free variable

If you bring these two coins to the miniature golf course, you can exchange either for a turn in the batting cages or a few minutes operating a radio-controlled boat. But one of them is also U.S. legal tender for all debts, public and private, while the other has no value for general trade. Can you tell which is which? Was it hard?

Just about every website in the universe is breathlessly reporting that James Cameron made over 100 different versions of Avatar for different viewing scenarios, tweaking postproduction variables like spoken language, subtitles, brightness, presence of 3D, and even aspect ratio. (The aforelinked article does an excellent job of making this appear to be the indefatigable devotion of a master craftsman and not the insane dithering of an egomaniac who probably spends his spare time sorting toothpicks.)

I applaud this level of attention to detail, although I’m still waiting to see the movie until Cameron releases an ideal version for my preferred viewing scenario, and even Cameron’s arsenal of postproduction manipulations might be insufficiently powerful to create such a version. Specifically, the version I’m waiting for would feature a plot developed by competent adult screenwriters, rather than by a pack of misanthropic teenage syndicalists; this alternate plot could involve characters that weren’t merely irrational and one-dimensional bullseyes or fetishized noble savages. It would also be nice if this putative “plot version” of Avatar were available in a Papyrus-free edition, and on Blu-ray with a DTS 5.1 mix.

(This is merely one of those “briefly-noted” remaindered link posts I have from time to time, but given the common leitmotif I couldn’t resist the urge to allude to the Confessio Augustana in the title.)

Logo abuse

Armin Vit discusses the new Peugeot logo, which represents a dramatic step backwards in execution and looks rather like it was created by the “3D Text” feature in Microsoft Office 97. (True story: at one point in my graduate-school career, I worked on a student project with someone who insisted not only on using Word for scholarly writing, but also on making a “3D” title page for our paper. That was a particularly awful semester.) As an interested layman, I can only speculate that AIGA and other professional societies are requiring identity designers to meet an “awkward gradients and misplaced highlights” quota these days. Either that, or branding agencies are delegating work to enthusiastic toddlers with Office licenses.

Naming abuse

Thomas and I were shopping for a TV antenna a few days ago, and we came across this product, which is billed as a “Quantum Antenna.” This made a lot of sense: in my experience, over-the-air TV reception is definitely a problem domain in which observing an apparatus can change its state. I didn’t buy it, though, since it was expensive and our reception is bad enough as it is without introducing any additional uncertainty.

Tautology abuse

D and B recently brought us a battery of amazings gastronomic delights including some truly excellent blackberry ice cream. I ate some of the latter last night and noticed the following truly excellent copy on the carton:

Yes, with a sentence that recalls Jon Gruden’s booth work on Monday Night Football (“THAT GUY is a FOOTBALL PLAYMAKER, making FOOTBALL PLAYS for this FOOTBALL PROGRAM.”), this carton of ice cream assures me that it is “certified organic by organic certifiers.” My initial reaction was “of course! Who else could do so?” But perhaps I’ve construed the second “organic” too narrowly, and the sentence simply means to indicate that organic certification was performed by a carbon-based certifier. In any case, the ice cream is great.

By the way, if you’re keeping track of Myriad creep, be sure to make a note here.

Here’s an excellent and evocative one-liner from Peter Suderman’s recent Reason post about netroots disillusionment with the current administration, for whom charisma, control of all three branches of government, and regular bons mots are apparently insufficient leverage to establish an agenda that satisfies the truest of the true believers:

Unless you’re a character in an Aaron Sorkin show, that’s just not how national politics work.

The whole post is, I think, pretty well done and worth reading, but the point that many vocal citizens are apparently living in the onanistic and reductive political fantasy world of The American President &c. is one that probably bears repeating as often as possible.

It looks like these college kids appreciate anarchy enough to name their nightclub after a misogynist, racist, and murderous thug, but not enough to go all the way and eschew the notion of private property (or the idea that the monetary values that markets ascribe to physical objects are meaningful):

Jeremy Reimer wrote an article for Ars Technica claiming that Microsoft Word is dead. Some incidental aspects of his argument surely deserve additional scrutiny (e.g. the “people prefer software with more features” claim), but the main thrust is that Word is dead because documents now appear on the web instead of in print, or something, and there are better formats and tools for writing for the web:

What everyone had lost track of in the heat of battle was why we were still using Word (or OpenOffice Writer, which is—let’s face it—just a clone of Word) to create documents that were likely never going to be printed.

Word, to this day, is still largely a digital representation of a bunch of 8½ by 11 pieces of paper. Pages have numbers which you must use to reference them, and every page has a header and a footer. Word does have a display mode called “Draft” that makes it look more like an endless stream of toilet paper than separate pages, but I always switched to “Print Layout”—partly because Draft was so ugly, but mostly as a kind of unconscious reflex, a need to “know” what the printed form would look like even though I was rarely printing things out any more. Even in Draft mode, the pages are still there, and are always the same size.

One almost hesitates to point out that Reimer’s article — as it appears on the Ars Technica web site, unfettered by the antiquated constraints of physical media — is paginated. Furthermore, each page has a header, a footer, a sidebar, and a number. Perhaps some constraints die harder than we might wish.

As you may recall, the venerable incandescent light bulb was due to be illegal by 2012 due to more stringent efficiency requirements. (I snarked about this earlier here.) This is unfortunate for a variety of reasons: fluorescent lights often look terrible, are more expensive than incandescent bulbs, contain mercury, and are — in my experience — of wildly variable quality and durability.

Fortunately, a new wave of incandescent bulbs is emerging that have vastly superior energy-efficiency characteristics. Unfortunately, the nature of engineering dictates that these suffer from tradeoffs, just like everything else:

The first bulbs to emerge from this push, Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers, are expensive compared with older incandescents. They sell for $5 apiece and more, compared with as little as 25 cents for standard bulbs.

But they are also 30 percent more efficient than older bulbs. Philips says that a 70-watt Halogena Energy Saver gives off the same amount of light as a traditional 100-watt bulb and lasts about three times as long, eventually paying for itself.

I’m sure these bulbs are great, and I’m almost inclined to buy some right now to replace the ugly and slow CFLs that have turned my basement into a futuristic gray dystopia. Furthermore, their prices will almost surely come down with competition, with improved manufacturing, and as the companies involved recoup their research costs. But did we really need an energy bill that mandates that we spend twenty times as much on a commodity product to improve its energy efficiency by less than a third?

Apparently, the religion reporting in AP wire stories that the NYT runs isn’t much better than the religion reporting in the NYT proper:

Archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of Paul.

Consider this some vindication for Wenham’s reading of Paul: not only was Paul not a theological innovator, but, given that his tomb has been regarded as such for “some 2,000 years,” many of his epistles must even precede the birth and ministry of Christ!

(Note also the gratuitous Ratzinger-bashing in the final paragraph: “At the end of Sunday’s service in the warm basilica, Benedict, 82, lost his balance slightly as he slipped on a step on the altar….”)

This Kottke post on a moronic dietary subculture is definitely worth reading. However, the “breatharians” are not uniquely deserving of scorn: a “breatharian” who sneaks an occasional cheeseburger is no worse than most of the “straight edge” people I knew in high school, whose various and intricate proscriptions always seemed to stop short of one undeniable appetite or another. Pop asceticism is the slave of the passions, I guess.

Like almost all sophisticated and clever people, I am delighted every time Facebook announces a new, easy-to-abuse feature that might at its best enable some of its users to become sharecroppers of a trivially larger chunk of the AOL of the oughts. If you’d prefer to see a rather dimmer view, then you’ll want to read Anil Dash, who wrote an amusing article speculating on the immediate aftermath of the “user-specified URL” feature rollout on Facebook; it is chock-full of goodness like this:

LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they’ve had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it’s more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

(via Ben Brown)

I can think of at least two reasons not to tell Rosie O’Donnell about this note on the Popular Science site. The first is right here, and the second should be patently obvious.

RIYL: (1) 9/11 conspiracy theories and Occam’s razor and (2) Not your “friends”

I had the Thanksgiving football games on while I was running some experiments. Amway ran ads in every game, explaining what a wonderful company they are. (They have run these ads regularly since, and I now have more time to finish writing short notes.) The ads included numbers that were, I suppose, intended to lend credibility to their claims. I found them to do the exact opposite: they merely strengthened my belief that Amway is some kind of cross between Mary Kay and Scientology.

The numbers that stuck out the most were these:

• Amway makes “3 million people” into “small business owners” with “$7 billion in sales” every year.
• Amway has 450 products and 700 patents.

The first of these basically tells you everything you need to know: the mean Amway “small business owner” has slightly over 2 grand in revenue every year? Yikes. I hope that they have some magical way to have more profit than revenue, or at least that Amway ships their cookware, cleaning supplies, and nutritional supplements to their small business owners for free.

I won’t address the latter number except to point out that most of the Amway products mentioned are shockingly pedestrian and seem unlikely to exploit inventions that warrant patent protection; certainly, not at the rate of more than one patent per product. This means that Amway’s portfolio is probably dominated by business method patents, which I suspect have titles like “Mechanism for paying ‘small business owners’ at the top of the pyramid with fees from other ‘small business owners’”

…but then I had to quit Safari.

From “Bits” at the NYT comes this tale of holiday cheer from Sony:

At a chat with reporters in New York, Stan Glasgow, the president of Sony Electronics in the United States, and Jay Vandenbree, the company’s president for consumer sales, discussed its new rule that bans retailers from discounting Sony’s Alpha digital camera line, its more expensive televisions and some other high-end products.

Mr. Vandenbree said that by having the price for these products be the same at all retailers, Sony had eliminated stress for buyers.

“Consumers don’t have to worry about whether I can get a better deal at retailer A or retailer B,” he said.

Another benefit is that smarter consumers now have one fewer overpriced consumer-electronics brand to worry about.

Yesterday, I saw an enthusiastic young woman on State Street who was handing out stickers to passers-by. When I got within earshot, she asked me if I had “voted for change.” I had voted — and indeed, I had voted in favor of several specific changes — but more-or-less politely declined the sticker, since I am only willing to provide free advertising for burger joints, not particular candidates.

I know what she meant, but honestly, it strikes me as an abuse of language to think that one might have voted, but not “for change,” in an election with no incumbent. What would such a vote consist of? “Actually, no. I wrote in W. for a third term. Here’s hoping we can get that pesky term-limit issue ironed out in time for January 20!”

From a snarky column on “people who have ruined Britain” comes a delightful indictment of Graham Kendrick, composer of the violently banal hymn “Shine, Jesus Shine.” Choice quote:

Kendrick, who has a personal website complete with an efficient shopping section, is the nation’s pre-eminent churner-outer of evangelical bilge….

The sturdy hymns of England, musical embodiment of the stoicism, resolve and undemonstrative solidarity of our nation, are in severe peril, and all thanks to ill-shaven remnants of the late Sixties — grinning inadequates who have never got over the fact that they weren’t Cat Stevens.

Football season is blissfully close — and, with it, the only time of the year that I actually watch television. As always, I feel compelled to revisit the perennial question: have those NHTSA advertisements really cut back on the number of people driving around in vehicles shoulder-full of booze?

I’d appreciate any hard data on this question.

There was a lot of commotion a while ago when some overcaffeinated kid revealed that the beat for the ubiquitous Usher single “Love in This Club” is made up of royalty-free loops, specifically, some synthesizer lines from the “Euro Hero Synth” set in Apple’s GarageBand. (All of the Apple loops have these bafflingly creativity-destroying names like “Cop Show Clav,” “Glow Stick Anthem Acid Bass,” “Angsty Chorused Flannel Stratocaster,” and “Uzbek Tech-House Breakdown Balalaika.”)

Of course, I use and love Logic Studio (which comes with approximately 2.7 years of royalty-free loops, including all of those included with GarageBand), but I never install loops. If I had — and if, you know, everyone else in the world hadn’t already done it — I might throw down a quick and mildly droll remix. This would probably be even easier than it sounds, since it seems like much of the production for “Love in This Club” may have been done in GarageBand. In particular, you might notice the obvious application of the “Earbleed Squarewave Mastering” preset:

Usher may not “care who’s watching,” but he cares even less, apparently, about those who are listening. Who’s winning the loudness war now?

NB: some preset and loop names may be imaginary.

The Canon Canonet GIII QL17 is a classic rangefinder from 1972. It was designed to use mercury batteries that are now unavailable in the U.S.¹; substituting contemporary batteries results in metering errors that change over the life of the battery, according to Wikipedia:

The lightmeter uses a PX625 mercury battery, which is now discontinued. The alkaline version can be used, but the different electric tension, different discharge curve, and absence of electronic compensation circuit, induce a defective exposure metering, between a 1.5-f-stop at the beginning of the life of the alkaline battery, and a 1.5-f-stop underexposure [at] the end.

At first glance, it seems absurd, or at least quaint, that someone would put up with inconsistent exposures and the absence of modern amenities in order to use this camera in 2008. (And people do make a lot of nice pictures with the Canonet even today.) However, when one considers all of the crap that people have to put up with to use a 2007-vintage, $10k Leica M8 digital rangefinder, worrying about a stop or two here and there suddenly doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

¹ This decades-old restriction on mercury batteries looks awfully prescient now, since we’ll need to ensure a ready supply of mercury for light bulbs in the next decade. Good show, lawmakers!

Well, this entry into the “themed-snack” marketplace is basically the dumbest thing I’ve seen since I learned that Sony was bankrolling “Are We There Yet,” a PG-rated children’s comedy starring Ice Cube:

Next up: “United States Currency-O’s,” “Fruit-Flavored Powerbook Keycap Snacks,” and “Whole-Grain Picture-Hanging Hardware Kit.”

(via Wolf Rentzsch on twitter)

Spotted in Madison:

If that’s unclear — and it might well be, since it’s a phone picture — the sticker on the left side says “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” and the sticker on the right side says “My sister is in the Air Force.”

I generally try to avoid paying attention in even-numbered years unless I have a ready supply of antiemetics, but I’m always happy to read about the competing goals of different typeface choices. Perhaps the most delightful thing that I read during my hiatus from posting here was this snarky riff on the typographic choices of presidential campaigns — and the questionable design goals each seem to aim for — from the always entertaining and quotable Hoefler & Frere-Jones Blog. (Note to typeface designers with weblogs: “mocking national politicians,” “type nerdery,” and “snarky riffs” become so much more powerful when combined, just like Voltron.)

Immediately preceding that post was a cute piece reflecting Hoefler’s delight that Barack Obama’s campaign is using H&FJ Gotham for some of their signage. As Gary Hustwit points out, Gotham’s aesthetic recalls Modernism and its attendant idealism — themes that resonate with Obama’s progressive base. (I suspect it is also resonates with voters who love flawless and absurdly expensive digital fonts with restrictive licenses.)

To my eye, Gotham is the finest typeface choice from any of these campaigns, both for its quality and for its rhetorical compatibility with the candidate. However, I note that Obama’s main wordmark does not use H&FJ faces. Rather, the ubiquitous Obama yard signs and bumper stickers employ two classic Eric Gill faces: Perpetua and Gill Sans. I am not sure if there is a similarly felicitous design goal behind this design choice. If I had to guess, though, I’d assume that this choice increases the campaign’s appeal among dog lovers.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to this article, Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy is unable to write songs in front of other people. That’s reasonable, I guess. Apparently, he’s uncomfortable with exposing some parts of the process:

[W]orking melodies over, you’re constantly sounding like a yowling cat, as you’re trying to find the right melody. And you find stupid melodies, too, and stupid lyrics that you never would want anybody to think that you’d knowingly entertain….

While I am not by any stretch a connoisseur of pop music, I should disclose that I have been subjected to the Decemberists’ oeuvre several times and found it affected, grating, and essentially unlistenable. However, I now have new respect for Meloy. If he’s paralyzed by the prospect of “sounding like a yowling cat” in front of a fawning reporter from the Guardian, he must be an extremely seasoned performer to muster the courage to perform live at all.

Here’s some heinous logo work as spotted at the Madison airport today:

I can’t say anything about the bar fare ($7 for bottled macrobrews and $5 for french fries is far too steep for me), but this is certainly some of the würst treatment of blackletter I’ve ever seen. (Background info)

Sara Ivry at the NYT discusses efforts to market “Evan Almighty” to religious groups. However, Ivry (or her editors) seem to be serious Arians:

By comparison, “Evan Almighty” seems an unlikely candidate for [marketing efforts targeted at churches]. Unlike “The Passion of the Christ,” it is a comedy that portrays God in the flesh (played again by Morgan Freeman, wearing a natty white suit). “Bruce Almighty,” which made more than $240 million at the box office in the United States, was better known for irreverent humor and Mr. Carrey’s mugging than for any underlying religious message.

While “The Passion of the Christ” is no comedy, I’m pretty sure Gibson would characterize his movie as portraying God in the flesh as well.

[NYT article via GetReligion]

These raise many of my objections to self-righteous contemporary institutional heresy (note the ludicrous oversize comma). Feel free to suggest your own!

RIYL: The bumper sticker is dead, I’d buy one of these.

Technorati Tags: bumper sticker, heresy, ucc, heterodox

wikipedic

SYLLABICATION: wi·ki·pe·dic

PRONUNCIATION: wĭ-kē-pē’-dĭk

ADJECTIVE: 1. Characterized by sparsity, a pathological focus on ephemera, savant-like devotion to the trivial or irrelevant, and occasional blatant error: “his wikipedic knowledge of music comprised the following: the birthdates and hobbies of every member of Menudo past and present, the exact synthesizer preset patch names used in Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi score, and the author of the tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra: namely, Richard Wagner.”

SEE ALSO: encyclopedic

Technorati Tags: neologism, wiki

I only saw about ten minutes of the Academy Awards, which included the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. As you may know, the screenplay for The Departed won. As William Monahan was taking the stage, the narrator said something to the effect of: “Monahan adapted the screenplay for The Departed from the Japanese film Infernal Affairs.”

I’ve always said that Andy Lau is one of the greatest Japanese actors I know, followed closely by Tony Leung. I also think that “Moo gaan dou,” the title by which Infernal Affairs is known in its country of release, totally sounds Japanese. (I’m no specialist, though.)

You don’t have to know much to read a teleprompter, and I suspect that you need to know only a little more to write the script for the Academy Awards narrator. Perhaps a good place to start would be “basic facts about films under consideration for major awards.” I have no particular affection for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — indeed, the only Oscars I care about include hollandaise sauce — but I’m embarrassed for them.

UPDATE²: UPI was repeating this bogus claim, but they’ve fixed it as of this morning. The original UPI text is below: