I still don't think "Emily" has crossed the uncanny valley--in fact, she may just have gone deeper into it--but there's no doubt she's a big improvement over previous efforts towards realistic human facial expressions in digital animation. There's still something not quite right, especially with her eyes. But it's a visible step forward.
All Star Cheer Squad lets you experience competitive cheerleading (as opposed to your run-of-the-mill weekend warrior variety). For maximum realism, THQ brought on Tony G, of Bring It On fame, as a consultant.
Like many of you, I'm wondering if this game requires a separate spirit fingers accessory.
You wouldn't think a man would have much leisure time in a race in which he sets a new world record of 9.69 seconds, but Usain Bolt had enough of a lead at the end of the men's 100-meter dash to blow out finger pistols, flash Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella triangle hand sign, and check his watch.
If I were racing against him, I'd be intimidated just seeing "Bolt" on the back of his jersey.
***
I thought I saw Michael Phelps ride across the pool to his last medal ceremony standing on the backs of two dolphins, holding a trident.
***
I was wondering about something at dinner yesterday and saw that someone else had asked Marginal Revolution the same thing: for such a populous country, why has India won so few Olympic medals?
***
Visual evidence that Nikon has made a huge comeback against Canon in the professional sports photography market. Look at the lenses in this shot of the press photography area at the Olympics.
Black lenses are likely Nikon's mounted on D3's, while the light gray lenses are the Canons that used to dominate.
***
Is it worth carrying an airline-mile credit card? Probably not unless you are a big-spending, high-flying, elite status traveler. I ditched mine several years ago in favor of various cashback cards.
***
Is it really possible Anthony Lane didn't know right away which actor was playing Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder? From his review:
He is a doughy, balding monster with big spectacles and even wider hand gestures, all his power distilled into profanity: a grotesque update, if you will, on the movie executive with the shock of white-hot hair, brought to life by Rod Steiger, in “The Big Knife,
Some sites I frequent have posted some Hulu links. I'd like to think it's love, but in web currency, links are like slaps on the butt in sports.
Filmoculous: "Some movies I didn't realize you could watch in their entirety on Hulu: Metropolitan, The Fifth Element, 28 Days Later, Requiem for a Dream, Lost in Translation, Koyaanisqatsi, and Eternal Sunshine."
Kottke, continuing the Filmoculous thread: "Me either! Also available are Raising Arizona, Lost Highway, Hoop Dreams, Sideways, Master and Commander, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, and Groundhog Day."
Will Carroll, in Baseball Prospectus: "I can't watch the Olympics without thinking of this video."
Sports Illustrated has a series of photos showing just how close Milorad Cavic came to upsetting Michael Phelps in the 100-meter butterfly yesterday. It's easy to see why, to some outside the pool, it looked like some conspiracy that Phelps won. He was so far behind before that final half-stroke that chopped the wall that it looked like an error when they superimposed that #1 graphic in his lane on TV.
I don't understand the advantages of wearing the high neck Speedo LZR Racer suit versus just the legskin, but I wonder why Phelps only wore the legskin for this swim, and whether that would have made a difference. Cavic wore the high neck bodyskin.
I want to hang a map of the world in my house then I’m gonna put pins into all the locations that I’ve travelled to. But first I’m gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won’t fall down.
Because every now and then, a dose of Mitch Hedberg is required.
When I saw this photo of Spain's Olympic basketball team making slanted eyes in an ad, I thought there couldn't be any possible way they could have known what that gesture meant. How could anyone be so blatantly racist? I haven't seen that gesture since the playground days in elementary school, and the feeling it evokes has evolved. Then, it stung. Now, it angers.
But the Spaniards have not apologized, and participants like Pau Gasol are quoted saying, "It was supposed to be a picture that inspired the Olympic spirit."
Huh?!?
Jason Kidd is right, if the U.S. team had done something like that, David Stern would have disciplined them. But no one, not even FIBA, has done anything, not even a public rebuke.
I'm rooting for the U.S. Olympic hoops team to remedy this by meeting Spain in the finals and kicking their asses up and down the floor.
A photo of mine, one of the Hollywood sign, appears in this Babar children's book, and it's on the cover, too.
I don't get anything if you buy the book, but I was happy to contribute because, well, you know, I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.
Sure, Whitney Houston sang it, but I live it.
That common victory pose, arms thrust high, chest stuck out -- think Michael Phelps -- may be innate to primates according to scientists. Their evidence is that chimps and monkeys do it also, and blind athletes who've never seen others do it also strike that pose.
What I want to know is what the root of the walk-off home run celebration is. If I spot a gorilla throwing off a half-coconut shell helmet and then jumping into a big group of gorillas, at which point they all start hopping up and down in a circle, I'm going to freak out.
The Olympics are a time for being part of the global community, for sportsmanship, for setting aside our differences and celebrating...
...yeeeaaahhhhh! Suck it France!
In the pool, Lezak had seen Bernard hit the far wall first.
"I'm not going to lie," Lezak said. "When I flipped at the 50 and I still saw how far ahead he was, and he was the world-record holder 'til about two minutes before that, when Sullivan led off with the world record, I thought, it really crossed my mind for a split second, there's no way.
"Then I changed. I said, you know what, that's ridiculous. This is the Olympics. I'm here for these guys. I'm here for the United States of America. It's more than -- I don't care how bad it hurts, or whatever, I'm just going to go out there and hit it.
"Honestly, in like 5 seconds, I was thinking all these things -- you know, just got like a super charge and took it from there. It was unreal."
...
With the pressure of all of it on him, Lezak threw down the fastest split of all time, 46.06.
After finally watching Margarito pound Cotto's face into a Margarito pizza on my friend's DVR, I am ready to pony up money to see Mayweather step into the ring with Margarito. Pretty Boy ducked Margarito once despite an $8MM guaranteed payout, but if he really wants to cement his legacy he should come out of retirement and face down the Tijuana Tornado.
The most interesting thing about this John Edwards story: the National Enquirer scooped the MSM. Second-most interesting angle: Edwards admits that all that time on the campaign trail made him a narcissist.
That one must be a bit self-absorbed to want to run for President is not surprising. As Chris Rock opined in his current comedy tour, "Do you realize how arrogant you have to be to think you deserve to be President of the United States?" But I haven't heard a candidate explain an affair that way before.
Maureen Dowd's column ends:
Back in 2002, Edwards sent me a Ken doll dressed in bathing trunks, Rio de Janeiro Ken, with a teasing note, because he didn’t like my reference to him as a Ken doll in a column.
In retrospect, the comparison was not fair — to Ken.
Oof.
Alan Ehrenhalt writes of the demographic inversion of the American city in his article "Trading Places" in The New Republic.
In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
Later:
We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.
Having grown up in the suburbs thinking it could not possibly be a more dull existence, I've always had a desire to live in a big city, of which Manhattan has been the apex in my life thus far. But then I didn't experience big cities when they were plagued with higher crime rates, and of course the public schools in most cities are either terrible or too expensive.
Ultimately, though, the current inversion is less the result of middle-aged people changing their minds than of young adults expressing different values, habits, and living preferences than their parents. The demographic changes that have taken place in America over the past generation--the increased propensity to remain single, the rise of cohabitation, the much later age at first marriage for those who do marry, the smaller size of families for those who have children, and, at the other end, the rapidly growing number of healthy and active adults in their sixties, seventies, and eighties--have combined virtually all of the significant elements that make a demographic inversion not only possible but likely. We are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings can live wherever they want, and many will choose central cities over distant suburbs. As they do this, others will find themselves forced to live in less desirable places--now defined as those further from the center of the metropolis. And, as this happens, suburbs that never dreamed of being entry points for immigrants will have to cope with new realities. It should come as no surprise that the most intense arguments about hiring and educating the undocumented have occurred in the relatively distant reaches of American suburbia, such as Prince William County, Virginia.
Just a fascinating article.
Somewhere in between, there lies the vision of Jane Jacobs, who idealized the Greenwich Village of the 1950s and the casual everyday relationships that made living there comfortable, stimulating, and safe. Much of what Jacobs loved and wrote about will not reappear: The era of the mom-and-pop grocer, the shoemaker, and the candy store has ended for good. We live in a big-box, big-chain century. But I think the youthful urban elites of the twenty-first-century are looking in some sense for the things Jacobs valued, whether they have heard of her or not. They are drawn to the densely packed urban life that they saw on television and found vastly more interesting than the cul-de-sac world they grew up in. And, by and large, I believe central cities will give it to them. Not only that, but much of suburbia, in an effort to stay afloat, will seek to urbanize itself to some extent. That reinvention is already taking place: Look at all the car-created suburbs built in the 1970s and '80s that have created "town centers" in the past five years, with sidewalks and as much of a street grid as they can manage to impose on a faded strip-mall landscape. None of these retrofit efforts look much like a real city. But they are a clue to the direction in which we are heading.
The world's most expensive car, the Aston Martin One-77, a hand-made coupe, will cost $2.3 million. At most 77 will be built.
It's hard to say that any car that costs that much could be worth it, but damn that's a beautiful automobile.
I was so excited for this year's Olympics because for the first time, 2,200 hours were going to be put online at NBCOlympics.com. DirecTV has some 6 or 7 channels dedicated to the Olympics. It didn't seem possible that the problems with the last Olympics would recur, namely that anyone who is on the Internet would find out results before they were shown somewhere.
Alas, that idea of maximizing audience via an artificially enforced notion of primetime still haunts us. If you want to watch Michael Phelps compete in events, you don't get to see them live, at least not on the West Coast in any legal fashion. I logged into ESPN this morning and there on the front page were the results of Phelps' first heat of the 400 IM Medley (which I won't share here). In fact, the result is even listed on the homepage of NBCOlympics.com. But the network is trying to still aggregate an audience for TV, so marquee events like that are not shown online, they are only shown on TV on a delayed schedule. In this case, the heats are shown at 3:30 to 4:30pm PST.
The final is at 5pm PST, but on the west coast they are going to delay coverage until 8pm PST, so for three hours the East Coast and Midwest in the U.S. will know the results, while the PST folks will have to detach all electronic devices and live in willful ignorance of the sports world if they wish to have any suspense when watching the main events on TV.
The revolution will be tape-delayed. Sigh.
