or hand drill.) You’ve just recently stopped exclusively referring to yourself in the third person (although you have developed a charming possessive: “Mag-gee-gees” for “Maggie’s”³). Your affirmative has evolved from “uh-huh” to “yem” to “yes” over the last few months, and I sort of miss the middle one. One of the little sad things about being a parent to kids who are as amazing as you and your brother is that you do these neat things, but only for a little while, and then you start doing different neat things. So I hope you don’t grow out of saying “Oh no, happen?” (always with upturned palms) in response to minor household disasters for a long time.

I love the way you use language; it’s like we’re getting literal translations of your thought process (when you want to nurse, for example, you’ll say “Maggie wants milk from mama’s tummy!”). You’ve also become a shrewd negotiator: once, when I told you that I’d be happy to let you eat ice cream after you’d eaten your supper, you carefully stacked all of the food from your plate on the table and then said “OK, Maggie eat ice cream now?” But you don’t have to negotiate that often, because Dad folds pretty easily (especially when you wake up in the middle of the night and call for Dad, even if you ask for Mom and Otto first).

For a couple of weeks, you identified every letter as “S” and every number as “3.” This really delighted your mother and me in a way that you probably won’t be able to understand until you have an impossibly charming child. You also regularly identified pictures of Lukas Cranach, Vic Mackey, or any Lycra-clad dude on a road bike as “Daddy.” These generalizations were pretty harmless, but assuming every non-ketchup red sauce was salsa (which you could probably eat as a meal by itself) only worked until you pleaded with me to let you try some Sriracha once when we were out to dinner. Although you’d liked spicy food and other hot sauces in the past, even a tiny speck of rooster sauce was “too HOT!”

You’ve also shown an amazing facility for music, singing Christmas songs, hymns, “Yo Gabba Gabba” tunes, Star Wars themes (courtesy of your brother), and “Land of Hope and Glory” (which you called “duck music,” since your papa David introduced it to you to via Fantasia 2000) — all with excellent pitch and rhythm. But it’s also fun to see how much you like to play with music, whether it’s banging on a drum machine, talking into a darbuka, yelling in resonant rooms to hear your voice reverberate, strumming Dad’s guitar, or twisting controls on effects units and MIDI controllers. I’m really excited to see where you take these gifts in the future.

You love people, especially your big brother (who you usually call “pumice” or “pomace” — and he loves you too!), your Papas and Grandmas, your great-grandparents, your aunts and uncle, and your cousins, all of whom you talk about constantly when they aren’t around. You’re also in the thrall of your little toddler and baby friends, and you often impress their parents by calling them by name or identifying them in photos, even the ones you don’t see that often. Your parents, while impressed, aren’t surprised; after all, you seem to know everyone by name.

Nature delights you. (You are quite the little treehugger.) You love to to smell flowers and often bestow an approving appellation: “pret-ty!” You love Otto and other dogs and always want to give them a “hug” or a “nice pat;” Otto in particular is a pretty good sport about having a wonderful little girl hanging around his neck, but you do give him a lot of food (sometimes you’ll entertain him by bringing him many servings of kibble — a teaspoon measure at a time). Some of your favorite animals are rabbits (which you used to call “hop-hops”), lambs, elephants, and ducks; this summer and fall, you loved to ride in the bike trailer on the paths in Madison and see all the hop-hops and birds. (Sometimes at night when you’re too happy to be quiet, we’ll remind you that the bunnies, birds, and probably some babies are sleeping, and you’ll say “ssh!” and drop a few decibels.)

You’ve done so many amazing things in the last year, Maggie. I’m really looking forward to seeing where you take us next.

love,
Dad

¹ Your first appearance on the Internet was a sub-140-character post I made right after you were born in which I referred to you as “Margrete” — because your mom and I hadn’t yet agreed on whether or not your first name should be spelled the Scandinavian way (with an “h”) or not. I was pro-”h,” and was trying to issue an orthographic concession, but Mom had a change of heart.

² Including, as of early October, “perambulation,” which makes it far more difficult for your parents to discuss going for a walk without committing to the idea.

³ We speculate this is you generalizing from how awkward it is to say “Thomas’s.”

Merry Christmas from the lad

Will Benton — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 21:58:47 +0000

(Fear not, readers who can’t get enough of my kids — I’ll have a post about the other birthday we celebrate in my house today later!)

Work ethic

Will Benton — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:47:30 +0000

Now this is someone who laughed at deadlines.

The vanishing tangible

Will Benton — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:51:40 +0000

[D]elivery devices are more tangible “things” than the books they hold. No wonder we obsess about them, since the things we used to call things are suddenly files, endlessly electronically vanishing.

I enjoyed this thoughtful piece by pianist Jeremy Denk on how attachment to “content delivery devices” is replacing attachment to “content,” and I wonder: is this phenomenon also related to the reality that we simply have fewer “things” to hold dear if all of our records, books, photographs, and letters are streams of bits? Does the ever-increasing probability that some future device won’t be able to read our movies or digital negatives, or that we could lose an entire library if Amazon goes out of business, encourage us to embrace the impermanence of all things?

Sometimes you can step in the same river twice

Will Benton — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:54:16 +0000

Often, the places we remember fondly don’t exist in any meaningful sense after we leave. This probably holds most true with institutions like colleges, but even a city or region can change so dramatically in a short time as to be nearly unrecognizable to expats. That’s why I was relieved to see that bloated grocery unions are still ruining retail for everyone in the DC suburbs, just as they were when I went to junior high and high school in the area. In one small way, it’s like I never left.

For those who delight in curious trifles

Will Benton — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:58:01 +0000

From the New York Times on November 11, 1911:

Eight hundred years ago this was beaten by writing 11-11-1111, on Nov. 11, 1111, but it is not likely that the precise monkish scribes at that time would have allowed so slovenly a method of recording an essential fact. As none of us is likely to be living in the year 11111, it would be well for those who delight in curious trifles to take their fill of enjoyment out of this method of dating to-day, 11-11-11.

(via Kai Ryssdal on Twitter)

You could have made this, but you didn’t

Will Benton — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:36:31 +0000

Andrea once told me of one of our friends from college who was, like her, an English major, and who protested loudly when they studied some William Carlos Williams poem¹: “Why are we reading this? I could have written it!” The instructor replied that, yes, perhaps he could have, but he didn’t.

With that anecdote in mind, enjoy the world’s most expensive photograph.

¹ It was either “The Red Wheelbarrow” or “This is Just To Say;” I can’t recall which.

Prior art

Will Benton — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:55:07 +0000

I have (and really like) a first-generation Luma Loop camera strap, and I understand that the recent revision is a dramatic improvement. So I found the news that Luma Labs has discontinued their whole product line in response to patent pressure rather disheartening. Duncan’s letter necessarily only provides his side of the story; furthermore, it doesn’t link to the patent in question so that his readers could evaluate his claims (most notably, that the patent application hinges upon the quite-old idea of a strap with a sliding camera mount).

Nerds who get exercised about software patents often point to particularly egregious cases in which patents are granted for obvious and non-novel techniques. Personally, I have often charitably assumed that these cases are explained by the limited domain knowledge of patent examiners; an obvious technique, when presented in a sufficiently vague and obfuscated manner, may appear novel to someone who understands the basic concepts of a field but doesn’t practice it. If the story as Duncan tells it is essentially true, though, the camera-strap patent is far harder to explain.

UPDATE: I can’t find the patent Duncan describes (which he says was filed in 2007 and granted on November 1, 2011), but I did find this patent, which would also seem to encumber any invention that resembles the Luma Loop.

Ron Swanson vs. the State

Will Benton — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:38:19 +0000

Here’s a nice piece about social commentary in NBC’s Parks and Recreation, framed as a discussion of the anarcho-capitalist Ron Swanson character.

Churches, branding, and identity

Will Benton — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:26:55 +0000

Via Alan Jacobs, a megachurch sends cease-and-desist letters to other churches that have the same name, with predictably tragicomic results:

When cases like this arise in the business world, it’s customary for a law office to send a notice asking the other organization to adjust their branding to differentiate it. This is commonly referred to as a cease and desist letter. On September 27, 2011, our legal counsel sent such a letter to these three Mars Hill churches requesting that they change their logo and name. In hindsight, we realize now that the way we went about raising our concerns, while acceptable in the business world, is not the way we should deal with fellow Christians.

Jacobs points out that this response reveals something pretty terrible about “the state of contemporary megachurch Christianity,” and I agree. But beyond the total impropriety of Mars Hill’s response, the thing that strikes me most is that the legal claim is surely indefensible: Mars Hill is not a particularly novel name for a church. Can you imagine any of the following scenarios leading to legal remedies?

“Dear Sir, We are the intellectual property counsel for First Baptist Church of Lake City. It has come to our attention that your church is also named ‘First Baptist,’ which creates confusion in the ecclesiastical marketplace and uses our famous name and trademark to attract parishioners who mistakenly believe they are receiving our services….”
“Dear Sir, Our firm represents Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church of Rockwell City. We understand that your parish enterprise has been operating using the names of St. Peter and/or St. Paul without our express authorization. This damages our brand, since worshippers have come to expect a particular experience only available from our parish enterprise, which is widely known as a halo atop the golden buckle on the corn belt, and its licensed affiliates….”
“Dear Sir, We serve as counsel for Trinity Lutheran Church of Webster City, the owner and/or exclusive licensee of the ‘Trinity Lutheran’ mark as applied to places of worship (cf. Flacius v. Karlstadt), schools, and buffet restaurants, among many other uses. Your organization’s use of the ‘Trinity Lutheran’ name and a logo that uses serifed type much as ours does is in violation of multiple civil laws governing trademark infringement….”

I can’t, either.

Handlettered logos from defunct department stores

Will Benton — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 04:53:08 +0000

This list of logos from defunct department stores has some beautiful and diverse examples of a generally-lost art. In addition, if you happen to assume that Macy’s has absorbed almost every regional department store in the United States in the last four decades, the brief captions will do little to convince you otherwise. This is a shame, since even an mediocre lettering job is superior to just about anything set in Avant Garde.

Stop pedaling, start driving

Will Benton — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 23:57:16 +0000

I saw this link from Swobo’s Twitter feed. GM briefly ran an ad earlier today in which they encouraged college students to “stop pedaling [and] start driving” by participating in some discount program that would presumably make it easier for them to buy a new car:

(Image credit: BikePortland.org)

I find this concept and its execution ill-advised and gauche but am unable to muster righteous outrage about an ad campaign that makes fun of cyclists; surely, a car company needs to portray their product as preferable to alternate modes of transportation, or else they’d be making bikes (or city buses, sedan chairs, spaceships, tuk-tuks, etc.). But I did chuckle over the following two points:

Apparently, we’re encouraging college students to take out new-car loans now. I guess most students will have paid for the car before they’ve finished paying for their liberal arts degrees (the Chevrolet Sonic featured in the ad is roughly equivalent to a semester at a private college circa 2011), and you can occasionally resell a car for some fraction of what you paid for it, while your BA in music history¹ or whatever is less likely to provide any tangible return. Still, it seems callous to prey on people who, by virtue of their status as customers of higher education, have such an obvious predisposition for making bad financial decisions.
I own three bicycles. Each was made by a different company with different characteristics: small companies and large companies, companies that source other manufacturers’ components and companies that design their own components. However, they all have something in common: none of these manufacturers has needed a massive infusion of government cash to stay in business at any point.

At least GM has something in common with their audience here: both have decided that they deserve freedom from the consequences of bad choices, even if they can’t quite explain why.

¹ I say this with particular authority, since I graduated college approximately three credit-hours short of a BA in music history.

“Enhance!”

Will Benton — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:35:56 +0000

Read this description of a literally incredible new Photoshop feature and then review this classic tirade. (I’m sure that the Photoshop feature actually can produce usable results for a large class of images; it is, after all, possible to do many things that are impossible in the general case perfectly adequately most of the time.)

The Augean tasks of attorneys involved in vapid-celebrity representation

Will Benton — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:44:15 +0000

“Meghan McCain is a person who is famous for no discernible or rational reason, like a Kardashian or a supernumerary Baldwin.” And, apparently, she demands that her attorneys send hilariously clueless cease-and-desists on her behalf.

How to peel a head of garlic

Will Benton — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:20:28 +0000

This has to be the fastest garlic-peeling technique I’ve ever seen:

(from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.)

“An Open Core project … has nothing to do with an open source project”

Will Benton — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:08:00 +0000

A nice explanation of the difference between open source and so-called “Open Core” licensing: “What is most important to understand about an Open Core project is that it has nothing to do with an open source project. If you are depending on a single closed source component then you have to regard the whole project as a closed source project as you lose all the benefits of open source.”

Beauty of tone is of secondary importance

Will Benton — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:37:19 +0000

If you need any further evidence that internet commenters are, in the aggregate, philistines, note that this video has received thumbs down from 60% of YouTube voters:

(See also “Scarlatti eruption,” a post about Enrico Baiano’s excellent interpretations.)

An open letter to the random guy, coincidentally also named “Will Benton,” who has been giving out my gmail.com address to his friends and correspondents for years as if it were his own.

Will Benton — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:59:12 +0000

Dear Will,

I hope this semester of college (your first? or is it your third?) is treating you well. I feel like I’ve known you for a long time, even though we’ve never met. You see, when you’ve told people to email you, you’ve given them my gmail.com address. It’s been great to watch you grow up over the last few years.

My first experience being mistaken for you was through those often-hilarious but generally reductive and mean-spirited political forwards from your mother. These were somewhat confusing, since I do have some correspondents that send along similar messages, but I have no known relatives with the same given name as your mom. After I realized what was going on, I ignored these messages, but when she started sending you (that is, me) personal messages with college advice, I replied, telling her that she had the wrong William Benton, that I already had a PhD and wouldn’t be going to college again, God willing, and that she should probably just talk to you at the dinner table. I hope she did, and I sure hope she didn’t think I was just you, playing a practical joke, because she never replied to any of these. I stopped bothering to correct her after a couple of years.

I got a new window into your world when some of your friends got iPods touch and began emailing you (that is, me). At first, these messages were little more than brief, slang-laden expressions of the sheer novelty of being able to send email from a portable device, but as you grew, so did the emails from your friends: one in particular opened up, discussing the joys of youth (“bro, im at the cabin, you should totally come here lol!”) and his aspirations for the future (“sweet bro, think im getting a ps3 for my birthday”). I replied to these messages, wishing your bro a good weekend and a happy birthday and indicating that he, like your mother, had the wrong William Benton. While I did tell him to enjoy his PS3, I regret not recommending that he pick up Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which was on sale at the time. But he, like your mother, never acknowledged his error, although his emails became less frequent.

At the beginning of the summer, you (that is, I) got an initial fundraising appeal from your private high school. I thought this was a little gauche, since I wasn’t sure you’d even graduated at that point, but I replied, again indicating the mistaken identity. The alumni director replied quickly; he was cordial and apologetic. I recommend that you ensure that they know how to find you for reunions and also that you consider them in your future charitable giving.

Recently, your history TA has been sending you (that is, me) announcements of upcoming review sessions. This is really heartwarming, Will. I’m pretty far removed from higher education, but I remember review sessions fondly — both participating in them as a student and leading them myself as a (music) history TA. So I know how crucial those review sessions can be — there’s a great deal of material to process and synthesize and it can be helpful to discuss with others and refine your focus. I have no evidence for this beyond the tone of his review session announcements, but your TA seems like a friendly guy, so I hope he’ll contact you, as I asked him to, and have you give him an email address that delivers email to your computer and not mine.

Will, I’ve enjoyed getting to know you via these messages and wish you all the best. However, I hope you’ll find a new email address. I’d change mine, but I’ve had it since just after Gmail was announced in 2004 (a buddy at Google hooked me up) and I’m somewhat attached to it. I also hope you’ll allow me to make two related suggestions that will serve you well as you grow into adulthood: (1) if you’re paying for something to be delivered via email, ensure that the seller has the right address; and (2) if you are likely to be ashamed to have paper copies of a magazine sitting around, the solution is probably to avoid that magazine altogether, not to subscribe to the digital edition. You see, Will, earlier tonight, when Maxim notified you (that is, me) that a new issue of their digital edition was available for you (that is, you) to download, I (that is, you) may just have hit the “bounce as undeliverable” button in my mailer. I demand no payment for this service and consider it simply a minor contribution to the aesthetic and moral development of a young namesake. Now, you certainly could change your address with them and receive your remaining eleven issues, but I’d recommend just asking for a refund, bro.

best,
Will

Antibiotics and markets

Will Benton — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:41:04 +0000

I agree with the diagnoses but not necessarily the prescriptions of this thought-provoking piece by Megan McArdle. The central idea is that the way we develop (not merely the way we use) new antibiotic drugs accelerates the emergence of drug-resistant infections: “Antibiotics are an exhaustible resource. We should be treating them like an oil field, or an endangered species. Instead, we handle them like consumer electronics.”

Gas powers everything?

Will Benton — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:10:26 +0000

This Nissan Leaf commercial, in which the narrator asks us to imagine a world in which “gas powers everything,” is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. A world in which “gas powers everything” would not have tiny internal-combustion engines attached to every appliance and gadget. Instead, it would look roughly like our world, in which batteries and alternating current both exist even though we primarily get the energy to power devices by burning smoke-belching coal. But perhaps acknowledging where our electricity comes from is beyond the consideration of Nissan’s target market; the fellow smugly unplugging his Leaf at the end of the ad appears to believe that his wall socket merely channels the power of unicorns and the optimism of children’s dreams.

Transcending ideology on Twitter

Will Benton — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:45:00 +0000

I follow Twitter users representing a wide range of vocations, political philosophies, and creeds, but they all have one thing in common: visceral hatred of mediocre rock band Nickelback. I base this assertion on the sheer number of people who’ve approvingly retweeted the following message:

WARNING: if you see posts offering free clip of the new Nickelback album DO NOT CLICK. It links to a free clip of the new Nickelback album.

The variety of people gleefully expressing Nickelback-related animus actually gives me great hope for a harmonious future. Nickelback’s universally hated oeuvre may have the potential to help people of diverse concerns find common ground — and, ultimately, to bring the world together in peace. In this sense, they are the inverse of fictional rock band Wyld Stallyns, whose music was so widely loved that it led to the eventual establishment of a 27th-Century utopia.

Be excellent to each another, my Nickelback-hating internet friends.

Spring Grove, MN

wbflickr — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:30:03 +0000

(A) Minnesota Viking, originally uploaded by willbenton.

Really stupid or outrageous

Will Benton — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 14:31:17 +0000

Some prankster made a fake Google+ page for Paul Krugman, on which he posted “…we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the [Mineral, VA] earthquake had done more damage.” Since this is not even the most ridiculous thing that Krugman has said in the last fortnight, many reasonable people assumed it was authentic, although it was a little too on-the-nose to not arouse any skepticism. The prankster then confessed, while pointing out that the “we need a bigger earthquake” sentiment essentially follows from the actual Krugman’s public statements about disasters and spending.

Krugman apparently heard enough lamentation from his distressed votaries that he had to issue a huffy disavowal of the Google+ page, concluding with some advice: “So if you see me quoted as saying something really stupid or outrageous, and it didn’t come from the Times or some other verifiable site, you should probably assume it was a fake.” Personally, I rarely find myself distraught over potential damage to the public image of an opinion writer. I do wish that he hadn’t used the material conditional, since his statement provides no guidance for how to regard the “really stupid or outrageous things” that Krugman regularly says in his role at the Times and on other “verifiable sites.”

I suppose I will have to continue assuming that his column and blog are components of an elaborate, ongoing practical joke.

Funding research

Will Benton — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:44:20 +0000

This rings true: “[T]here seems to be an unfortunate trend among some researchers to assume that they are somehow owed … funding for their activities just because they somehow fall under the banner of ‘scientific inquiry.’”

Paul Krugman is L. Ron Hubbard

Will Benton — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:38:19 +0000

As far as I can tell, a lot of people on the internet can’t stop uncritically linking to every dripping from Paul Krugman’s noxious pen. Unfortunately, Krugman is a reductive partisan hack who believes that everyone who disagrees with him is a malicious subhuman. He is the sort of columnist who targets every word exclusively to the most blindered of his ideological fellows and abandoned even the pretense of argumentation or persuasion at some point in the distant past. However, Krugman became a lot more interesting last weekend when he admitted that he honestly thinks it would be a good idea to make up a UFO-cult story in order to scare people into accepting increased government stimulus spending:

ZAKARIA: But, even if you were, wouldn’t John Maynard Keynes say that if you could employ people to dig a ditch and then fill it up again, that’s fine. They’re being productively employed, they pay taxes, so maybe the big — maybe Boston’s Big Dig was — was just fine after all?

KRUGMAN: Think about World War II, right? That was not — that was actually negative for social product spending, and yet it brought us out. I mean, partly because you want to put these things together, if we say, look, we could use some inflation. Ken and I are both saying that, which is of course anathema to a lot of people in — in Washington, but is in fact what the basic logic says.

It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you have a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.

I mean, if we — if we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a — a massive buildup to counter the — the space alien threat, and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake there aren’t actually any space aliens —

(CROSSTALK)

ROGOFF: So we need Orson Wells is what you’re say?

KRUGMAN: No. That’s a — that’s a — there was a “Twilight Zone” episode like this, which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time we don’t need it — we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

Krugman’s presuppositions about government stimulus definitely recall “pyramid power” — that is, doing X has generally failed in the past, including quite recently, but that’s just because we didn’t do enough X — but I’m most impressed by how comfortable he is with the idea of making up a lie to justify spending a lot of money to accomplish nothing except the spending of money itself. Many opinion journalists resort to intellectual and actual dishonesty in red-meat columns defending their positions, but most seem to believe their own lines; few go on the record as advocating mendacity. (I also wonder if becoming an enthusiastic advocate of imaginary space war will lead Mr. Krugman to revise his earlier public statements against the actual wars, started by the current and prior US administrations, that Americans are currently fighting against other Earthlings.)

I’m not sure whether or not Krugman’s ultimate vision of phantom alien invaders will involve giant DC-8s without engines, volcanoes full of nukes, or evil galactic overlords, but the idea of making people believe UFO stories in order to take their money does echo L. Ron Hubbard’s profit-driven transition from science-fiction writing to religion-inventing. Of course, ersatz religions based on “space opera” stories and empirically-falsifiable claims only have the potential to bankrupt gullible cultists; the same cannot be said for science-fiction-based public policy.

One decade!

Will Benton — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 03:04:03 +0000

Ten years ago today, I was running on no sleep because I had been too excited to fall asleep the night before; I was about to marry the greatest woman in the world. Today, I’m sleep-deprived because of a summer of ridiculous allergies. In favor of August 4, 2011 over August 4, 2001, though, is the fact that I’ve gotten to spend the last ten years with my best friend. Andrea has been my love, my muse, my coach, and a daily blessing through a decade of sickness and health, richer and poorer (a.k.a. “graduate school”¹), varying degrees of spousal baldness, and a seemingly endless string of (my) stupid and expensive hobbies. She is also a creative and wonderful mother to a pair of stellar kids (and is certainly responsible for all of the genes that are expressed in their good qualities).

I’m a pretty lucky guy.

¹ We were never quite as poor as you might have been led to believe had you listened to grad students holding picket signs, though — no Americans are.

Disappointing musical texture stunts

Will Benton — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:23:25 +0000

A few months ago, I purchased a download of Gabriel Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntables & Orchestra. (The preceding link is to Amazon.com). What follows is a brief review, although careful readers may be able to infer the general verdict from the title of this post.

Mr. Prokofiev was a prolific dance music producer in the UK before branching out into concert music. Unfortunately, this piece, which combines a live orchestra with a turntablist scratching records of a recorded orchestra, relies too heavily on gimmicks to be really effective. Some parts are more successful than others (there are some sections which would make excellent film cues or incidental music for the theatre). However, it really seems that the most interesting thing about this piece is the central idea — “let’s combine some contemporary orchestral music with turntable scratching” — which is insufficiently clever to carry a whole recording by itself. (Some gimmicks, like the Hilliard Ensemble’s musical palimpsest, are clever enough to make the merely excellent sublime, but I suspect we’re past the era in which novel instrumentation alone can make a piece of concert music interesting.)

The failure of Mr. Prokofiev’s Concerto comes from what I believe is a common problem with compositions adopting unorthodox musical textures: all too often, the textural innovations merely crowd out and smother any good musical ideas in the piece. When there are few good ideas to begin with, as in Uri Caine’s bizarre free-jazz take on Mahler, the Hilliard Ensemble’s execrable Machaut-meets-Kenny-G collaboration with Jan Garbarek, any student composition ever scored for “X and tape,” or this Concerto, the gimmicks become truly oppressive. It needn’t have been this way: so many people have made great music by reworking other music (in general) and by repurposing and rearranging recordings of other music (in particular). Still worse, Mr. Prokofiev apparently has some talent for composition and facility with contemporary music production; he is precisely the sort of person who should have been able to do something special with this technique.

Instead, this pretentiously-titled work suffocates a few mildly interesting moments in a sonic tarpit. It tries to make art solely from debatable mechanical novelty and Mr. Prokofiev’s surname (his grandfather is rather famous). After listening for a few minutes, I began wondering about whether or not DJ Shadow has a dog, what kind of a record DJ Shadow’s dog might make, and how much more I might enjoy that record.

Helpful reminders from social media

Will Benton — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:58:58 +0000

I understand that a lot of people use Facebook messages instead of email. I think they’re wrong to do so except when there is no other option, but I am aware that this practice is somewhat common. I also understand that a lot of people need Facebook to remind them of birthdays and other events. Again, this is sad, but it’s an expected consequence of the social network information firehose.

What I can’t understand is the idea that someone might need Facebook to remind him of his own anniversary, or that a Facebook message might be an appropriate way to commemorate the occasion, as this notification seems to indicate:

So the first year is paper, the second is cotton, the third is linen, and the tenth is, apparently, a “thanks for the add.” I doubt that most of the adults I know would prefer a Facebook message to an anniversary card, gift, or personal greeting (since, after all, one typically cohabits with one’s spouse), but maybe we’re just behind the curve. Indeed, I suspect if Facebook continues to grow in popularity, our wedding and anniversary traditions will be completely revolutionized. Not only will physical gifts be replaced by “pokes,” “zombie attacks,” and “virtual pies,” but the long-abandoned practice of giving dowries will make a return. Fortunately, cattle are probably less expensive in Farmville than in real life.

“Not just risibly clumsy, but truly shrill and hideous”

Will Benton — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:23:43 +0000

A delightful polemic about one of my least favorite authors from David Bentley Hart at First Things: “I know one shouldn’t expect much from a writer who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare. Even so, the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance—it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect: at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy.”

Read it all!

Beautiful game, ugly marketing failures

Will Benton — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 02:15:20 +0000

Why is it possible for me to buy my 18-month old daughter a Jared Allen jersey but not an Abby Wambach jersey, a Hope Solo jersey, or even just a nameless USA Women jersey? I enjoy American football, and so do my kids. But while Maggie might grow up to love playing striker or goalie (she could even take after her dad and play fullback), it seems rather less likely that she will choose to be a mulleted defensive end. There has to be a market for this sort of apparel — why wouldn’t American girls want to show their support for American women who happen to be the best in the world at what they do?

(In a related gripe, I’d be delighted if I could get Team Peanut Butter & Co or Rabobank Giant Offroad kits in 2T, for Maggie’s next e**c tricycle ride.)

Epic

Will Benton — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:36:49 +0000

A friend of mine recently expressed her disgust with trite overuse of the adjective “epic.” Since I only use this sense of the word ironically, I had a sympathetic chuckle, but even I was convicted by her presentation. I resolve to use the adjective “epic” in the future only to refer to things that I am about to describe in dactylic hexameter.

My favorite five-year-old

Will Benton — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:02:29 +0000

Happy birthday, buddy. Dad loves you. You did a lot of cool stuff in the last year: you’ve been a great big brother to your sister, you’re getting a lot better at swimming and riding your bike, you did a really awesome job in plays and talent shows at school and church, and your overwhelming interest in the fictional universe of the Super Mario Bros. series of video games has finally waned ever so slightly. (To be fair, it’s been replaced by a similar interest in Star Wars, Pixar, and Tron.)

You started making jokes, too. All the time. Your first attempts got the structure (for example, of a knock-knock joke) right but didn’t make a lot of sense, but by Thanksgiving, you were dropping metalevel-obliterating gems like “Yo ‘sup dawg, I heard you like turkey sandwiches so I put a turkey sandwich in your turkey sandwich so you can gobble gobble while you gobble.” I’m amazed you even get that joke!

Some of my favorite memories of you in the last year are your plans for future residential arrangements; your insistence on “dad music” at bedtime; your careful and passionate argument, presented in full volume in our local REI to the delight of everyone around, that I should buy you a 700c road bike right now “so that [you] could use it when [you were] 6;” and your delight in fishing.

In particular, I’ll always remember the time I took you fishing on your grandparents’ dock last summer. I took you down there, rigged up and baited your rod, and cast out for you. We were probably there for five minutes when you told me “OK, Dad, I’m done fishing now.” I was a little annoyed, but I kept it to myself — after all, it had taken me about half that long to set up your rod. But as I was packing up our stuff and heading back to the house with you, you turned to me, gave me a huge hug, and said “Thanks for taking me fishing, Dad! I had so much fun!”

Me too, buddy. I’m looking forward to the adventures we’ll have together in the next year.

How not to write a college essay about videogames

Will Benton — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 20:37:05 +0000

I enjoyed this short post on writing well about video games in one’s coursework. In related news, I am in awe of anyone with the constitutional fortitude to teach video game criticism to college freshmen. I don’t know how much “adrenaline-pumping action” one can take. (See also this post from last summer.)

“Does not provide protection”

wbphone — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:11:19 +0000

I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what kind of liability the toy manufacturer is limiting exposure to with this disclaimer.

Yikes (cinema edition)

Will Benton — Wed, 18 May 2011 14:17:33 +0000

Sometimes I wonder if Lars von Trier is a real person or a particularly hilarious character in a Coen Brothers movie. (via @joshuakucera)

Copyright protip

Will Benton — Wed, 18 May 2011 14:15:49 +0000

If you’re concerned about the “moral rights” to your copyrighted work, don’t license it to someone in a country that doesn’t recognize these. This linked case concerns the children of Egyptian songwriter Baligh Hamdy, who licensed Hamdy’s song “Khosara, Khosara” to Jay-Z, who turned it into the vulgar-but-catchy earworm “Big Pimpin” in 2000. One of Hamdy’s children sued Jay-Z and EMI in 2007, alleging that Mr. Carter’s license to use the work only covered unmodified reproduction. Looks like they should have consulted the Creative Commons! (Honestly, though, what did Hamdy’s heirs expect Jay-Z was going to do with a copyright license to a song if not “sampling it, looping it and adding his lyrics?”)

More on climate and theodicy

Will Benton — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 15:30:11 +0000

After the 2008 Iowa floods, I was mildly dismayed to hear a ridiculous wrathful-Gaia claim in All Things Considered’s listener mail section. I’m a little more dismayed (but not particularly surprised) to see ThinkProgress doubling down by issuing their own fatwa in the wake of widespread death and devastation in the American South. Even if you believe — in spite of rationality and evidence — that disasters are clearly retribution for particular, enumerable “sins,” it is despicable to show so much delight in others’ suffering. ThinkProgress is thus gleefully staking out a position as the Westboro Baptist Church of environmental policy prescriptions.

Target audiences

Will Benton — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:55:51 +0000

It makes sense that the White House would invite Michael Bloomberg to a meeting on immigration policy while snubbing border-state governors; after all, Ellis Island is really where most immigrants enter the US. (I’m not sure why Rick Perry wasn’t invited to discuss the Port of Galveston, and it’s really unclear to me what the AFL-CIO or Al Sharpton has to do with immigration, but I guess that’s why I make software and not public policy.)

Musique d’ameublement

Will Benton — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 03:28:10 +0000

Based on my arbitrary but not random sampling (conducted while shopping), I believe that the average West Madison REI employee has heard Arcade Fire’s “Modern Man” 607 times at work in the last three months. While this is probably a depressing situation for REI employees who are ardent fans of Eminem or Justin Bieber,¹ any disgruntled REI employees should note that it could always be far worse.

I know, since I’ve experienced “far worse,” in the summer of 1995. I was working at the Gaithersburg, MD Best Buy in the computer department. The nonstop, pixellated demo video for the then-current IBM Aptiva computers blared the first half of the hook from Better than Ezra’s “Good” approximately once every 145 seconds. Whuh-uh-oh, indeed.

¹ Yes, all of them.

Assorted irregularities and cruft

Will Benton — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 19:37:12 +0000

I wasn’t aware that the assorted irregularities and cruft on spaceships in movies had a name, but apparently they have several. I do, however, remember getting in unofficial “drawing contests” with other kids in kindergarten, which chiefly involved seeing who could most aggressively greeble a sheet of paper. (I also remember being totally baffled when one of my classmates — clearly missing the point — drew a really nice tropical island scene.)

(Link via Andreas Wetterberg on Twitter.)

Misinterpretations of user-interface freedom

Will Benton — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:47:41 +0000

This gallery of hideous screenshots of mobile devices might make one nostalgic for 1997-vintage galleries of “WinAmp skins” or “Enlightenment themes.”¹ In fact, it’s actually like some of those old screenshots were placed in suspended animation and reconstituted as 480×800 JPEGs with wireless carrier information: the anachronistic speculative-fiction movie references (“my phone is, like, in The Matrix, dude”), the Star Trek-inspired UI chrome, and the gratuitous misogyny all recall an era when the only thing nerds demanded from a computing platform was unfettered freedom to make their devices look as ludicrous as possible.

(Link via DF; see also more on the “misinterpretations of freedom.”)

¹ Amazingly, both of those links are current: not only can you still download both WinAmp and Enlightenment, but people are still apparently furiously “theming” both.

Ligature (ab)use

Will Benton — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:09:26 +0000

Even people who don’t care about typography probably recognize ligatures, or special glyphs that can represent the combination of two or more letters. Most commonly, these are used to make unsightly glyph combinations like these:

look less awkward:

In the bad old days of computer typesetting, getting ligatures to print involved some degree of manual effort and suffering, depending on what applications and typefaces you were using. However, now we have OpenType fonts, which can specify that the rendering engine should automatically select particular glyphs for sequences of characters, thus bringing WYSIWYG typesetting in the 21st century roughly up to par with where TeX was in the early 1980s.¹

Delightfully, digital font designers have taken full advantage of these capabilities, offering faces like Typodermic’s Owned, which uses a wide range of contextual-alternate glyphs to mimic felt-tip graffiti, or like Alphabet Soup’s Metroscript, in which ligatures can both provide natural-looking lettering and convert sequences of underscores to tails like you might see in sports-team logos:

Certainly, these take automatic ligature replacement far beyond simply replacing common sequences of glyphs with more attractive alternates. But one of the most amazing applications of OpenType’s ligature technology I’ve seen is Travis Kochel’s Chartwell, which converts a sequence of numbers separated by plus signs into bar charts, pie charts, and sparkline graphs. For example:

In the image above, the two sides of the equals sign have the same text — but on the right, ligature replacement is enabled, and on the left it is not! Because the raw numbers remain in either case, Chartwell essentially supplies simple, flexible charting capabilities to any application that can render OpenType fonts: you can turn ligature replacement off, edit, recolor, and rearrange your data and then turn ligature replacement back on. It’s an extremely clever hack, but one that is also likely to be useful in a lot of domains.

¹ TeX and LaTeX have always had decent support for automatically applying common ligatures (e.g. “fl” and “fi”). But LaTeX hackers also developed more involved applications, like automatically generating Cyrillic text from a Latin transliteration (!)

The Wire as serialized Victorian novel

Will Benton — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 21:47:08 +0000

It would be difficult to improve upon this amazing riff on The Wire, which recasts the series as a serialized Victorian novel:

Literature today is no longer concerned with morality the way it was in the nineteenth century. Unrelenting, bleak images of society are celebrated for their realism, as representations of humanity. And yet, we have very few images, representations, or new and challenging canon that captures the essential helplessness, the inevitable corruption, the deep-lying flaws of both society and humanity in the way The Wire does. Again, I would contend that such a feat could only be accomplished in the Victorian Age, through the serial format, which allowed for such layered complexity. In no other way could such a richly textured tapestry of a city be constructed from ground-level up. In no other way could the faults in the underlying foundations of society’s institutions be exposed. In no other way could our own society be held up for our examination, and found so sadly lacking.

Read the whole thing, which contains some salty language but few consequential spoilers for The Wire itself.

Vocational training in higher education

Will Benton — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:13:47 +0000

Who says you don’t learn any marketable skills in graduate school?

Motivating technology

Will Benton — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:10:58 +0000

Like many computer scientists of a certain age, I spent a nontrivial part of my graduate career going to academic talks about “sensor networks,” which were apparently an extremely hot research area in the early-middle aughts, suitable for distinguished lectures early on, faculty candidate talks later, and targeted research areas for not-particularly-prestigious academic job postings long after the rest of the field had moved on. The basic idea was that you’d have these enormous collections of tiny, autonomous primitive computers that were capable of self-organizing and reporting interesting-in-the-aggregate results to somewhat more powerful computers.

Sensor networks work touched on a lot of interesting challenges in systems and engineering, and the talks were always fascinating from a bottom-up perspective. But it always struck me as a solution in search of a problem. The motivation for these talks, perhaps due to the political and funding climates of the time, was always wrapped up in vague ties to national security. Depending on the host institution of the researcher presenting, the always-implausible hypothetical applications for this technology might involve placing one sensor in every cubic meter of the San Francisco Bay in order to detect bioterror attacks, or perhaps placing one sensor anywhere in the Charles River in order to verify that you should not place yourself in the Charles River.

If only these talks had led off by introducing ANT+, I would have maintained my interest far more readily. ANT+ is a real-world sensor network technology with a useful application (collecting data from fitness equipment like heart rate monitors and bike computers) that has to meet nontrivial engineering challenges (for example, working when everyone in a race is using them simultaneously). As a practical bonus, having a single standard for these devices means that I can track my bike computer or heart-rate monitor from a watch or from a cell-phone dongle — and that I can add additional data sources easily without being locked in to a single manufacturer.

Every computer scientist I know has given at least one talk with some ridiculous big-picture claim as the ostensible motivation, even though everyone in the room knows that — to use an example from one of my own talks — program analysis is interesting to computer scientists, on some level, whether or not making good software is uniquely hard or expensive among engineering disciplines. Not every research focus lends itself to a motivation that is both likely to occur in the real world and compelling to nonspecialists. But I’m inclined to believe that the field would be well-served by devoting more effort to finding such motivations, and the problems that they imply.

Regarding universalism

Will Benton — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:10:52 +0000

Apparently, postmodern Christian Rob Bell doesn’t believe in hell. Perhaps he’s never had to read one of his own books?

Preschool and predicates

Will Benton — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:18:31 +0000

This gem from the aptly-named preschoolgems twitter feed, strikes me as subtly related to ontological arguments:

But dinosaurs aren’t cool because they’re already dead, right?

I’m almost inspired to finish reviewing Time-out for Contingency as a consequence, but only almost.

The first song is always the hardest

Will Benton — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 07:17:44 +0000

I thought I’d try the February Album Writing Month challenge this year for the first time in a while. One week in, and I’ve got one song done and (only) thirteen to go. The first song is called “like lions breathing fire”; you may read the liner notes or just listen to the mp3.

Sports fandom

Will Benton — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 16:40:18 +0000

Ilya Somin argues that sports fandom is no less ridiculous than vicarious identification with fictional characters, but that you should still probably hate the Yankees. This isn’t news to thoughtful sports fans, of course, but I’m often baffled why emotional responses to sports and other more-or-less lowbrow entertainments are often regarded as somehow unacceptable by the same people who find weeping over the specifics of literature, opera, art cinema, or other imaginary diversions completely praiseworthy. (Speaking of imaginary diversions, I’d argue that it’s much less ridiculous to care about the state of the Premier League table or the fate of Maurice Levy than it is to get all worked up over real-world election results.)

In a similar vein, I’ve recently realized that my permanent addresses throughout my entire life, when ordered by time, strictly increase in the noisomeness of the local pro sports fan base: St. Paul until toddlerhood; Alameda County, CA for the 1980s; the D.C. metro area in the early 1990s; the Philadelphia metro area for summers in college; and finally, southern Wisconsin. As you might imagine, I’m wholly unsettled by this pattern’s implications for my family’s future mobility. Although we love Madison and have no desire to leave, if we were to move again, we’d have to settle in Chicago, North Jersey, or perhaps next door to ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons.

Road closed

wbflickr — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:16:40 +0000

Road closed, originally uploaded by willbenton.

Parenting highlights (and other lights)

Will Benton — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:36:33 +0000

The other night, my son (age ~4.5) said this completely out of the blue:

Dad, when I’m grown up and have kids, I will buy the house next door to yours so that I can visit you whenever I want without driving, and so you can visit me and my kids without driving!

That absolutely made up for the time he broke the garage window and, while wearing mittens, hid the shards in the snow, later telling me that he was playing “hide and seek glass.” What a great kid.

Just another reminder

Will Benton — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:26:55 +0000

When access to your personal data is a point of negotiation between application developers and the company that makes your favorite gadget, you aren’t the customer. You’re the product:

In recent weeks, these people say, Google has told publishers it would take a smaller slice on any sales they make of Android apps than the 30% cut Apple typically takes on iTunes sales. Google has also proposed giving publishers certain personal data about app buyers to help with marketing related products or services.

This isn’t a knock on Google; targeted advertising is how they make their money, and they’re good at it. Furthermore, while they may collect terrifying amounts of data about me personally, those data are generally more commercially useful in the aggregate. But for all of the rosy optimism I hear about iPads and Android devices replacing general-purpose computers in the near future, no one seems to acknowledge that people are willing to accept a level of creepiness with these devices that wouldn’t be politically (or, in some cases, technically) possible with general-purpose computers.

(Link via Ellen Lupton on Twitter.)

Two almost comically depressing links

Will Benton — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:42:56 +0000

Roadside assistance

It looks like Eagle, CO might be as bad a place to ride a bike as it is to be a 19-year-old female hotel employee. Apparently, Vail Valley District Attorney Mark Hurlbert is willing to avoid pursuing felony hit-and-run charges against an investment banker who ran over a cyclist and only stopped to phone Mercedes roadside assistance in order to report the damage to his car. His rationale is that a felony conviction would negatively impact the perpetrator’s career.

One might assume that Hurlbert is merely weary of the increasing criminalization of the American public, and that he allowed this (admittedly completely egregious) offense to slide with misdemeanor charges in order to make some ideological statement about the nature of punishment. One would be wrong, though, as Hurlbert has also pursued felony criminal-impersonation charges against two women who exchanged race numbers for a mountain-bike event.

There’s not a lot I can say about this story without using naughty words. However, I would like to apologize to the town of Middleton, WI, for anything negative I have ever said regarding its climate for cyclists. I’ll take antipathy and incompetence over corruption and abject hostility any day.

Cargo cult security

Bruce Schneier points out that the future of in-flight wi-fi is in doubt as a result of the attempted cargo plane bombings on UPS flights from Yemen; while these package bombs did not have internet-enabled triggers, such a trigger exists in the realm of logical possibility, so it’s obviously better to outlaw in-flight internet access altogether.

Schneier notes that this will not prevent any known class of attack (and, indeed, leaves less-sophisticated bomb triggers involving timers and altimeters completely unaffected). Personally, I assume that every passenger and bag will soon have to pass through an electromagnetic pulse, right after the security groping and peepshow.

If only all film reviews were this awesome

Will Benton — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:03:45 +0000

Here’s the opening paragraph of Dan Kois’ excellent review of Jackass 3D:

I know what you’re thinking: Am I highbrow enough to see Jackass 3D? No doubt you read about this challenging art film’s premiere this week, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where curators praised the film’s revolt against phallocentrism and its use of the body as canvas for acts of transgressive violence. But have no fear: Indebted as director Jeff Tremaine is to Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the works of Luis Buñuel, Jackass 3D remains surprisingly accessible.

You should probably read the rest.

Cold-blooded connections

Will Benton — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:01:05 +0000

Almost every American sports media outlet is aggressively covering the best sports news I’ve heard in decades, but I like Mike Florio’s take and this insight in particular:

The parallels between Moss and Tarkenton are eerie. Both players started their careers with the Vikings and spent six years with the team. Both players were gone for five years. Both players eventually returned.

The Tarkenton–Moss parallel had occurred to me before, but even as the climate in Minnesota grew more hospitable to Moss’s return, I never thought it could actually happen.

Welcome home, Randy.

Dissertation advice

Will Benton — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:56:05 +0000

I’ve been blissfully out of the grad school game for so long that I might have to start teaching boxing to bright-eyed masters students to keep them from entering a life of research. But I was recently reminded of the best advice for anyone embarking on a substantial applied research effort (especially a dissertation): build your work around a thesis statement. That is, your main point should be an objective, defensible point that your experiments and prose will support. It should also fit on a single slide in 64-point type.¹

This point seems obvious (after all, schoolchildren are instructed to begin constructing a five-paragraph essay with a thesis statement; why wouldn’t adults do the same for a 200-page monograph?), but it is surprising how many junior and senior grads can’t express the central claim that their dissertation is meant to argue in a single sentence. I first encountered this advice from Olin Shivers’ web site early in my graduate career; it was a big help in focusing my work, even as my own research veered more into analysis than into runtime support as I had originally intended. (Shivers is also responsible for the greatest acknowledgements section of all time, which I’ve linked to earlier.) I was reminded of Shivers’ advice this morning when I read a nice article by his student Matt Might (now at Utah) elaborating on the benefits of a thesis statement, in which Shivers’ influence is palpable.

¹ This last point is where the thesis statement that appears in the text of my dissertation falls short. Although my thesis statement is one sentence, it includes a great deal of unnecessary detail about specific mechanisms rather than their essential properties (e.g. “type-based analysis” instead of “scalable analysis”).

Worse than hypertargeted ads

Will Benton — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:34:05 +0000

Lately, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the hyperspecific targeted advertising I receive while using the internet. This ranges from terrifyingly creepy, as in Google ads related to something I just received a message about in my gmail account, to comically incompetent, as in Facebook ads for multilevel marketing schemes that merely include numerous personal details about my life (e.g. “31-year old bald Madison dad who married a far better woman than he deserves nine years ago today and took way too long to complete a terminal degree makes $10,000 in his spare time”).

Amazingly, there’s something still worse than the ever-metastasizing clump of evidence that my personal information and attention are the real products on offer from currently-fashionable internet companies. Here I refer to the completely untargeted ad, as in the regular promotional emails that Borders sends me. I have never purchased a hardcover bestseller from Borders; in recent memory, I think I have exclusively bought technical books, books about photographic lighting, DK Eyewitness Books about robots and knights, and audio recordings of Baroque and Renaissance music. (We’ll construe the latter broadly enough to include DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, which I also bought at a Borders.) Borders knows my purchase history because it is tied to my “Borders Rewards” card, which is the only reason that they have my email address in the first place.

Borders certainly has enough data about me to send me sensible recommendations, or even targeted promotions that I would be likely to exploit. Instead, they drop the same impersonal, coordinated, and clumsy marketing on (I presume) every email address they have. So instead of getting notifications of a new Pragmatic Programmers book or Fretwork album, I get messages from Borders touting the sort of crap I’d never buy: e.g. Dan Brown books, political memoirs, the Twilight series, and Eat Pray Love and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, whatever those are.

Targeted marketing, when done well, has the advantage of being relevant and potentially useful. Advertising that make me weep for my lost privacy is disheartening, but it doesn’t necessarily represent a waste of my time. I can’t say the same, on either count, for lazy, carpet-bombed marketing that reveals that the sender has absolutely not mined my purchases, browsing history, or “friend” network to the extent of its ability. As a concrete example, consider Amazon and Borders. Amazon’s aggressive daily emails encouraging me to buy every product tangentially related to something I looked at yesterday are bad for my wallet (and my soul), but they are at least sometimes interesting. When I see an email from Borders in my inbox, on the other hand, I typically delete it unread.

Driving at one-third the speed of sound

Will Benton — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:24:01 +0000

“The tires will only last for about fifteen minutes, but it’s okay because the fuel runs out in twelve minutes.” (Thanks to Pete MacKinnon for the link to this excellent video.)

Taiwanese news humor

Will Benton — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:16:25 +0000

I’m fairly late to the train on the animated Taiwanese recaps of U.S. news stories, but if they’re all as good as this one, I sincerely regret not watching them sooner.

Autocompletion as oracle, with an application to The Wire

Will Benton — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:12:46 +0000

Google’s query autocompletion feature has produced some mildly amusing results due to what it reveals about search queries in the aggregate. Query autocompletion can be useful, too, if you want probable confirmation of an answer to certain kinds of questions.

As an example, Andrea and I watched the first episode of Season 3 of The Wire on Saturday. As we were watching, I thought “I bet I know what real-world public figure Tommy Carcetti is based on; I’ll check Google.” As it turns out, I didn’t even need to complete the search to learn that I was probably right. I merely had to type “carcetti o” in the search box before seeing that the first suggested autocompletion was what I had intended to type.

Lac Seul

Will Benton — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:15:37 +0000

I recently spent a week on Lac Seul in northwestern Ontario walleye fishing with my father-in-law and some friends. When compared to the sorts of places in which I have spent most of my life, Lac Seul is notable for having visible stars at night, total freedom from wired or wireless communication networks, and an extremely favorable walleye-to-human ratio. It is also quite photogenic.

Click on any image for details, coordinates, and larger versions, or click here to see all of my published images from Lac Seul (sixteen public images, with more if you’re one of my flickr contacts). I have included notes on equipment (for photo nerds planning similar trips) after the jump.

Notes for photographers

There were a lot of fun challenges surrounding photographing this trip. Usually when I’m going out to take pictures, I can choose two or three lenses to shoot with for a couple of hours, but I needed to bring with everything I thought I might need for a week. I also am typically near a computer shortly after shooting and can check focus and exposure on a large screen. Since I didn’t bring a computer along, my experience was much closer to shooting film.

Lenses

I brought two zooms (a 10-22 and a 70-200), fast normal and telephoto primes, and a macro lens. (The latter is my go-to lens for photographing my kids these days, and I thought I might find some interesting textures to shoot. I wound up not using the macro lens or the tele prime at all.) Although I usually prefer using prime lenses, I shot with the two zooms almost exclusively. Partially this was a matter of where I could get interesting focal lengths, but it was very convenient to not have to drop my tackle to switch lenses on the boat.

If you’re packing photo gear for a similar trip, note that the two focal length ranges I brought along might not be the most versatile. In particular, 70mm on a crop sensor is probably too long to shoot a portrait of a boatmate, but 200mm isn’t long enough to fill the frame with a shy animal. (Fortunately, we encountered some quite brazen eagles.) The 10-22 is capable of extremely dramatic images, but most of its range is not useful for conventional portraits or the sorts of landscape pictures you’re likely to get from a boat. (It will capture a great deal of the starry night sky, though!)

I never felt like I couldn’t get a shot that I wanted because of my equipment, but if I had an unlimited budget and could only pack two lenses, I’d bring a slightly-wide to slightly-telephoto zoom (like a 24-70) for people, and a very long zoom like a 100-400 for wildlife. Either of these will also work well for certain kinds of landscape shots.

Bags and other equipment

Typically when I’m shooting close to home, I carry my gear in a Lowepro Slingshot that Andrea got me for our anniversary a couple of years ago. This is an excellent bag. It is convenient, comfortable, and well-organized, and it has one of the best user interfaces I’ve ever seen in a bag of any kind. Unfortunately, it won’t accommodate lenses much larger than the Canon 10-22 or 135/2.8.

Instead of carrying my Slingshot and a separate case for my zoom, which is possible but unwieldy, I brought a Lowepro Flipside backpack. The Flipside is a backpack that opens on the panel facing the wearer’s back. I suspect it is harder to lose gear from it as a result. I packed a camera with a long zoom, a pair of speedlites, accessories, and four other lenses and had room to spare. The Flipside also has a tripod holder that does an adequate but unremarkable job of hanging on to my small Manfrotto tripod.

I also brought along a Seal Line Baja 30 dry bag. This bag is just large enough so that the Flipside could fit snugly inside sans tripod. Fortunately, we had great weather almost every day and I never had to see how quickly I could isolate my gear.

Finally, this trip was the most hostile environment yet for my Luma Loop. This clever strap absolutely lives up to its considerable hype. If you ever use heavy lenses or need to have a camera accessible when you aren’t just taking pictures, you should check it out.

Typographical jokes

Will Benton — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:13:00 +0000

Consider the swash capitals pictured above: from Estupido Espezial and from Comic Sans. You might assume that both of these saw their genesis as elaborate inside jokes within type foundries. You would be half right.

Delightfully, the press release announcing a font package including a swash-enabled Comic Sans includes the following surely spontaneous and heartfelt quotation:

“The new versions of Comic Sans and Trebuchet have a lot of great OpenType features” said Vincent Connare, the original designer of the fonts. “My hat’s off to Ascender for creating swashes and other delightful flourishes that give these fonts a breath of fresh air.”

I have to assume that this statement isn’t something Connare merely “said” so much as something he snickered, wept, or spit out from behind bitterly-clenched teeth. But I suppose that press releases are typically imprecise about the delivery of quoted utterances.

(Ascender press release link via DF.)

Lens reviews

Will Benton — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:04:30 +0000

From a review of the brilliant Canon 200mm f/2.0 IS lens: “This is one of those lenses that can set you and your work apart from the competition. The price is harder to swallow.” Careful readers will note that the actual price is not mentioned in the review, but a cursory internet search reveals that I would probably have to sell my car to at least three different people in order to buy such an amazing piece of glass.

Some photos from the Iowa Great Lakes

Will Benton — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:46:59 +0000

I’ve uploaded some photos from the 4th of July weekend weekend in Spirit Lake and Okoboji, including a few photos of WT fishing, one of my brother-in-law¹ catching a lot of air on Big Spirit Lake, and one of my sister-in-law waterskiing bluetooth style.

¹ I suppose Ben and I are technically “co-brothers-in-law,” but this nomenclature has always struck me as unnecessarily pedantic.

On certainty

Will Benton — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 05:44:58 +0000

I noticed tonight that my iPhone auto-corrects from “provably” to “probably.” The epistemic implications are staggering.