April 2008 Archives

In the fine tradition of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, Charles Darwin has a weblog.

It's good to see Disney has big toy plans for WALL-E. The toys accompanying Ratatouille were a huge disappointment, if you could find them at all. Pixar deserved better.

Elementary schools in our part of the city are getting more crowded. Henry was on the wait list for Bryant before we decided on Wedgwood. (via The Wedgwood Blog.)

Starbucks' return to their roots apparently involves new non-coffee drinks. (via Seattlest.)

Speaking of TED, you could easily lose a couple weeks watching the fascinating, awe-inspiring, and thought-provoking talks they've posted from the last 24 years of TED. From the brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor's talk about her own stroke to Will Wright's early demo of Spore, it's all worth watching. Who else can you watch? Al Gore, Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, Dave Eggers, Frank Gehry, Any Tan, Steven Pinker, Jeff Bezos, Dean Kamen, Julia Sweeney, Craig Venter, Bill Clinton, Peter Gabriel, Daniel Dennet, Ze Frank, Jill Sobule, James Watson... Wow. And unlike the conference itself, it's all free.

You can also get these videos directly in iTunes (still free!).

I've been a subscriber to O'Reilly's Make Magazine since the first issue. I love the DIY-meets-science-geek vibe, even if I almost never build any of the projects. Make has since branched out with the Maker Faire and its sister magazine Craft. Now, they've started a book series called "DIY Science." First out of the gate is The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture, by Robert Thompson:

From the 1930s through the 1970s, chemistry sets were among the most popular Christmas gifts, selling in the millions. But two decades ago, real chemistry sets began to disappear as manufacturers and retailers became concerned about liability. The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments steps up to the plate with lessons on how to equip your home chemistry lab, master laboratory skills, and work safely in your lab.

Yes! I think the decline and fall of the home chemistry set is a sad, sad story. There was a segment on Wired Science last fall about it that is available on their website (and here's an interesting blog post from The 12 Angry Men Blog). Unfortunately, a similar decline has happened in high school chemistry classrooms, as well. What's the value of a chemistry lab if you can't actually do chemistry? Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Of course everyone will tell you the chemistry set died thanks to the increasing litigiousness of American society. That's probably true, but I suspect there's another factor at work: parental cocooning. Do we really need to wrap our children in bubble wrap and follow their every move? Of course not! Yet the uproar over a mom—Lenore Skenazy—letting her 9-year-old ride the subway home alone (NY Sun Article, weblog) tells me an awful lot of people think we should. Curiously, a lot of the outraged parents say the same thing: "I did all sorts of things on my own as a kid, but the world is so different now, I'd never let my kids do that" Well, the world is different: it's safer! Violent crime in the US is way down since I was a kid. But I digress.

Obviously, I'm not the only one who's been thinking about this stuff. Ms. Skenazy got a lot of positive feedback amidst the uproar. Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, gave a great talk at TED that really ties together a lot of these ideas and offers some suggestions. Here it is, "5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do:"

I think we'll look into sending Henry to the Tinkering School some summer. I'm sure he'll love it. I'm not sure about letting him drive, though.

(via BoingBoing.)

Roger Ebert has a weblog? I had no idea. I've really missed seeing him on Ebert & Roper the last couple years.

His most recent post mentions the 1990 movie Joe vs. The Volcano, starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, saying it's "a film that was a failure in every possible way except that I loved it." That pretty well sums up my opinion, too. For those of you who haven't seen it—which is likely to be most of you— let me fill you in. Tom Hanks plays Joe Banks, a former fireman turned hopeless hypochondriac working in a soul-sucking job. His doctor tells him he has a "brain cloud," an incurable and fatal disease. He has six months to live, "My advice to you is: live it well."

Joe quits his job, tells off his boss (played brilliantly by Dan Hedaya), and asks his co-worker DeDe out on a date. DeDe is played by Meg Ryan, in the first of her three roles. The next day, a wealthy man makes him an offer he can't refuse. If Joe agrees to jump into a volcano on a small South Pacific island, the man will give Joe all the money he need to live the life of his dreams for the next six months. You see, the island has rich mineral deposits that the man needs, while the native islanders need to appease the volcano with a voluntary sacrifice (only none of them want to do it). Joe agrees and off we go.

"A failure in every possible way," right? It sounds like a complete disaster. And there's more... Meg Ryan plays both of the rich man's daughters, the chief of the native clan is played by Abe Vigoda, and one of the movie's best scenes is when Joe buys luggage for the trip. How could this possibly work? Maybe as a screwball comedy or with lots of camp. Yet the result is neither; it's a really charming, honest, good-hearted movie. Odd, yes, but charmingly so.

I fully realize that not everyone feels the same way about this movie. It seems to be very polarizing. It's surprising, though, how many comments on Ebert's post say basically the same thing. As one commenter put it, "I thought I was the only person alive who loved this movie." Watch it. I suspect you will either hate it or have it become a real comfort movie, one you want to go back and watch again year after year.

(via Kottke.)

Today in Bacon-related news, we have two items:

1. Chocolate-covered bacon. I love bacon. I love chocolate. I even love bits of bacon in chocolate. Honestly, though, this stuff looks pretty revolting.
2. Operation Bacon Salt. I wrote about Bacon Salt last fall. Since then, I bought some and found it to be every bit as baconlicious as I expected. Well, according to the PI:

   U.S. troops in Muslim nations where pig-eating is a religious no-no, have been requesting the local startup's product ... to sprinkle on their MREs and anything else edible overseas.

   Brilliant! The Baconistas at Bacon Salt HQ are running with it. Behold Operation Bacon Salt! (via Seattlest.)

Hmm... What's this?

Google's updated satellite imagery for Chicago happens to have been taken in early August 2007, just as Lollapalooza 2007 was happening at Grant Park. I seem to recall someone was there.

In related news, our house in no longer under construction on Google Maps.

(via Google Sightseeing.)

Excellent. iTunes now has two of my favorite TV shows of the 80s: The Greatest American Hero and 21 Jump Street. Man, I loved these shows. I somehow doubt either one really stands the test of time, though. Ah, the early days of FOX: 21 Jump Street, Tracey Ullman, The Simpsons. One night of prime time programming a week.

(via TUAW.)

I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert on the complex financial and legal wrangling in the world of mergers and acquisitions. I have only the vaguest notion of how such things work. The Microsoft-Yahoo mess has been no exception. Now, thanks to an excellent post by Marc Andreessen (yes, that Marc Andreessen), I think I get it.

Tomorrow (29 April 2008) is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry's. Based on the past few years, we have about an 85% chance that tomorrow will be cold, rainy, and generally miserable and a 15% chance that it will be an absolutely gorgeous sunny spring day.

Another great article by James Duncan Davidson about auto white balance in digital cameras:

Oh, come on, surely you don't mean that modern photographic technology hasn't figured out how to set the white balance automatically for every situation.

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. Sure, modern electronics do a pretty good job a fair amount of the time. But, there's one thing that prevents auto white balance from doing a perfect job and that is that the data it works with is the light reflected from your subject. Unless the light source is in the scene, there's no way for the camera's electronics to know what the color the light used to illuminate a scene is.

He points out a couple tools for helping get white balance right: the WhiBal reference card from PictureFlow and the ExpoDisc from ExpoImaging. I considered buying an ExpoDisc a few months ago, but decided it was too fiddly for my taste. I've always thought a grey card would be a good idea, but they're usually big and not particularly durable. The WhiBal Pocket is about the size of a business card, waterproof, scratchproof, and rugged. Mine should arrive in a few days.

One interesting thing I've noticed about auto white balance is that using Lightroom's "Auto" setting can frequently improve photos that the camera's own auto setting messed up. Of course, for shots that fit cleanly into one of the presets (Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, etc.), choosing the appropriate preset works great. But for less clear-cut situations—say, an existing-light shot indoors with diffuse sunlight coming in through a window—choosing Auto in Lightroom tends to get me pretty close. I'm not sure why this is. I suppose Lightroom's algorithm is just more sophisticated than the one built in to the camera. Or maybe it's just better tuned to my own taste.

Interesting. Mark Hamburg, the driving force behind Adobe's Shadowland project—which eventually became Photoshop Lightroom—has left Adobe for Microsoft:

Six years ago Mark left his position as chief architect of Photoshop in order to start work on the Shadowland project (which became Lightroom) and right up until this week Mark was fine-tuning the controls for non-destructive localized editing in Lightroom. Ever since Lightroom launched, users have been asking for was a means to dodge and burn raw images, and if you have been testing the Lightroom 2.0 public beta, you will know that you can now also paint with colour, saturation and clarity, plus you have really accurate auto masking with flow and density brush controls. It’s yet another example of Mark’s programming genius and gift for innovation.

My first thought was that Mark would be working on Microsoft Expression Media, the latest version of what was once iView Media Pro. But no: "...his future work there won't involve digital imaging, but instead be focussed on the 'user experience'." Hmm.

Update: John Nack has a little more perspective on his blog.

(via Daring Fireball.)

When Henry and I were in Barnes & Noble yesterday, I noticed a big display of this book staring out at me. Weird Washington: Your Travel Guide to Washington's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets is one in a series of of Weird State books (you can check out your own state!)

Well, I don't really have anything to say about the book's contents; I never had a chance to take a look inside. It's the picture on the cover that caught my eye. The picture is of a huge carved head of George Washington. The head is rotting away behind a store in La Conner, up in the Skagit Valley. There's something about this huge head that's captivating. Back when Henry was in his puzzle phase, I had a puzzle made of one of my photos of George's head. You also may have seen it as a banner (this one) on this very page. Presidents just don't get the respect they used to...

A new genetic study reveals that humans were nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago. (via 24/7 Family History Circle.)

The Washington State Department of Transportation has a flickr stream. Cool. Now I can see how they're doing opening up the passes.

Zoka's weblog has a review of Cafe Aiello in Lowell, Mass. We tried to go there when they first opened in 2006, but despite what it said on their web site, they hadn't actually opened yet.

A remarkably comprehensive history of digital cameras.

The One Day Poem Pavilion reminds me of this digital sundial. I have one, but it's kinda fiddly to set up right and once you do, you can only really view it from a certain angle. (via Kottke.)

Believe it or not, there were a couple things I forgot to mention in that last post. The big one is that Apple has released Aperture 2, which takes direct aim at many of the deficiencies I ran into in earlier versions, especially speed. Aperture and Lightroom are very similar in many ways and if you're on a Mac, you should look at both before deciding. There are free trial versions of each.

The other thing I didn't mention about Aperture (and iPhoto, for that matter) is Apple's excellent printing service. Aperture and iPhoto can send photos directly to Apple to be printed and can create really gorgeous books, calendars, and cards. Lightroom has nothing to compare.

Warning: this is a long one...

Back in 1995, I bought my first digital camera: an Apple QuickTake 100. It took a couple years to make the psychological shift to digital—no film to pay for; take as many pictures as you want and throw away the bad ones—but once I did, I embraced it enthusiastically. Only I never really throw away the bad ones. Digital storage is cheap, why not keep 'em all? Since then, Kathy and I have managed to amass a collection of over 42,000 digital pictures. Managing that many pictures can be quite a challenge.

For a long time, I used iView Media Pro to organize and keep track of all of our digital photos. It had plenty of quirks, but overall it was a great media manager and served me well. I tried switching to iPhoto a couple times, but it was just too much of a compromise in too many ways. Especially in its early versions, iPhoto just wasn't designed for someone who takes—and keeps—as many pictures as I do. I looked at a few other options, too, but always returned to iView.

Meanwhile, back in 2002, I bought my first digital SLR, a Canon EOS D60 (not to be confused with the new Nikon D60). Along with its myriad other features was the ability to shoot pictures in RAW format. Most digital cameras process the data coming off the image sensor before saving it as a JPEG. This processing includes sharpening, white balance adjustment, and compression, all of which are non-reversable. If you shoot a JPEG with the wrong white balance setting, you can kinda sorta fix it later, but the result will never quite be right. You simply can't recreate data that isn't there in the JPEG (as much as CSI would like you to believe otherwise). RAW files are different. They contain the exact unprocessed data coming off the image sensor. The camera's white balance setting is just a piece of information stored along with the image data, so changing it after the fact is trivial. And because most image sensors capture 12 or 16 bits per color, RAW files also contain more image data than 8-bit JPEG files. This difference may not seem like much, but because we're dealing with powers of two, it's substantial. Eight bits can represent 2⁸ = 256 levels, which gives us a little over 16.7 million possible RGB colors. By comparison, 12 bits gives us 2¹² = 4096 levels, or about 68.7 billion possible RGB colors. One very happy consequence of this is that you can effectively adjust the exposure of a RAW file by as much as a stop or more after the fact. Blown-out highlights can be dialed back, revealing detail you'd never see in a JPEG.

Anyway, I was well convinced of the advantages of shooting RAW as soon as I bought the D60, yet I continued to shoot JPEGs most of the time. The reason was the workflow. Dealing with RAW files was a big pain in the butt. Most programs couldn't read RAW files at all and if they could (like iView), they would only read the JPEG preview that the camera embedded in the RAW file. Taking advantage of all that RAW magic involved using a specialized program—Photoshop, Bibble, or Canon's own tools—and doing so one image at a time. RAW processing was slow and frustrating.

The situation gradually improved over time, but the big change came in 2005. Apple released iPhoto 5 in January with support for RAW files. Then in April Mac OS X 10.4 introduced built-in support for RAW files which allows pretty much any application to open a RAW file as easily as it would a JPEG. Then, in October, Apple released Aperture, a sort of professional version of iPhoto with full end-to-end support for RAW files. Best of all, Aperture treats RAW files as digital negatives and stores all your edits and modifications as a list of changes rather than destructively modifying the original (or rendering out a new copy). You can create separate versions of an image that appear distinct in the Aperture interface, but are actually just different sets of editing instructions applied to the same master image. Very cool. I was sold and immediately bought a copy.

Unfortunately, Aperture 1.0 was a carnival of frustration. It was glacially slow, even on fast hardware, and very inflexible in its handling of files. Importing my existing library of images into Aperture was a multiple-day endeavor. Once my images were in Aperture, the things it could do with RAW files were really incredible, but it also had a lot of problems with basic RAW conversion, introducing introducing excess noise and sometimes doing weird things with color. It was also a step backwards from iView in in its organizational capabilities. And did I mention it was slow? Ugh! It was so promising and so close to what I wanted to have, but that just made it all the more frustrating. In the end, I went back to iView and hoped that a future version would work for me. I tried each successive update and by version 1.5 Aperture was almost there, but still way too slow.

Meanwhile, Adobe had cooked up their answer to Aperture: Photoshop Lightroom (to be fair, they'd been working on it since 2002). I downloaded one of the early betas back in 2006, but I ran into some typical beta issues and didn't use it for long. When Lightroom 1.0 was finally released in January 2007, I felt committed to Aperture and confident that the next release would finally make the grade. I kept hearing great things about Lightroom, though, so a few months later I finally downloaded the demo and gave it a try. Wow! For my needs, it was everything Aperture promised to be but wasn't... and it was fast! I made the jump from iView to Lightroom and I've never looked back. Shortly thereafter, I started shooting RAW exclusively on my current digital SLR, a Canon 20D.

Once I got up to speed, Lightroom turned into one of my favorite applications. It's such a joy to use that I would find myself firing it up and just playing around with my images. The first of those banner images up at the top of the page came from one of these sessions. They're just virtual copies in Lightroom. The originals are untouched; only the virtual copies are cropped and tweaked. And because the image data is not duplicated, virtual copies take up almost no disk space.

Lightroom's interface is incredibly flexible. All the tools and information that surround the main center area of the window can be hidden, either individually or all together (or you can use a "lights out" mode that dims everything but the picture you're editing). It can run in a normal window as I've shown it here or in full-screen mode, which is the way I usually use it. Unfortunately, the current version doesn't take advantage of multiple monitors, which is a shame. Version 2 has great multiple monitor support, including the ability to show the library browser on one screen and the develop interface on another. The develop interface is arranged just about perfectly. The most common image adjustments are at the top of the toolbar:

For the vast majority of images, all the adjustments I need to make are right here in the "Basic" section of the develop module. Even within this section, the sliders are arranged in roughly the order I normally want to use them: color balance first, then exposure and tone adjustment, and finally a very useful group Adobe calls "Presence." Clarity is Adobe's implementation of Local Contrast Enhancement, which on many images can be like a little dose of magic. There are tons of other options I haven't shown here, including full tone curve control, sharpening, noise reduction (both luminance and color noise), split toning, and more. And, of course, you can rotate, crop, straighten, and remove red-eye. Oh, and there's a healing brush, too, that has been very helpful for taking care of the spots caused my my dirty camera sensor. For adjustments that can't be done in Lightroom, you can just choose "Edit in Photoshop" and Lightroom will create a copy with all your adjustments applied and pass it off to Photoshop; when you're done in Photoshop, just save and your work will automatically end up right back in Lightroom.

Since the release of Jeffrey Friedl's free Flickr Export Plugin I barely have to leave Lightroom at all. The only things that keep me going to Photoshop are localized correction (dodging and burning, etc.) and photo merging (like creating this montage). Fortunately, the recently-announced Lightroom 2.0 has support for non-destructive localized adjustments and it's even better than I'd hoped for. Not only can you lighten or darken a specific part of an image (dodge or burn), but can apply any image adjustment locally: contrast adjustments, sharpening, saturation... anything. Lightroom 2 is still in beta and I'm not ready to trust it with my images, but soon...

If this little big software hagiography has convinced anyone to buy Lightroom, here are a couple suggestions for getting the most out of it. The video tutorials over at Luminous Landscape are excellent, if a little low key. The Photoshop Lightroom Adventure book is also wonderful. Back when Lightroom was in beta, Adobe sent a group of professional photographers to Iceland. Their experience helped shape the software and led to this book, which also features many of their gorgeous photographs of Iceland. They're repeating the project in Tasmania for Lightroom 2.

Gah. Why must I pay attention to hot new games on the interweb? First it was Desktop Tower Defense. Then Chain Factor. Now? TypeRacer, the entire point of which is to type fast. Really, that's it. But unlike the typing test in Mavis Beacon, it's been updated for the brave new world of Web 2.0. See, you don't just have to type fast, you have to type faster than the anonymous strangers you're playing against. It's disturbingly addictive, but I somehow doubt it will have much staying power. We'll see.

My typing speed is somewhere between 60 and 80 words per minute. Not bad, but I've been pretty consistently coming in about third place.

The new seismic hazard maps are out! The PI says:

The U.S. Geological Survey's new seismic hazard maps, released this week, show two more earthquake faults in Western Washington: one near the Canadian border, the other east of Port Angeles.

Lucky us. We already have plenty of faults around here that could give us a "big one." Of course, the "Really Big One" is likely to be a Cascadia Subduction Zone quake. From the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network:

HOW BIG ARE CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE QUAKES?

Great Subduction Zone earthquakes are the largest earthquakes in the world, and can exceed magnitude 9.0. Earthquake size is porportional to fault area, and the Cascadia Subduction Zone is a very long sloping fault that stretches from mid-Vancouver Island to Northern California. It separates the Juan de Fuca and North America plates. Because of the very large fault area, the Cascadia Subduction Zone could produce a very large earthqauke, magnitude 9.0 or greater, if rupture occurred over its whole area.

On the other hand, the PI also reports:

Scientists now estimate that potential ground motion in the western United States is 30 percent lower than they previously thought for the kind of quakes caused by long-period seismic waves that would affect taller, multistory buildings.

(Via Seattlest.)

Now, a digression...

A commenter on the Seattlest post links to The Street-Smart Naturalist: Field Notes from Seattle (a preview is available on Google Book Search), which looks great. I wonder how I've managed to miss it. The commenter mentions the chapter on The Fault, of course, but the first chapter caught my eye, too: "The Eagles" (about the birds, not the band). See, Seattle has Eagles. Bald Eagles. Shortly before we moved into our house, we were sitting on the front steps waiting for the inspector to arrive. We looked up and saw a Bald Eagle soaring overhead. We were both amazed. I knew the population had rebounded since the DDT days, but still. I've seen Bald Eagles in and around Seattle many times since and I'm still a little awe-struck every time.

After our brief stop in Silicon Valley (including an hour at a very nice Mountain View city playground), we headed north to San Francisco. Well, we had to make one more stop. We were just a few miles from Cupertino, so we had to make a little detour. You see, long before there were Apple Stores, there was The Apple Store: The Company Store on the Apple Campus. Kathy went for a walk with Charlie while Henry and I went inside. Henry picked out an Apple hoodie for himself and a plain Apple t-shirt for Charlie. I resisted the urge to get Kathy the "I visited the mother ship" shirt and got her an "Hello. I'm a Mac" shirt instead. And for me? An insulated Apple travel mug. Woot!

With that out of the way, we finally headed for San Francisco. Our first stop was the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite visiting SF yearly (or nearly so) for the last ten years, we hadn't been over to the bridge since Kathy and I were there from Maine fifteen years ago. It was a gorgeous day—the first of several. We walked out to the first tower, but Charlie was getting too tired and hungry to go farther.

Afterwards, we found a great pizza place in the Richmond District and recharged. Other than the two Neapolitan places (which are really a whole different thing), I've never had pizza in Seattle that comes close to Giorgio's. Yum. Then on to our Hotel. When I was in San Francisco for WWDC a couple years ago, I noticed that there was a new hotel at the west end of Fisherman's Wharf, right next to the cable car turnaround and across the street for the Hyde Street Pier. According to our San Francisco with Kids guidebook, this new hotel, The Argonaut is supposed to be great for kids, so we thought we'd give it a try. I booked a package that included breakfast at the hotel restaurant and Muni passes for the duration of our stay—a great deal.

As it turns out, The Argonaut is a pretty good hotel for kids and though our room was neither a suite nor particularly large, we managed just fine. On the other hand, I've reconfirmed my gut reaction to staying at Fisherman's Wharf: despite being one of San Francisco's top-visited tourist areas, it's neither convenient nor aesthetically appealing. I think next time we'll stay down near Union Square, where there are more (and better) restaurants, more to do, and easier Muni access. The one place really worth visiting at Fisherman's Wharf is the Hyde Street Pier.

We had a great time in the city. We rode the cable cars, visited the cable car museum, and generally acted like tourists. Henry was a little sick the first couple days in the city, so we took it a little easy and skipped a lot of things that were on our list. More than once, we headed off a napless afternoon meltdown from Charlie with a ride on the cable car. I think his favorite was the nighttime ride back from Union Square when we got seats on the outside of the car.

One thing we did manage to do was visit the Exploratorium. The king of all hands-on science museums, the Exploratorium is housed in the old Palace of Fine Arts from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition. We were there on the first Wednesday of the month, so it was even more crowded and noisy than usual. Henry loved it anyway. Charlie, too, but in an "attention span of a 2 year old" way.

It was a fun trip; we're already planning what to do on our next Bay Area excursion. Next up: the Canadian Rockies this summer. Stay tuned.

Apple today reported its best 2nd quarter ever. Macintosh sales were up 51% over the year-ago quarter and almost matched their record-setting holiday quarter. That's a lot of Macs. The company ended the quarter with $19.4 billion of cash on hand. I suppose a dividend would be too much to ask?

The hucksters animal-rights activists at PETA have announced their own version of the X-Prize: the In Vitro Meat Contest. One million dollars to the contestant that can create convincing vat-grown chicken substitute at price competitive to real boneless chicken breast. Their well-oiled publicity machine has gotten plenty of press about it. But there's a catch (or two). First, there's a deadline: 30 June 2012. The original Ansari X Prize—$10,000,000 for launching a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks—was created in 1996 and wasn't won until 2004. Going back a little further, the Orteig Prize was first offered in 1919 and wasn't won until Lindbergh's flight in 1927. Is there something about the imagined market for in vitro meat that is going to disappear in 2012? Worse, though, is the second catch: to win, you have to have scaled up production and brought your product to market in at least ten states. This would be like demanding the winner of the X Prize have a thriving space tourism business.

For comparison, let's take a look at another meat substitute, the mycoprotein marketed under the name Quorn. According to the timeline on the Quorn website, the initial search for an appropriate protein began way back in 1965. "Initial work" on the flavor and texture of mycoprotein began in 1969. Pilot production and testing didn't begin until 1975 and the product wasn't approved for sale in the UK until 1985. Twenty years to market, ten of which were after the basics of the product had been nailed down and pilot production started. Oh, and Quorn wasn't approved for sale in the US until 2002. Even then it was approved only over the histrionic objections of the Center for "Science" in the Public Interest.

Given the history of Quorn, is it reasonable to think that anyone will be able to develop and bring to market a completely new meat substitute in just over four years? I sure don't think so. Even if they had something ready to go today, I doubt they'd even be able to get FDA approval in four years. So what are we to make of PETA's much-publicized contest? Well, my opinion is that the rules of the contest were devised to make winning nearly impossible. The wave of press attention they're getting is the entire point of the contest. June 2012 will come and go with nary a peep from PETA (or alternately with an indignant press release about their great disappointment that no one rose to the challenge). As we carnivores say, it's all sizzle and no steak.

As an aside, I have to mention that the first thing that popped into my mind when I read about PETA's contest was the title of this post, "ChickieNobs." In Margaret Atwood's dystopian/apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake genetic engineering has run amok:

"This is the latest," said Crake.

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.

"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve on a growth unit."

No beak, no eyes, no feathers, just the bare minimum of brain function to support digestion and growth. The end result? Tasty cheap chicken: ChickieNobs.

Update: Slate has an article today by Daniel Engber coming to much the same conclusion about this X-Poultry Prize. I wish I'd seen it earlier; it would have saved me a lot of typing. As an added bonus, the article has an illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty, best known in this house as the author of Who Needs Donuts. That's right, who needs donuts when you've got in vitro meat?

In which I post, with little or no comment, a variety of unrelated things that are cluttering up my browser and/or newsreader...

Google is celebrating Earth Day with the addition of 9 new cities to its Google Transit feature (also available directly in Google Maps). SF Muni is one of the new additions, which would have been helpful when we were in San Francisco a few weeks ago. (via Google Lat Long.)

The Mariner's Nintendo DS-based services at Safeco Field (food & drink ordering, in-game stats, instant replays, etc.) are now free (down from $8/game). (via Slog.)

Another case of reality imitating The Onion. (via digg.)

Great "After Every Shoot" reference card from the Digital Story Podcast. Following this religiously could save me from taking a lot of bad pictures. (via O'Reilly Digital Media.)

Ennui Gas!

Writing a story? Need some names? Try this for four random names based on US census data.

After a brief period of feigned disinterest, I broke down and bought an Apple TV shortly after they were introduced. Prior to the "version 2" upgrade, I mostly used it to watch Podcasts and the occasional downloaded TV show. It's gotten more use since the upgrade and we've been quite happy with the movie-rental experience. But the great not-so-hidden feature I really love is the ability to view trailers for movies in the iTunes store.

I love a good movie trailer. A well-made trailer gets you interested in the movie without giving away too much of the plot or deceiving you into thinking it's a completely different movie. The very best are creative and original in their own right. Apple TV has trailers for pretty much all of the movies in its catalog (I should note that these are also available through iTunes as well). I admit I've spent far too much time lately viewing these things. Unfortunately, only a handful have really stood out.

Today Kottke has a post about Pablo Ferro and his work with Stanley Kubrick. Ferro's trailers for Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was the first one I came across that really caught my eye:

It's weird and trippy and absolutely brilliant. Ferro also made the trailer for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange which somehow manages to be just as unnerving and cringe-inducing as the movie itself, yet completely different.

Kottke's post also mentions that Ferro did the opening titles for Dr. Strangelove. I remember when I saw the movie for the first time (circa 1986 or so) how similar the titles were to those in the Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense. Well, it turns out Pablo Ferro was responsible for those, as well.

In case you don't get the title of this post, watch this (warning: R-rated).

I like the look of these new "Cozy Suite" airplane seats coming to economy class in Delta's 777s and 767s. They're designed and built by Thompson Solutions, which has its own page about the seats.

They apparently allow more legroom than normal seats given same seat spacing. Of course, that could also translate to more seats with the same legroom. As Thompson says:

Maintaining standard seat width (from 17.8" to 21.0" dependant on aircraft) and overlapping the arms allows us to add an additional column of seats thus increasing seat count by up to 15%, without reducing pitch (e.g. a B777 configured 3-3-3 becomes 3-4-3).

The airline then has a choice to increase seat pitch or keep the capacity increase – or a bit of both. Typically an airline can increase seat pitch (from the typical 32”) to 34” and still achieve a respectable capacity increase.

I'm not sure how these will work for parents flying with small children, though. Car seats must go in the window seat. Combined with the side "wings" on a car seat, this means you're stuck with a small child that can't see his parent. Now that's a recipe for fun! As a parent of two boys who just love to kick (honestly, sometimes I think the hardest part of air travel with a toddler is keeping them from kicking the seat in front of them), I see this as a way to provide two kicking targets instead of one.

(via Gizmodo.)

Continuing Schizophrenia Day here at bradandkathy.com, we have news from Scientific American that schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders may be caused by infections:

Doctors have known for many years that microbes such as syphilis and Streptococcus can, if left untreated, lead to serious psychiatric problems. Now a growing number of scientists are proposing that microbes are to blame for several mental illnesses once thought to have neurological or psychological defects at their roots. The strongest evidence pertains to schizophrenia, but autism, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder have also been linked to bacterial, viral or parasitic infections in utero, in childhood or in maturity. Some of these infections can directly affect the brain, whereas others might trigger immune reactions that interfere with brain development or perhaps even attack our own brain cells in an autoimmune mistake.

Blame it on the cytokines.

As mentioned in the article, if this theory is right, then the CDC's recommendation that all pregnant women get flu shots (thus inducing an immune response) might be causing more problems than it solves. Ah, science. Messy, messy science.

(via MetaFilter.)

I've never been much of a fan of the comic Garfield. It's not that I have any active hatred for it; it just isn't my cup of tea (or coffee, as the case may be). So I was quite surprised by how much I enjoy Garfield Minus Garfield. As the name implies, G-G consists of daily Garfield comic strips from which Garfield himself has been expunged, leaving behind a bipolar, schizophrenic Jon. It's brilliant: Garfield for Zippy fans.

Apparently, Jim Davis enjoys it, too:

The cartoonist calls the work "an inspired thing to do" and wishes to thank Walsh for enabling him to see another side of "Garfield."

Usually, the "snow" that we get at this time of year consists of delicate pink and white petals, falling from the blossoming cherry trees that grow all over Seattle. But today, we had the other kind of snow, the stuff that consists of frozen water falling from angry grey clouds, accompanied by blustery winds. I had a nice long time to enjoy this frozen water in its many forms (freezing rain, ice pellets, snow flakes), as did Henry, since his baseball team played almost 3 innings in it this morning before we realized we're all wimpy Seattlites and that the correct response to this sort of weather is to tuck tail and run to the nearest coffee shop.

I hear it was 80 degrees in New England today. I think we got their weather by mistake, but I don't know whose they got. Florida's?

A great parody over at Obsidian Wings answers the question "What if the Lincoln-Douglas Debate had been moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos?"

STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?

LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky “a land of swine and whores”?

LINCOLN: Sounds right -- his ex-wife was from Kentucky.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why did you remain in the church after hearing those statements?

LINCOLN: I was eight.

(via Boing Boing.)

The Sonics are out of here. Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

In anticipation of the team's arrival, Oklahoma City voters last month approved a $121 million sales-tax package to renovate the city's Ford Center arena and build an NBA practice facility.

The Oklahoma Legislature sweetened the pot for the NBA on Thursday, approving a payroll-tax rebate for the Sonics worth an estimated $60 million over 15 years. The state House approved the measure 67-32 and sent it to Gov. Brad Henry, who swiftly signed it into law.

Good for them. Better for us.

The Stranger has a story this week about Lunchbox Laboratory (the place Kathy wrote about the other day) and its chef/owner, Scott Simpson.

Lunchbox Laboratory—Ballard's new experiment in premium hamburgers—was closed a week ago Monday. The handwritten sign on the door said that the Laboratory was not in operation today because the Professor—chef/owner Scott Simpson—was having surgery.

I knew he was the culinary whirlwind behind the Blue Onion Bistro and Fork, but the journey from there to Lunchbox Laboratory was a bumpier one than I'd imagined. Take a look.

The folks at eMusic have created an online quiz to test your Music Intelligence. I scored 123/180, which makes me, in their estimation, a "Mix-Tape Master:"

You are a music evangelist: the person in your network of friends who always has the coolest new song, the one whose iPod gets picked to DJ every party. You understand the art of the segue, how the key to the best mix-tape isn't just the songs you pick, but how they interlock with each other. You also know who the up-and-coming acts are and are quick to recognise where their influences lie and whether they will make it big. You work hard at the pursuit of this knowledge, scouring music blogs, magazines and record stores. Most importantly, you are generous with your passion – and your friends should be very, very grateful. Still, it’s always good to get new inspiration for your latest mix.

Uh... okay. They've set the bar pretty high for me there. I guess I'll have to put "something about music" on my list of upcoming blog posts. Kathy's almost done with The Rest is Noise; maybe she has something to say.

(via a crank's progress).

Yes, I made avocado ice cream. I used Alton Brown's recipe. It's sweet, creamy, and delicious. No lie. Even Brad (who until now has claimed to despise avocado) loves it. Henry loves it. On the other hand, Charlie won't even try it, but he's two. In other parts of the world, sweet avocado desserts are quite common.

I know, I know, between the lamb burger and the avocado ice cream, not to mention the chocolate malted muffins I made a few days ago, it seems as though our eating habits are really out of whack, but we've actually been eating more healthfully these days. Really! Next time I'll tell you about my scrumptious parsley smoothie. Or maybe you want to hear about the spinach one...? Yeah, that's what I thought. Hey! There's an idea...avocado smoothies!

I'll let Kathy follow up on the full story.

Fognazos has a beautiful compilation of pictures of the abandoned huts built by the ill-fated Scott and Shackleton expeditions to the South Pole.

Shelves are still stocked with tins of cabbage, veal or onions. All these objects have been preserved by cold for the last 100 years. Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton left them here in their way to the South Pole, in the beginning of the [20th] century. But none of them was able to come back

This is great stuff. I recently watched Life After People on The History Channel and was struck by just how quickly things return to nature once abandoned. These Antarctic huts look like Scott and Shackleton might have just walked out the door a few days ago. The dry freezing climate has done a wonderful job of preservations. It's an interesting contrast to the pictures of Prypiat, Ukraine or the Detroit School Depository.

(via Kottke.)

Hmm. I had no idea Ford used to have an assembly plant here in Seattle. Vintage Seattle has the scoop:

Heading down Fairview Ave toward Lake Union you’ll find one of the city’s finest examples of industrial age architecture in the Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant (now Public Storage). It was designed by architect John Graham Sr and constructed in 1913. Model T’s were assembled at the plant for years and in 1932 operations moved to another location in the city.

I've driven past this building many times (it's in a very high-visibility location in South Lake Union), but never knew its history. Cool.

Today for lunch, I had a lamb burger with blue cheese, caramelized onions, and balsamic steak sauce, twisty fries with smoked tea salt, and a chocolate milkshake served in a 400mL beaker. For the second time, Brad, Charlie, and I had the giddy pleasure of eating at Lunchbox Laboratory. Our first visit was last Thursday and we've both been not so subtly trying to find excuses to be over in their neighborhood since. Today, we just had to visit a nearby nursery for some essential gardening supplies (that will now sit unused in our garage until June, I'm sure...).

On this second visit, we arrived after the lunch rush, around 1:30, to a nearly empty restaurant. It was nice to have a bit more time to study the menu, without all the eager lunchers waiting behind us as on our first visit. There are so many choices of meats, cheeses, sauces, sides, salts... When I take Henry there, I'm sure we'll pass the time waiting for our food by figuring out how many possible permutations there actually are; he's a math geek like me. Also, I'm sure he'll be into all the old lunchboxes hanging on the wall (Six Million Dollar Man wielding a giant tree, Speed Buggy, The Fonz). Anyway, you could spend a long time trying to decide what to eat, but I actually settled pretty quickly on the "B&O" lamb burger, one of the specials on the "experiments" chalk board. Brad had "The Hopalong," a prime rib burger with bacon, cheese (can't recall what kind), onions, and BBQ sauce, skinny fries with bacon salt, and a vanilla shake. Charlie insisted he and I share a chocolate shake. I gotta say there wasn't much sharing going on, though; Charlie slurped most of it down. The shakes are delicious, thick but not too thick; you can still drink them through your straw! And tasty, so tasty... I love holding the glass beakers (you can take the girl out of the chemistry lab but not the chemistry lab out of the girl?), and seeing the artful way the shake maker painted the inside of the glass with arches of chocolate sauce. Oh dear, I got distracted by the shakes... What of the food?!? Delicious. I was literally licking my fingers after the last bite of burger, wishing I'd been able to eat it more slowly. Lamb and blue cheese is a brilliant flavor combination. The fries were good, too, though I think I would have liked more smoked tea salt.

Oh, I could ramble on and on about this place and their fine food. I'm trying to figure out why I like it so much. It does a lot of things "right" in the Seattle foodie sense (and we are such food snobs here, and don't even get me going on coffee): grass fed animals, sodas without high fructose corn syrup, bread from a local artisanal bakery, real ice cream, exotic salts. Gotta have that exotic NaCl. So, it's a cramped, upscale burger joint with funky decor (and the salts!), but I've been to plenty of those and not been so smitten. Somehow, it hits all the right notes without being too fussy or seeming too studied. The people who own it also run it, and they care about what they're doing, and it shows in the food they make and in how they interact with each other and the diners, and that is a thing of great value. The food is obviously not health food, but great splurge food. And it is fun. That's it. It's just friggin' fun.

And, I think I can use all the fun I can get these days. We've been down, way down, in the muck of parenting lately, what with the whining, and whinging, and whacking (as in "I accidentally whacked my brother with this hard object I began whirling around even as he was standing not more than a foot from me, right in front of me, but, see, I closed my eyes and so there's no way I could have known he was still there right in the path of this hard object I have every right to fling around willy nilly...) Repeat often. Yep.

There's an interesting article in The New Yorker about elevators that is getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere (or at least the sliver of the blogosphere that I pay attention to). Most of the attention seems to be on the story of Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator in New York's McGraw-Hill building. There's even an accompanying video.

In the end, though, I think the author's decision to build his whole article around Nicholas White falls flat. The article touches on everything from history to urban planning, technology to etiquette. Does it really need the ultimately-depressing story of one man's 41-hour ordeal running through it? Don't get me wrong—White's story is worth telling. In fact, I'd love to read a longer article just about Nicholas White and the aftermath of his lost weekend. It just doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the article. It would be like Mark Kurlansky building Salt: A World History around the story of one retiree from Boca Raton who's having trouble controlling his blood pressure.

Nevertheless, the article is worth a read. It's full of good stuff:

In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they're driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

Or this:

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset.

In fact, I'd be glad to buy a Kurlansky-style book about elevators, maybe with Nicholas White's story tucked away in one chapter. I can see it now: Lift: How A Simple Invention Elevated The Human Condition.

(via Kottke and Boing Boing, among others)

Wow.

"Did you tell those guys that the car keys are in the snowmobile, parked at the top of Mt. St. Helens?" he asked.

A fascinating history of the Ampersand on Adobe.com:

The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his "Glossary of the Book," is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means "(the character) & by itself (is the word) and." The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for "and."

(via Kottke.)

Sad news today in the world of animation. Ollie Johnston, the last of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men" has died. Others are far more qualified than me to discuss his considerable contribution to the art of animation. But it's also worth noting that without Ollie, there might not be a Disneyland today. Walt Disney was inspired to build his backyard railroad, the Carolwood Pacific, by the backyard railroads of Ollie and fellow animator Ward Kimball. The Carolwood Pacific in turn inspired Walt to think bigger, leading to the creation of Disneyland. Thanks Ollie.

Update: The Disney Blog has a list of online tributes to Ollie Johnston as well as Walt Disney Studio's tribute.

Variety has a great far ranging interview with director James Cameron on 3D movies, digital production, resolution vs. frame-rate and much more.

I believe that Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they're not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow. The building is a thin-walled set, the sunlight is a xenon, and the traffic noise is supplied by the sound designers. It's all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion.

I suspect I'm not alone when I say I've had plenty of horrible experiences with 3D movies. Colored glasses, flickery picture, ghosting, headaches, gratuitous use of pointy objects... Bah. It's just a lot of annoyance with no real payoff. In the last couple years, though, I've seen two movies in 3D that changed my mind. When Henry and I saw Chicken Little and Meet The Robinsons, we saw them in 3D. Now, neither of these are destined to be classics (though for the record, Meet the Robinsons is far far better than Chicken Little), but nonetheless, they opened my eyes to the possibility of 3D. There was nothing gimmicky about the 3D at all. With comfortable polarized glasses and digital projection, the experience was pretty much like seeing any other movie, but the world of the movie seemed just a little bit more real. Neither movie ever hit you over the head with it, it was just there adding to the overall experience. You know, like color... or sound.

Both Chicken Little and Meet The Robinsons are animated—computer animated. CG animation tends to have a more three-dimensional quality to begin with, so 3D seemed a great match to me. Indeed, Disney announced last week that beginning with the release of Bolt later this year, all Disney and Pixar features will be released in 3D. I'm not completely convinced about 3D for live action movies yet. I still haven't seen one that's changed my mind, but I've heard good things about U23D. Maybe Cameron's Avatar will be the one. It's bound to come, right? What's more 3D that the real world?

(via Daring Fireball)

The geek in me loves these Sierpinski Cookies, but the cook in me says they're way too much work. I guess they're a lot easier than Julia Jello or Mandelbrot muffins, though. There's always Romanesco broccoli!

(via Boing Boing)

I really had no choice but to make that last post long. I had to do something to push that stupid Time Machine dialog off the front page. Man is it annoying to have a full-size error message, complete with drop shadow staring at you every time you open a browser window. To other Mac-using readers, I apologize. To the Windows users, well, now you see why those annoying pop-up ads that are made to look like Windows error messages just don't have the same impact to a Mac user.

Last week was Henry's spring break. We wanted to go somewhere, but for the longest time couldn't decide where to go. First we were going to go to the southwest, then maybe Hawaii (when we discovered that we could fly to Hawaii cheaper than Vegas), then Eastern Washington. In the end, we decided we didn't really want to fly anywhere; we can handle the hassles of air travel with a 2 year old (or for that matter a 7 year old) just so often. Then I decided I probably wouldn't be attending WWDC this year, which got me thinking about San Francisco. So we decided to drive down to San Francisco for the week. Since Kathy's parents left California, we've been missing the drive down through Oregon and Northern California.

We figured we could make the drive pretty easily in two days, but we gave ourselves a little head start by driving down to Portland right after school on Friday. Friday morning, we were surprised by a freak snowstorm. In Seattle, any snow is a surprise, but snow in late March is downright shocking. It was snowing pretty hard as I packed the car and it even accumulated a bit, but we had no fear. Thanks to Scott Sistek's excellent weather analysis, we knew the snow would likely stop and melt away by evening. The drive to Portland was messy, with flurries much of the way, but by the time we got to Portland, there was no evidence of snow. Good think, too. I'm not sure whether it would have been okay to stop for frozen custard if it was snowing. The rest of the drive was beautiful and the kids did great. How did we ever manage without rear-seat DVD players?

We didn't head straight to San Francisco, though. Our first stop was in Mountain View, down in Silicon Valley. A couple months ago, I read something about the Computer History Museum and its wonderful collection of old computers. The place has been around for a while, first in a hangar at Moffett Field, then in its current home just off 101, not far from the Googleplex. How had I missed it? As we rolled in early Sunday afternoon Charlie was asleep, so Henry and I went in. There were only a handful of cars in the lot and we wondered whether they were even open. The first few exhibits we saw were nice, but I wasn't sure the detour was worth it. Henry really liked the exhibit on the history of computer chess and the mish-mash of other exhibits in the lobby were interesting, if modest. They have a Xerox Alto, the first computer with a modern GUI and a mouse (and built-in ethernet!), which was very cool to see, as was the Apple I and Cray 1.

Then we walked into the "Visible Storage" exhibit. Wow. This is what I'd been hoping to see: computers of every size, shape, and age. Early adding machines, supercomputers, minicomputers, PCs... they were all here. I was in geek heaven.

As I browsed through the collection, I kept getting a vague feeling I'd seen some of it before. Yes, in Boston in the early 90s, we'd been to a place called The Boston Computer Museum. It was located next to a children's museum and most of its exhibits were more about computers in general than computer history (There was a huge computer you could walk through. I recall it had a mouse about the size of my desk.) But I thought I remember seeing a PDP-1 there, too. Finally, a shipping label caught my eye (I wonder why?).

Stuck to the end of a really cool gadget from the UNIVAC I called a mercury delay line memory that stored data as pulses in a column of mercury. Anyway, the gadget was addressed to The Computer Museum in Boston. Hmm. Maybe the Computer History Museum is somehow connected to the old Boston Computer Museum. That evening, I did some research and discovered that the two museums are one and the same. Over time, the old museum focussed more and more on the educational side of things and in 1996, it spun off its archive as The Computer Museum History Center at Moffett Field. The Boston museum finally closed in 1999. Its remaining materials were split between Boston's Museum of Science (for the exhibits) and The Computer Museum History Center (for the artifacts). Then in 2001, the Museum moved into its current building and changed to its current name. So I guess I had been to the Computer History Museum, just in a previous incarnation.

Though the Visible Storage Room was impressive, the museum feels a little incomplete. I see on their website that their signature exhibit "A Timeline of Computing History" is scheduled to open in late 2009. I can hardly wait. Next month, another new exhibit is set to open. A brand spankin' new Difference Engine, built from Charles Babbage's original plans arrived at the museum this week. Built with funds from Nathan Myhrvold, the machine will stay at the museum for a year before being moved to Myhrvold's home.

Be sure to check out the rest of our trip pictures (many more yet to be posted) over at flickr.

As I was writing this last night, iTunes downloaded a new episode of Mahalo Daily for me. And where is the lovely and talented Veronica Belmont today? Why the Computer History Museum, of course. Check it out.

Thanks, Time Machine. That's helpful.

Last week, the PI reported that starting this season, three of our "local" pickle brands (Nally, Farman's and Steinfeld's) would be outsourcing their cucumber production. All three brands are owned by a company in Wisconsin that decided they could get cucumbers cheaper elsewhere in the country or from abroad. I didn't think much of it, because I didn't think much of their pickles to begin with.

Now, I'm no pickle expert, but I do know what I like and that's Woodring's Parker Pickles. According to a post today on Seattle Metblogs, I'm not alone. We've been buying these pickles at the farmer's market for the last couple years and they're wonderful... crispy and flavorful with just the right kick. We usually get the spicy ones, though as Dale Nelson of Woodring's explained to me, they're not really spicy at first. As they sit in the jar, they get hotter and hotter. Charlie has no problem with a pickle out of a fresh jar, but by the time we're down to the last pickle, they can really make you sweat. Mmm... pickles.

Great article by James Duncan Davidson on color temperature.

If this setting is way off—say you shoot outdoors with your camera set to a tungsten color temperature setting—your images will have a massive color shift to them and appear ultra-blue toned. Vice versa, if you shoot indoors at night on fully automatic mode and your camera doesn't dial in a correct color temperature, which happens more often than we'd like, everything will appear orange-tinted.

I've been working on a photography-related post that touches on color temperature without going into much detail (in short, if your digital camera supports RAW format, your color temperature setting is less important than you may think). If you want to know more, go read.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

The New York Times today reviews my new favorite game on the Nintendo DS, Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Greg Zeschuk of BioWare hits the nail on the head:

“I was expecting something pretty thin, but now I find myself sneaking around my house with the DS in my pocket, thinking about puzzles,” Mr. Zeschuk said last week by telephone from Edmonton, Alberta, where BioWare is based. “I never conceived of having puzzles as the focus of a game, but they have done a great job of integrating the puzzles with the story and some pretty wacky characters. It’s this juxtaposition of really well thought-out puzzles, high-level artistry and the engaging story.”

Unlike other puzzle games like Tetris or my latest computer-based time-waster, Chuzzle, Professor Layton has a story tying the puzzles together. It's not an epic War and Peace kind of story, but it does draw you on into the game. What's more, the visuals are great. I'm a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki and as the Times mentions, Professor Layton would fit right in at Studio Ghibli. In particular, the combination of turn-of-the-last-century Europe with peculiar mechanical contraptions is straight out of Howl's Moving Castle. Though I usually end up playing the DS with the sound off, it's also worth noting that Professor Layton sounds great, too. Like Super Mario Galaxy, it's clear they put some real attention into the sound of the game. The era of tinny electronic bleeps and bloops is long gone.

It's interesting that a good third of the Times article is spent in essence defending video games:

In a game the protagonist is you, and if you don’t figure out whatever there is to discover, no one else will do it for you (unless you enlist a friend or look it up online). The very concept of the deus ex machina, the god or godlike solution that miraculously appears to save the day, a concept ingrained into millenniums of traditional media, is completely anathema to interactive storytelling. The whole point of a story’s being interactive, rather than a static narrative merely consumed by the audience, is that the player makes the choices that matter.

With a traditional medium like books or opera, consumers are in no way responsible for anything that happens; the narrative exists wholly outside them. But make bad choices in a game, any game, and the game ends badly.

I was reminded of Steven Berlin Johnson's Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Among other things, Johnson points out that many games these days are not just more engaging than books, but more mentally demanding as well. Video games are not all about twitch response and eye-hand coordination any more (I've never been good at those kinds of games anyway). They can be deep and challenging, too.

Oh, and in Professor Layton, the answer to the question in the title is T.

The agents at Improv Anywhere have done it again. You may remember them as the folks who staged the Food Court Musical and spent five minutes frozen in place in Grand Central Station. Great stuff.

This time, they did their best to make a group of little leaguers feel like they were in the big leagues. It started in the first inning with a few very vocal fans. By the top of the second, vendors were walking through the crowd selling peanuts and popcorn (and passing out full-color programs). I don't want to give the rest away, so just go read about it yourself. I can only imagine how the kids felt.