To celebrate their new site, Focus Lab LLC put on a bit of a treasure hunt. I teamed up with Twin Cities EE pal Nick Benson to take home the title.
The goal was to find 7 hidden Monocle Men across their redesigned website.
Stunning imagery from NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP.
Be sure to check out the 8000px by 8000px version.
I like the way Andy Boyle put it:
ATTENTION ALL OF JOURNALISM. This is what you can do instead of a goddamn word cloud.
Joe Paterno died today. He also died last night, according to an erroneous report from Onward State.
You may remember that Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot to death last year outside a grocery store, at least until NPR and other news outlets backtracked and learned that Giffords was, in fact, alive and in surgery.
These incidents only happen to public figures.1 There are no retractions in the obituaries section of the newspaper. But consider this: if Paterno hadn’t passed away a few hours after the erroneous report and instead survived, even for just one more day (or news cycle), how silly would your morning paper2 look?
As I thought about this this morning, my mind turned to case of speed. To whom on this planet does it matter that Joe Paterno is dead so much so that they need to know the second he’s taken his last breath? I would argue that pool is as large as zero, outside of his family and his inner circle of friends.
News is only news as long as it’s new. As a journalist, I know there are bragging rights at stake for breaking a story first, but “I reported a man’s death first” is pretty thin glory. I tweeted that thought and had a nice exchange with Mark Loundy:
It’s not about ‘glory.’ It’s about value to the readers — which we don’t dictate.
I questioned the value, from a reader’s perspective, of knowing whether someone is dead two minutes before someone else, to which Loundy replied:
Many people like knowing things like that first. Whether you or I share that like is irrelevant.
The first is a valid point, I said. But as the Giffords and Paterno incidents have both shown, that drive can be destructive and, at the very least, get in the way of accurate reporting. One Devon Edwards, the now former managing editor of Onward State, learned that the hard way. Very much to his credit, Edwards wrote a no-bull explanation of the events:
In this day and age, getting it first often conflicts with getting it right, but our intention was never to fall into that chasm.
For the record, there is no Pulitzer Prize for Best Intentions.
Now think about times when the media is criticized for not reporting the news quick enough. There are always sins of omission, or waste dumps simmering without investigation for decades, or the candidate whose checkered past was not discovered until after the election. What stands out to me as a counterpoint in the urgent news game is the tornado. A not uncommon refrain after a tornadic catastrophe sounds something like: “We only had two minutes warning,” or, “the sirens never went off.”
I was the lone web editor on duty at MPR the night more than three dozen tornadoes touched down across Minnesota in 2010. I’m sure we relayed information that was inaccurate, or delivered tornado warnings to areas that ended up with just a strong thunderstorm. But the message was clear, consistent and necessary. Get to a safe place.
The broadcast team went wall-to-wall storm coverage that evening, and delivered information from the National Weather Service as fast as possible, because it needed to be.
Knowing about Joe Paterno’s death two minutes sooner will not make a difference in anyone’s life. 3
Joe Paterno is not a tornado. Check your facts, double check your facts, and then broadcast the right information.
Over at Poynter, Craig Silverman chats with AP associate managing editor Ted Anthony about his organization’s approach — “conditions for accuracy” — and how it kept the AP out of trouble in both the Giffords and Paterno cases:
Even before Penn State student news organization Onward State reported that Paterno had died on Saturday night, AP reporters and editors had already discussed how they would handle Paterno’s death.
That afternoon, AP reporters in State College began hearing from sources that Paterno’s health was deteriorating. This was confirmed in a statement issued by the family.
“So at that point we had conversations, the usual planning conversations, but also we acknowledged there could very well be a flurry of these more-dire-than-the-reality reports [of Paterno’s health], and we needed to be aware of that, and we needed to expect these and not be surprised and apply our usual standards,” Anthony said.
Frank Jacobs, for the New York Times, examines the Guyanas, the vestiges of European colonialism on the north of South America, isolated from the rest of the continent by geopolitics, geography and the Amazon jungle.
While the Suriname and and Guyana have gained independence from the Dutch and the British, respectively, French Guiana remains a territory of France to this day.
The coming weekend might very well be an historic one for Franco-Brazilian relations. Nicolas Sarkozy will be in French Guiana to deliver his annual New Year’s address to France’s overseas territories, in which he is likely to announce the opening of the bridge across the Oyapock River, French Guiana’s border with Brazil.
When the 1,240-ft-long, cable-stayed construction is finally be open for business, it will do more than connect the towns of Saint-Georges-de-l’Oyapock and Oiapoque, on the French and Brazilian banks of the river, respectively. The bridge will establish the first road link between France and Brazil, not to mention the first overland connection between the European Union and the Americas.
Kazunori Asada took Vincent Van Gogh paintings and simulated the effects of protanomal color deficiency.1
The results are fascinating.
Asada:
Each of the stones in the stone pavement become more solid. The building of the slender cafe’s terrace emerges with depth in the moonless night. Under the stars in the infinite sky, people relax and are enjoying a meal and drinks. And the warm light illuminates them.
At MinnPost, David Brauer chats with Pioneer Press photographer Ben Garvin about his fantastic aerial photos of the Red Bull Crashed Ice event in St. Paul.
After the photos ran, Garvin says he got an email from the Red Bull folks. “They said, ‘dude, you just crushed it.’ They speak their own language.”
I was wondering who was out flying so low around the event on Saturday. It looked pretty darn good on the front page, too.
Fordlandia is about as tangential a profile of a major American figure as one gets. Greg Grandin takes on the history of Fordlândia, an ill-fated attempt to wrestle the Amazon jungle into compliance with good, old-fashioned Midwestern manufacturing.1
This is the second Amazon-set profile I’ve read in the last year, the other being The Lost City of Z. Fordlandia doesn’t have the pace or the excitement of Z, but as a reflection on Americanism, at least as prescribed by Henry Ford, it holds its own.
Perhaps my favorite line in the book:
The term Fordism evolved after the Washington Post, condemning Ford in 1922 for briefly shutting down his factory rather than pay high coach prices, defined it as “Ford efforts conceived in disregard or ignorance of Ford limitations” […]
The project was a mess throughout its history, and one wonders if it was really at the top of the aging and fading Ford’s mind at all.
Fordlândia never exported any significant amounts of rubber, and Ford never visited the site.
I’m on Dribbble now. Follow me if you screenshots of web projects.
Nice little poster by Phil Jones.
I’ve had a set of JBL Creature II speakers for quite a while, and at some point last year one of the speakers blew out. Instead of looking at repairing or replacing them — which was around the time that we were moving — I shelved them and stuck with my Sony MDR-3506s.
Jump ahead a few months, and I’m putzing around on Internet when it occurs to me that I really ought to have a set of Apple Pro Speakers to go with my new desk. You know, the lovely clear, spherical speakers that came along with Apple’s acrylic phase. 1
There was one problem: I hadn’t read the specs closely enough.
The Apple Pro Speakers were all powered by small, onboard amplifiers on the G4 Cube, as well as a few iMacs and Power Macs. The jack for the Apple Pro’s uses a three-way plug that is smaller than the typical 1/8” mini-plug and has a small sheath, which carries the power to the speakers from the onboard amps. If you wanted to plug in the speakers to something else, such as a computer without the special or an iPod, you had to get something like the Griffin iFire, now available online for exorbitant prices.
This weekend I finally got around to creating the unholy fusion of my two unused speaker sets.
I popped open the satellites for the JBL, disconnected the speakers and went to work stripping wires and pulling back shielding. Each satellite has a small circuit board, owing to the fact that each little “creature” has an LED status light, and the right-side one has two little capacitive touch volume controls. I did the same above the joint for the Apple Pro Speakers. Since the JBL’s woofer housed the main circuits and the amp for the satellites, all I needed to so was make a good connection between the Apple Pros and the JBL’s satellite chips — the main JBL fixture would provide the power the Apple Pros needed.
It was a fun little project, and now I have these great clear spheres that sound pretty darn good sitting on my desk. Since I left all of the JBL circuit boards exposed, my next project will be to connect a wire out from the capacitive volume control leads to something fun on my desk.
My wife works with kids with autism, so I’ve got a bit of a heightened interest in the condition. Whether you do or not, this is a fantastic article.
So far they had only cuddled; Jack, who had dropped out of high school but was acing organic chemistry in continuing education classes, had hopes for something more. Yet when she smiled at him the next morning, her lips seeking his, he turned away.
“I don’t really like kissing,” he said.
Kirsten, 18, a college freshman, drew back. If he knew she was disappointed, he showed no sign.
On that fall day in 2009, Kirsten did not know that someone as intelligent and articulate as Jack might be unable to read the feelings of others, or gauge the impact of his words. And only later would she recognize that her own lifelong troubles — bullying by students, anger from teachers and emotional meltdowns that she felt unable to control — were clues that she, too, occupied a spot on what is known as the autism spectrum.
But she found comfort in Jack’s forthrightness. If he did not always say what she wanted to hear, she knew that whatever he did say, he meant. As he dropped her off on campus that morning, she replayed in her head the e-mail he had sent the other day, describing their brief courtship with characteristic precision.
“Is this what love is, Kirsten?” he had asked.
And, as pointed out by @sandentotten, it now has a fantastic correction appended.
An article on Monday about Jack Robison and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.
Update: The story behind the correction, via Jim Romenesko. It just gets better.
I was accompanying Kirsten to school, taking notes on my laptop as she drove. She was listening to music on her iPod known to Pony fans as “dubtrot,” — a take-off on “dubstep,’’ get it? – in which fans remix songs and dialogue from the show with electronic dance music. Anyway. The song features Fluttershy exclaiming “yay,’’ which I wrote down. Then Kirsten told me that in the Pony universe, the seasons do not change on their own. She talked animatedly about one episode in which the ponies do “winter wrap-up,’’ bringing back the birds that had migrated, clearing away the clouds.
I remember thinking the manual season-changing was a metaphor for people with autism, for whom the social interactions that come naturally to many of us have to be consciously learned. (This seemed way too tortured when it came time to write). Twilight Sparkle had a big role in that episode, and it was then that our conversation then shifted to her nerdy intellectual personality. But I never wrote down her name.
The cartography thing got me thinking… It hasn’t been that long since the time when weren’t able to see half of the Earth from space. The first picture came on October 24, 1946.
The grainy, black-and-white photos were taken from an altitude of 65 miles by a 35-millimeter motion picture camera riding on a V-2 missile launched from the White Sands Missile Range. Snapping a new frame every second and a half, the rocket-borne camera climbed straight up, then fell back to Earth minutes later, slamming into the ground at 500 feet per second. The camera itself was smashed, but the film, protected in a steel cassette, was unharmed.
Fred Rulli was a 19-year-old enlisted man assigned to the recovery team that drove into the desert to retrieve film from those early V-2 shots. When the scientists found the cassette in good shape, he recalls, “They were ecstatic, they were jumping up and down like kids.” Later, back at the launch site, “when they first projected [the photos] onto the screen, the scientists just went nuts.”
David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total.
That’s craftsmanship.
And the peasants rejoiced.
You were a pretty good year, 2011.
I started a new position with the Public Insight Network. We moved into a new apartment in the summer. We’ve done cool stuff like this and this, and while not worrying about things like this.
We got to see awesome concerts and awesome flowers and awesome towers.
I got a concussion, just like Babe Ruth.
Our two cats are still awesome. And we said goodbye to an old friend.
All in all, you were a pretty good year, 2011. I hope 2012 is even better.
Fantastic tune. Can’t stop listening to it.1
Frank Chimero dissects Louis CK’s cultural resonance:
So, we’re ashamed by the those dark thoughts, and Louis is there to give the shameful inclinations credence through his routine. We laugh because we know, and we hear others laugh, so we can hear how we are not alone. The thought gets aired, so there’s less shame to feel.
See also: Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy
You know the one — The Beatles “A Hard Day’s Night”
Giles Martin shows Randy Bachman the first chord of A Hard Day’s Night.
Update: There’s a slightly better version here.
