Lonely no more

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Jack Kerouac's favorite photo from Robert Frank's seminal photography collection The Americans was the one of the "lonely elevator girl". He noted as much in his introduction for the book, asking "That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name and address?"


Well, years later, through a twist of fate, she has been found.



So now, 54 years after Frank snapped a shot that would leave a great American poet yearning, I can finally bring it all full circle and tweet:


@kerouac: name is Sharon, Pacific Heights, and no longer lonely. Adios, King.



(via Design Observer)


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Low light digital cameras

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Ryan Brenizer and David Pogue highlight new compact cameras meant to perform better in low light situations. These manufacturers have done this by moving down in megapixels rather than up for the first time. This is a good sign. For far too long digital camera manufacturers have continued to release new models that increase megapixels when what most photographers needed was not more "resolution" but more "effective resolution".


The Panasonic LX3 earned a following last year among serious photographers as one of the first compacts focused not on increased megapixels but improved low light performance. I bought one and still use it as my carry-around, though it is not quite as slim as the ultra-compacts many people favor these days.


Of the new cameras announced, the Canon S90 sounds most attractive. It has some great features:


- an f2 lens at the wide end like the LX3, great for those really dim environments, which seem to be most of the ones I'm in when I find myself reaching for a carry around camera.


- a sizeable 3" diagonal LCD screen in back.


- two programmable control rings. I'm old school this way but I hate having to press buttons on compact cameras to select functions, I far far prefer physical controls that can be switched quickly. I switch ISO and aperture constantly on my cameras, even my LX3, and on the LX3 that requires using a little joystick.


- thin profile, small enough that I'd consider it pocketable.


It's smaller than the LX3 in body size, and if I didn't own an LX3 and an iPhone I might buy one of these. I might still get one (it pays to be in my family, you inherit lots of good trickle-down electronics as I succumb to gadget lust or early adopter syndrome).



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Car free

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The NYTimes hosted an online roundtable about the possibility of going car-free in America. Witold Rybczynski's entry contained one interesting note.



There are only six American downtown districts that are dense enough to support mass transit, which you need if you’re going to be carless: New York City (Midtown and Downtown), Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco. That’s it. The breaking-point for density and mass transit feasibility seems to be about 50 persons per acre, which means families living in flats and apartments, rather than single-family houses, even row houses. Not necessarily high-rise apartments, but at least walk-ups.


Since most Americans still prefer living in houses, this is a problem — at least as far as carlessness is concerned. A more realistic goal for most Americans would be a semi-carless community, that is, one that is walkable within the neighborhood for convenience shopping, school-going and errands, and drivable for weekly shopping, consumer purchases and so on. A combination of twins, townhouses and low-rise apartments. Think of it as a halfway house.



It is sad to not see LA listed among those, but I've long since resigned myself to the necessity of a car in this town.


Marc Schlossberg chimes in:



The goal should not be car-free, but car-appropriate. The car was a wonderful invention: door-to-door travel, in relative comfort, at the time of one’s choice. The costs of using the car for every type of trip, however, are finally apparent, from their contribution to global climate change, the national obesity epidemic from loss of daily physical activity and the 40,000 deaths per year on the roadways, to the social isolation and neighborhood fragmentation that the roadway system creates. The way forward is not to eliminate cars, but to relegate them to the tasks they do well.



He goes on to describe ways to minimize car use, the most interesting of which is to reduce availability of parking (after making walking a more viable option).


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El Bulli, Dan Brown, et al

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Man hits the culinary lottery and gets a reservation at El Bulli, then recounts his meal in comic book form. 30 courses! I felt engorged and exhausted just reading about all the dishes.


***


Bill Maher rants at Huffington Post about the idiocy of Americans in an article titled "New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country." Bryan Caplan would be proud.


At times like this, trying to pass some form of healthcare reform, even a watered-down version because of the difficulty of getting any big change through the conservative institutional roadblock that we call the Senate, one wonders how the government has ever achieved anything on behalf of anyone other than a special interest.


Obama took his argument directly to the people in an Op-Ed in the NYTimes. I'm curious who was the last President of the U.S. to write an Op-Ed in a major American newspaper. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it wasn't the previous occupant of the office.


An interesting sidenote to the whole debate on healthcare reform is the uproar over Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's editorial in the Wall Street Journal arguing against the health care bill on the table. The Opinionator over the the NYTimes tracks the timeline of the whole brouhaha. If you disagree with Mackey, I don't think boycotting Whole Foods is the solution, but I do think CEO's of companies need to be careful of what they say because it's too convenient to read their comments as representative of the views of Whole Foods as a company, and it's dangerous to ascribe too many coherent policy decisions to a capitalist institution, even one like Whole Foods which many people associate with a progressive lifestyle.


***


Andrew Collins examines the global phenomenon that is Dan Brown, universally reviled by literary critics and other writers but whose next novel The Lost Symbol will command the largest first print run in Random House history at 6.5 million.


I'm not sure it's such a paradox that someone can be a bad writer yet spin a real page-turner. What grabbed me about The Da Vinci Code was the fabricated secret that tied together so many known quantities in history in a clever way, from The Last Supper to Mary Magdalene and everything in between.


The plots of his stories themselves never strike me as plausible or gripping, his characters are two-dimensional (and that may be generous, though perhaps I'm being sexist in finding gorgeous and leggy nuclear physicist Vittoria Vetra of Angels and Demons a bit implausible), nor is his command of the English language that noteworthy. After all, one chapter of The Da Vinci Code concludes with this sentence, one that would have failed me out of my first year fiction writing class in college:



Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino.



***


A physicist writes that The Time Traveler's Wife may be the most scientifically accurate movie treatment of time travel ever. No comment on whether the cheesy slow dissolve of Eric Bana each time he travels through time is also consistent with the laws of physics, or whether his expressionless acting is a consequence of too many leaps through time and space.


The article's a good read, though, as I didn't realize that physicists had come to such consensus around these constraints of time travel. I still say The Terminator remains the most brilliant time travel movie because of its stunning revelation that by going back in time to change the future you just create it, illustrated in the movie by the Moebius strip of a plot in which John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mom, only to have Kyle Reese become his father.


In that twist, the movie adheres to one of the principles stated in this article, the so-called "self-consistency problem," that is, "You can't kill your own grandfather."


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Justice Antonin Scalia and Thomas, the Twiddle Dee and Dum of the Supreme Court, argued in the minority against allowing a prisoner to challenge his murder conviction after many witnesses recanted their testimony and implicated another person as the actual murderer. Scalia, in his dissent (PDF), claims the following:



This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually

Health care reform and special interests

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Hendrik Hertzberg posts a letter from Arnold Relman in response to one of his columns on healthcare reform. Relman and Hertzberg both point to special interests, namely lobbying by the current healthcare industry, as one of the key blockers to true reform.


What's interesting is that Hertzberg goes on to trace the problem of special interests back to the structure of U.S. democracy itself.



But how did those interests get so vested in the first place? Why do interests like the health-care industry have so much money and influence? I am convinced that the underlying cause can be found in the unique hydraulics of our centuries-old political mechanisms.


We have three separately constituted “governments

Knives and thumbtacks

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Oh, what I wouldn't give for a Bob Kramer chef's knife (his knives are used by some of the most famous chefs in the world, like Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame). I'm on Kramer's waiting list, and I hope to make it to the top of it while I'm still in my cooking prime.


I received an e-mail from his mailing list saying he'd just put one of his knives up for bid on eBay. It sent a brief surge of excitement through me that lasted until I followed the eBay link and saw the current bid price.


***


Some famous people share their favorite places on Google Maps. Not a very long collection of people, though I was curious to see what places Ferran Adria of El Bulli picked out.


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So...

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Ann Shaff examines the ascent of the word "so" among this technology-raised generation.


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Pics from some lucky person who received the Mad Men season 3 press kit.


The season 3 premiere is this Sunday at 10pm. I will be planted in front of my TV then, yes.


***


Can you measure grit? Maybe so.


Many books and articles have been written recently about how genius is overrated and hard work underrated, so that idea isn't the interesting point here. The idea that a survey can assess a person's grit with some accuracy is a bit surprising. Let's get this to be a standard test in the NFL so I can use the data in my upcoming fantasy football draft.


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My So-Called Life is on Hulu now. Among the most beloved of the "one and done" shows in my lifetime, I'm looking forward to catching up on it online.







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Live from the Artists Den

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We just launched Live from the Artists Den at Hulu. It's a concert series in which an artist is invited to perform in a non-standard venue in a town, the performances recorded for broadcast.


Long before we signed this content provider, I received an invite to attend one of their concerts, an Aimee Mann performance at LA's Vibiana Cathedral.







On the road last week I perused the video to see if I made it into any shots, and 4 minutes in, I caught a glimpse of myself as I was sitting in the front row.


Hulu - Live from the Artists Den: Aimee Mann


Here's another good one in the series, The Swell Season, of Once fame.







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Lists

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Roger Ebert draws attention to another "best movies of all time" list, this one by Spectator magazine. The top one on their list is one I haven't seen atop these lists before, The Night of the Hunter: Here's the top 12 from the list, and you can see the rest here.


1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton

2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola

3. Sunrise, Murnau

4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger

5. L'avventura, Antonioni

6. The Searchers, Ford

7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles

8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman

9. L'atalante, Vigo

10. Rio Bravo, Hawks

11. The Godfather: Part I and Part II, Coppola

12. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer


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The Times (UK) selects the 60 best novels of the last 60 years, with the twist that they could only choose one book published each year. This list is provocative in its mix of classics and more populist fare: on few lists will you see Twilight (as the best novel of 2005) sharing a podium with Lolita.


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Serendipity

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Interesting post by Ethan Zuckerman on the topic of serendipity and whether the rise of the internet and digital media has increased or decreased it.


I need to think about this issue more. With the rise of the internet, my exposure to ideas has increased, which is wonderful, but I consciously try to avoid limiting myself to the same several silos of thinking over and over. Adopting a naturally contrarian mindset helps, and every few months I tend to rotate the blogs or news outlets I read regularly, not just to avoid groupthink but because I find myself naturally tiring of the same schools of thought being pressed by the same authors again and again.


Clustering is a danger, though. The same set of blogs you follow in your newsreader, the same set of sites you visit regularly because they're bookmarked, the same core set of people you follow on Twitter, all of these are huge sources of selection bias.


Be curious and skeptical. That's all I can offer for now.


***


Old link from Wimbledon: amusing t-shirt worn by Serena Williams at the press conference after her Wimbledon victory.


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Confidence game

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So what did cause this whole financial meltdown? Malcolm Gladwell blames overconfidence.


Those who don't like the anecdotal style of Gladwell will probably dismiss the article. And it's true, Gladwell doesn't make much of a case in this relatively short article that overconfidence is definitely at the heart of the financial meltdown. It reads more like a Gladwell hunch, loosely connecting some stories about former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne with a quick survey of psychological studies on human overconfidence.


But that doesn't mean he isn't a skilled storyteller. Profiling Cayne:



Jimmy Cayne grew up in Chicago, the son of a patent lawyer. He wanted to be a bookie, but he realized that it wasn’t quite respectable enough. He went to Purdue University to study mechanical engineering—and became hooked on bridge. His grades suffered, and he never graduated. He got married in 1956 and was divorced within four years. “At this time, he was one of the best bridge players in Chicago,

Africa

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Thomas Barnett urges the U.S. government to look beyond foreign aid and debt forgiveness when trying to spur improvements in Africa's standard of living.



Let me clue you in on something: When the average Western businessman goes to Africa, he sees bad environment, bad infrastructure, bad climate, and bad governance. And guess what? He's not particularly inclined to invest his money. But when the average Chinese or Indian businessman goes to Africa, he sees all the same things and thinks to himself, "Hmmm, not that different from home. I can make a lot of profit happen here!" Ditto for a lot of Arab money looking to reassert itself throughout Africa in the manner of centuries past (hint: Europeans weren't the only colonial masters).


My point is this: Africans aren't waiting for the West to finally decide to connect it up to the global economy. Asia has already beaten us to the punch, and for a lot of good reasons.


...


A recent World Bank study made this point in spades. It detailed how foreign direct investments from China and India, while overwhelmingly concentrated in extractive industries (energy, minerals, agriculture), are both growing rapidly and diversifying to the point where African economies are being integrated into buyer-driven network chains (think Wal-Mart) and producer-driven network chains (think Toyota). The rise of such "network trade" (largely within multinational corporations) means that Asia is starting to do to Africa what America once did to Asia: pulling new sources of cheap labor into the lower ends of global production chains, all while moving itself up the ladder into higher-tech (and thus higher-paying) jobs.


Too exploitative for your tastes? Perhaps you'd prefer Africans still picking cotton decades from now and calling that "development." Africa is only 30 percent urbanized today, or roughly where China was when it began its great rise thanks to Deng Xiaoping. Africa is expected to be half urbanized within a generation's time, so tell me: What do you expect all those new urban laborers to do?



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Racing Father Time

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It had to look familiar. After all, it came out of the playbook he had used with Johan Brunyeel for all 7 of his Tour de France victories. Either his team or a chasing team would set a high pace at the base of the concluding climb to winnow out the pretenders. Then, at the right moment, his teammates would form a train to lead out, and one by one, they'd redline and fall away like various pieces of a rocket ship, until he'd be alone with his contenders. Then he'd climb out of the saddle and accelerate, and his foes would only be able to watch him float away.


Only this time, it was Lance Armstrong's teammate Alberto Contador who launched off the front, and only after casting some Lance-like backwards glances to read the faces of his opponents, a la Lance's look back at Jan Ullrich in 2001 on L'Alpe d'Huez. For once, Armstrong experienced what his foes experienced time and again the seven years he reigned atop the Tour: redline. Looking at Contador shooting away ahead must have been like seeing a ghost of his younger self.


It wasn't unexpected, that Contador would drop the other shoe today on the climb up Verbier. Still, until this decisive break happened, so many held out hope that Armstrong would pull a rabbit from his hat. But after the race, he couldn't deny what all could see on that last climb, that the strongest man in the race was indeed his teammate Contador. Lance conceded he was now riding for Alberto and that things would be less tense around the team table at dinner that night.



“Today I was definitely missing that required high-end. It would be hard for me to win at this point,

Fireworks at the Tour de France, a day early

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I expected tomorrow to be the next potentially decisive day at the Tour de France, with another mountaintop finish, this time ending with the Cat 1 climb up Verbier.


But unexpected drama came today when George Hincapie joined an early breakaway and became the virtual yellow jersey leader after they opened up enough of a gap to the peloton. Late in the race, after Hincapie finished, his virtual yellow jersey would only become an actual one if the peloton finished far enough behind. It was going to be close.


Hincapie is the only rider to be Armstrong's teammate for all 7 of Lance's TDF wins, and by all accounts they've remained friends even after Lance retired and Hincapie moved on to Team Columbia HTC. The only team that appeared to have any incentive to chase down Hincapie's lead was Ag2r since they currently held the yellow jersey, and they didn't appear to have the legs to lead the peloton out at the end.


That's when Team Garmin-Slipstream came to the front to pull hard, and because of their push, Hincapie ended up just 5 tantalizing seconds short of wearing yellow.


In a post-race interview, Hincapie blamed not just Garmin but Armstrong's Team Astana, questioning why those teams, with many of his former teammates, would deny him the opportunity to wear yellow.


Armstrong responded via Twitter over the confusion over what had happened late in the race:



St14 done. Sounds like there's quite a bit of confusion over this one... Noone, and I mean noone, wanted George in yellow more than me.


Our team rode a moderate tempo to put him in the jersey by at least 2 mins. Ag2r said they would not defend then they started to ride.


Until 10km to go he was solidly in yellow until GARMIN put on the gas and made sure it didn't happen.


And I reiterate. @ghincapie deserves to be yellow tonight. He deserves more than that. Look to who pulled the last 50k to see who to blame.


@bfogelstrom And george should be pissed. Very pissed. He can talk to his teammates who were n the bunch w/ us then perhaps it will be clear


@bbelshaw told astana 2 chase? Not true @ all. My vision was george would have YJ by 2 mins. Was reality til ag2r and garmin started 2 pull.


Last thing. There were 13 guys in the breakaway. We had 2 guys riding "tempo". That is not chasing by any stretch of the imagination.


@matkearns why we pulled so hard? When we started it was 6:00. When we stopped it was 8:40. Those are the facts...



As of now, Hincapie had not responded via his Twitter account.


Armstrong's one competitive guy, but it doesn't make any sense for him to keep George out of yellow. Hincapie isn't a podium contender, they go way back together. As for Garmin, there is a history of rivalry between them and Team Columbia, but their move seems short-sighted given that they have a rider still up in the top 10 in Christian Vande Velde. With the tough mountain stages to come in this next week, they made few friends today.


For those who aren't huge cycling race fans, it may seem odd that teams would grant favors, or why every team wouldn't just race as hard as possible at all times. This is still a competition, after all. The in-race tactics are more fascinating if regarded as a series of moves in a series of races within the race, and cycling is a much richer specimen for game theory study than many people realize.


A 5 second margin is so slim that it's not clear that any one team's tactics really caused George to miss out. It's almost impossible to tell what happened from watching on TV, and it may be that it will never be sorted out. In any sport in which you draw a finish line, there will be winners and losers.


Here's hoping George and Lance sort things out face to face. I'm a fan of the increased access to riders via Twitter and blogs, but I hate when athletes and coaches sort things out in public rather than in person. Too much can be lost in translation through the written word, especially when truncated to 140 characters. It's difficult enough to convey tone in e-mail.


If you've been passing on keeping up with the Tour, tomorrow morning's the next stage to get up early for. All the Tour contenders will be trying to make their move, and Lance may have an early showdown with his teammate Contador to establish who's strongest. Most cycling analysts, if pressed, would still put their money on the younger man and his brutal climbing attack capability, but it wouldn't be any fun if Lance waltzed through his comeback without a formidable competitor.


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Books to boot from the Canon

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The Second Pass nominates ten books to kick out of the "Western canon":



  • White Noise by Don DeLillo

  • Absalom, Absalom by Faulkner

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy

  • The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence

  • On the Road by Jack Kerouac

  • The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

  • The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos

  • Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens


It's a strong list (amen about One Hundred Years of Solitude), and even the criticism of the ones on the list that I've read and enjoyed are valid.


If I was to add an addendum for books that aren't necessarily part of the Western canon but that were pressed into my hands with the highest of personal recommendations and left those same hands tumbling to the ground by the force of gravity when I'd lost all patience, I'd name the following:



  • The Fountainhead

  • Lord of the Rings

  • Cold Mountain


There are probably others (e.g. the first Harry Potter book, whatever it was titled) but those are the ones that jump to mind immediately.





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Nikon 24-70mm f2.8

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Ryan Brenizer lauds the Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 zoom lens. I agree as it has become my go-to everyday lens on my SLR.


It's not light, in fact it's a bit of a beast, but then again when I bring out my SLR I'm usually not optimizing around weight but around picture quality. If I want a light carry-around camera I either use my phone or my Panasonic LX3.


The Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor Zoom Lens is not cheap at about $1,800 each right now, but most beginning photographers make the mistake of spending too much on the camera body and too little on lenses. Two reasons this makes little sense:



  • The lens, much more than any of the modern SLR bodies you're likely to buy from Canon or Nikon, is responsible for image quality. SLR bodies from Nikon and Canon have reached a point where you really can't go wrong. But there are still shots you just can't get without the right lens. Now, at the margins, and for specialized uses, for example if you're a professional sports photographer, the SLR body makes a difference. But even there, the most important piece of equipment they own are their fast, top-grade lenses.

  • Great lenses, or "good glass" as photographers refer to them, retain or increase in market value, camera bodies start losing resale value the moment they hit the market. Whereas Nikon and Canon will replace an SLR every year or two, roughly, the great lenses in their lines are often around for many years. Some lenses have never been replaced with a suitable equivalent and become highly coveted collectors items selling for thousands of dollars on eBay (for example, try to find a Nikon 58mm f1.2 on eBay, and if you do, it's likely selling for $3K).



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