Holy Smokes! The Premiership starts tomorrow. I’m dumping Arsenal and rooting for Chelsea this campaign. Hopefully The Blues won’t gack at the finish line like they did last year. Doesn’t look like Chelsea made many moves over the summer, but maybe having Fernando Torres from the get-go will lead to a more dynamic squad.

Two things I learned about The Premier League last year. First, I didn’t know the season was so long. Pretty close to a nine month schedule. Second, the top teams are actually playing four seasons simultaneously: Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup, Carling Cup. That’s a lot of football!

So after a few days of using Lion on an older, white MacBook I’ve realized that the multi-touch trackpads are probably core to getting the most out of Lion. Even though I don’t have access to a machine with a trackpad and Lion (foo on slow upgrade processes at work) I’m sure there are some gestures you just can’t make on the old trackpads.

Of course that’s a big nudge to upgrade to more recent models. Rumored 15” MacBook Airish machines would make a nice Christmas self-present.

So I spent a scorching afternoon upgrading my MacBook to OS X Lion. So far, so good, no major issues. The new scrolling is a bit disconcerting, but it shouldn’t take long to adapt.

Besides the reverse scrolling behavior, the only obvious changes are the addition of Launchpad and Mission Control. I’m not sure how much use I’ll get out of those, as my Dock situation is pretty solid and I also like to use LaunchBar. But they look purdy!

To get the most out of the new OS, I’m going to have dig into Lion backgrounders like Glenn Fleishman’s overview at TidBITs or of course John Siracusa’s gargantuan review. Probably the Kindle edition.

Unfortunately, things just seem a bit pokier in terms of performance. Hoping it’s just some behinds the scene OS housekeeping burn-in.

Apropos Elle Driver. I’ve always liked that word… “gargantuan”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.

As predicted, the latest versions of Apple’s MacBook Air computers are very tempting. Since the Apple url isn’t particularly stable, I’ll point to Jacqui Cheng’s writeup at ArsTechnica for the specs in human comprehensible form.

If at some point I do take a bite, I’ll probably go top shelf and get a maxed out 13 inch edition. Too bad you can’t get 8GB of RAM in the things, then it’d be a fabulous developer machine. Depending on finances, I’d splurge on the Thunderbolt driven display as well. Although not cheap, that combo would do me for a good 3 to 5 years.

Ripped through Peter Sims’ Little Bets. I’ve advanced enough in my career that technical proficiency won’t make or break me. Leveling up involves all that management goop that I’ve disdained in the past. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to get a class to fill in my gaps, so I’ll have to do it myself.

I thought Little Bets would provide some productive insights into the creative process. Little Bets though comes from the Malcolm Gladwell school of popular science. Long on anecdata, short on rigor. How many times can you name drop Chris Rock?

Actually, the book is chock full of references and notes which back up the assertions on the text. Should have picked on the links on the Kindle sooner. Even so, I never felt like I got deep into the practice of little bets. How does one effectively gauge the cost of a small effort or experiment such that it’s cheap enough? What happens if you hit a losing streak on your bets? What’s the difference between little bets and deliberative practice?

For those reasons, I can’t really recommend Little Bets although it’s an easy quick read. On my Kindle 1/3 is taken up by notes and the index, thus the end sneaks up on you real quick. Surprisingly so. Leaving it feeling as substantive as the origami on the cover.

I’ve been reading futurist Jamais Cascio’s Open The Future for a while but nothing’s come across the transom that was really interesting. At least until now.

Sight Licenses is a short essay on what happens once Augmented Reality lenses become a fixture amongst the populace. Suffice it to say that once vision becomes mediated, mayhem ensues. If you think our current copyright and fair use regime is woefully inadequate in the face of technology, imagine if everything you could see might be regulated in some fashion.

Perpetual ubiquitous advertising might not even be the worst outcome.

That was quick. I told you last Thursday Charles Stross’ Rule 34 was up next. Case closed, book finished on Sunday. Great read, remarkably dense, and thought provoking to the end.

Loosely a sequel to Halting State, Rule 34 involves a complex mesh of characters and plot threads. The book is written in the second person, and no two sequential chapters are told from the same character’s point of view. Ergo, you are constantly switching between them. Takes a bit of getting used to, especially since Scots figures heavily and you have to make the language adjustment along with the perspective switches.

When I’m not fawning over William Gibson, Stross is my go to guy. Rule 34 doesn’t fail to deliver.

The three main characters, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, Anwar Hussein, and The Toymaker all get spun into a hyperkinetic web of flat out weird technology driven crime. Spammers are offed by household appliances. Phony nation states are constructed to hide fancy financial instruments (read scams). And venture capitalists are now Gangster 2.0, or is it vice versa?

Kavanaugh is the heroine trying to figure out who or what is wreaking this havoc, despite being banished to the cop hinterlands after losing at some political infighting. Hussein is the chump, but oddly sympathetic, two bit “developer” continuously getting sucked into get rich quick schemes to no good end. The Toymaker is a fucked up psycopath (that is all). A number of minor characters also get a chapter here or there, but Rule 34 really revolves around these three.

First of all, Rule 34 is just a good, fast paced police procedural/thriller/mystery although it probably doesn’t obey the covenants of all those forms. Secondly, it is extremely dense on the nerd/pop culture call out front which is much different than my remembrance of Halting State which seemed a bit kindler and gentler. At certain points, I thought every graf in Rule 34 had to have some sort of oblique reference to a Real Life (TM) emergent meme. Almost like a mashup of Accelerando and Halting State. Keanu starring in a Godfather reboot was a nice tweak though.

Obviously I’m recommending Rule 34. But there’s one essential concept to take away: panopticon singularity. Be careful what you wish for nerds…

I was considering picking up an Apple TV using some credit card points. But Jacqui Cheng of ArsTechnica is reporting there may be a 1080p version of Apple TV coming in the Fall. Very tasty. Definitely worth waiting for.

So I was noodling around with Amazon EC2 a few days ago. I used one of their quick start Linux machine images for about 10 minutes, then terminated the instance. Afterwards, I noticed I had some EBS volumes that were terminating also.

This is a complete noob lesson, but some AMIs use EBS volumes for their root disk instead of loading from S3. Thus the unexpected EBS volume. Operator error, please read the fine print.

It’s not a huge deal, although you could inadvertently incur costs with an EBS volume, since they’re metered by I/O operations in addition to storage. I’m assuming Amazon pays for the storage on these volumes but the user forks over for the ops.

Finished up Walter Jon Williams latest technothriller Deep State. Deep State is the sequel to This is Not a Game, which I read previously. In that story, Dagmar Shaw is an accomplished puppet master of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). While unexepectdly caught up in a revolution in Indonesia, Dagmar discovers the crowdsourcing power of her player base, which gets her out of a tough scrape. Upon returning to the states, she becomes enmeshed in a murder plot where again her players help sort out the mystery.

Deep State follows the same themes, although I think it almost takes the puppet master concept a bit far. After running a successful game in Turkey, she gets hired by some part of the US Intelligence apparatus to destabilize Turkey, which has recently succumbed to a military coup. ARGs, the Internet, and international politics collide in a quite messy fashion.

Overall, despite a number of flaws Deep State is a satisfying read. Williams didn’t reveal much hesitancy in Dagmar taking on her new gig, which I thought a bit implausible. USGOV made nary an appearance, despite political unrest in a NATO partner. And as a card carrying member of the Defense Industrial Base (TM), turning around clearances that fast is hard to fathom. Plus, her team maintained crappy OPSEC.

Also, I was waiting for a much bigger, and more cynical, reveal at the end. And the copyeditor did a subpar job in my book.

In any event, Deep State, like it’s predecessor is a solid near future thriller, with some tech elements obvious to anyone with even a shallow Internet background. If anything it’s been overtaken by events a bit, but I can still recommend Deep State.

Next up: Stross’ Rule 34, apparently another victim of the acceleration of modern change.

Damn! These adhesive steel plates for the iPhone 4, made by Luxe Plates, look pretty sweet. And they’re not outrageously expensive. Wonder if they can do school logos or even ones for minimalist dynamic languages.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed Ian Hocking’s Déjà Vu. I say surprisingly because Déjà Vu prominently features time travel as a plot element. Somehow Hocking managed to overcome my usual distaste for such stories.

Time travel has to be one of the lamer crutches in science fiction. Most authors get caught up in trying to deal with the causality paradoxes generated by the possibility of time travel. Maybe I missed it in gobbling up Déjà Vu, but Hocking basically asserts a minimal time travel capability, characters avail themselves, story proceeds. No long soliloquies about altering the path of history, or changing your own past. Just a nice tightly plotted thriller.

Hocking also has done a much better job of character development than many of my recent reads. First, there’s a small number of distinctive players. No wasting details on minor characters. Second, the major characters are rich with nuance. Saskia Brandt and David Proctor are fully realized. The European setting adds a lot of flavor.

Lastly, the opening gambit that introduces Saskia is nicely done and pulled me deep into the story.

And to top it all off, it’s only 99 cents as a Kindle ebook.

Hat tip to Ken Macleod.

From the Wired online archives, dated 7/30/2001:

MIT’s Media Lab is experimenting with a tool for indexing the most popular hypertext links across thousands of weblogs and has ambitious plans to turn it into a resource for the mass media.

Launched last week, Blogdex is like a search-engine spider that visits about 9,000 weblogs a day looking for hypertext links.

Things have changed a bit since then.

The reports of the next edition of Apple’s MacBook Air are trickling out. If as speculated, the new versions will incorporate a significant processor bump, Thunderbolt I/O, and MacOS X Lion, that might be a very tempting purchase later in the year.

Going on 3 years old, my current MacBook is starting to get a little long in the tooth. It’s currently quite serviceable, but if I get deeper into hacking like I’d like to, some extra cycles would be useful. Having an ultralite notebook would also be a plus.

Well lookee here. Matthew Pearson’s Generative Art finally hit the streets.

If I get a spare moment, I’ll probably pick up the Manning edition, since they also pitch in a PDF electronic copy.

Finished Kameron Hurley’s God’s War on the Kindle yesterday. Picked up based upon an appearance in Jon Scalzi’s The Big Idea series. An interesting world, and a worthy effort, but I didn’t really connect with the book.

Almost all of the characters are unsympathetic but that usually doesn’t faze me. There’s a heavy religious component, including overtones or maybe even direct references (pardon my ignorance) to Islam. Could have been interesting. Something was lacking though.

I’m pretty sure it was the key “technology” element, bugs. I must have missed it somewhere, or it was simply deus ex machined, but I never even had an intuition as to how bugs fueled things. And lord was the story crawling with bugs. Absent a belief in the science, you’re just back into a historical fiction.

The war didn’t resonate either. Didn’t understand its motivations, mechanics, or dynamics. The supposed perpetual war never really struck me as particularly omnipresent or awful.

I’ll give Hurley credit though. I did catch the connection, tension, and contrasts between Nyx and Rhys, the two main characters. White/black. Female/male. Godless/pious. Corageous(?)/cowardly(?).

Oh, and I have to mention the atrocious typesetting, which is apparently not particularly rare in e-books. There were a number of clear cases where temporal transitions, indicated by increased spacing, were botched. And there’s quite a bit of dialog exchanges that are screwed up. First downside of the Kindle that I’ve run across.

Mostly this is a test drive of the WordPress iOS App. But I’m sitting on my couch watching IFC’s butchering of Frank Miller’s Sin City. First I’ve seen it in HD. Still amazed at the cast and the visual style. Make’s me want to buy the DVD and the graphical novel boxed set.

And Carla Gugino still looks pretty damn good.

This may be the first movie where I’ve realized how bad editing for time constraints can be.

So I’m watching the 2003 movie reboot of S.W.A.T. featuring Colin Ferrell, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner, and Michelle Rodriguez, among others. The ultra-rich villain, in S.W.A.T. custody, is being escorted into a holding facility. But along the way he spots some TV cameras and pronounces that he’ll pay One Hundred Million Dollars (cue bad French accent) if anyone gets him out of jail. The director promptly uses all the cheapest ethnic criminal stereotypes to indicate the forthcoming mayhem.

Immediately I thought if that video went viral on YouTube, they’d have scum coming from across the world to cut this guy loose.

Except there wasn’t any YouTube in 2003. Didn’t get here until 2005.

Like I said Internet Time.

American McCarver is a new sports Tumblr. I find that the starting lineup has a lot of potential. I’m into Famed Web Presences (TM) linkblogging sports. But their choice of patron saint?

That’s a bit, ahem, questionable.

Hey! I actually managed to finish another book on my Kindle. Actually I’ve completed a handful more since I got the device as a Christmas gift. But this is the first book I’ve felt inclined to write about.

Ex-KOP is a sequel to KOP. Going back to the destitute jungle planet Lagarto, we find our favorite dirty cop Juno Mozambe a broken shell of himself after the events of KOP. Events lead to a severe downward spiral led by a procession of depressing characters alternatively cynical, scummy, evil, naive, or a combination of all four. Finally, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Juno starts getting his mojo back, and the mystery gets interesting.

Of course, he has to euthanize his wife to get the ball rolling, but that’s Ex-KOP for you.

Again, not great, not awful, but satisfying. If you’re a fan of a fabulous turn of language, or a tightly efficient plot, look elsewhere. If you’re into an easy read dark noir, give Ex-KOP a whirl.

One of these days, I’ll have to do a Guilty Pleasure for McG’s Charlie’s Angels. However insulting of the viewer’s intelligence it is, I still vastly enjoy most of the movie.

A thing that’s been bugging me in the 11 years since the film’s release is the id on one song on the soundtrack. Near the end, after Sam Rockwell’s character has been revealed as the villain, he’s shown in his lair grooving out to some hard hitting’ hip hop track. Damn!!

But I never got around to seriously tracking it down. Until on a lark today, I went to IMDB, and started looking at the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack listing. Eyeballed a couple of likely candidates by title and started googling. Took a couple of wrong turns, but finally hit on Pharoahe Monch’s Simon Says.

Like Head Rush’s Underground, mystery solved.

I mentioned HBO Go a few posts ago, but I’ve been kicking the tires a little bit more recently. The service is surprisingly better than I thought it was going to be. The desktop browser version is an amazingly overdone Flash app, but it gets the job done. For some reason, it occasionally just takes a long to time to connect.

The HBO Go iPhone app is actually good! At least using Wi-Fi on my fast Verizon FiOS network. No stutters or buffering pauses on the movies I’ve sampled. The movie scrubber isn’t particularly precise, but that’s a nit. And I have to admit that I haven’t tried to watch a full movie end-to-end.

Next up is to try it over 3G and see how much of a dropoff there is.

Of course the key point is the content selection, and it’s pretty impressive. HBO Go seems to have a wider and more varied movie selection than the HBO On Demand provided through my Verizon FiOS subscription. The HBO Series collection is amazingly impressive with access to all episodes from recent top flight products including: The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Treme, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and True Blood. That’s right gorge on each of those series from start to finish and stone your friends with deep pop culture criticism.

Just the above buffet alone is worth the price of admission, which is free for me. The movies and other stuff is just a bonus. The only areas that look thin are Sports and Documentaries.

If this is the future, I’ll take it.

I’m pretty much on the “big data”, “data science” bandwagon as an important emerging trend in computing. An essential element is the application of machine learning approaches to massive data sets. Never really got into machine learning while doing my graduate work. Since my day job isn’t particularly big on developing engineer’s personal technical skills, I’m exploring an autodidactic approach.

Hilary Mason’s An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data looks like a promising starting point. I have to say though I found her PyCon keynote and Strange Loop presentations to not have the depth I was anticipating. High on humor and rah, rah. Low on real technical insights.

But for the $29.99 O’Reilly is charging it better at least have good production values. And I hadn’t actually noticed that O’Reilly had seriously expanded into downloadable video courses.

I’ve been using NetNewsWire since just about forever and loved it all that time. I haven’t even seriously flirted with another desktop reader on the Mac, despite a number of emerging alternatives during the heydays of RSS. The only real threat was Google Reader thanks to its cross-platform nature. But I’ve always enjoyed a well executed desktop app.

An implicit, but key, selling point was always Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire’s politely outspoken and opinionated creator and developer. Brent’s been blogging since just about forever, and I’ve been following him since the Userland Software days. He built brand loyalty through the openness he brought to his development process.

Nothing lasts forever though, and Brent recently engineered the sale of NetNewsWire to Black Pixel, a Seattle Mac indie developer house. I’m hopeful they can uphold, and surpass, the standard Brent set, in the same way MarsEdit has managed to continue on after Brent moved it to RedSweater software.

As usual, Brent was quite eloquent himself on the big news. Here’s another bravo from a user who loves the product and appreciates the author.

Thanks to SportsGrid I chanced upon Stathead, brought to the world by the fine folks at SportsReference. Statheads tagline is: Mission: Compile all the sports research you need to know. It’s a good old-fashioned linkblog devoted to quantitative research across all sports. So I threw it in the feedreader.

Not sure it was a good idea, given my recent trimming of fire-hose feeds. Stathead definitely pours out the links on a daily basis and these days I’d rather do more reading and less filtering. But I’ll continue the test drive, since there’ve already been a couple of choice links, and I really want to sink deeper into this area.

Bear with me, I’m easily amused.

My personal laptop has been parked on a desk for quite a while now. So since it has my full iTunes collection, I thought I’d jack in some speakers and use it as a flexible stereo. Plugging some old Dell PC castoffs into the line-out socket didn’t quite work out as well as I thought it would. The audio was just plain crappy and the wires made a mess.

Biding my time I finally bit the bullet and bought a Creative D100 Bluetooth wireless speaker. ($65 cheap, on Amazon). At first I was simply stoked to have a convenient way to go from headphones to speaker in the middle of a DJ mix when I got home from work. But things got better when I paired the speaker with my MacBook and used the iTunes Remote on my iPhone to control iTunes on the laptop. For some reason, I get a lot of pleasure out of using a $500 phone as a glorified remote to have a $1000 laptop (at least it’s 3 years old) wirelessly feed a $65 pair of speakers.

Like I said, easily amused.

Michael Rapaport was always good in my book, basically riding long on his appearance in True Romance (God that movie had a stacked cast), as Floyd’s roommate.

But he just got +10, as I found out Rapaport’s directed a documentary on the hip-hop pioneers A Tribe Called Quest. Entitled Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, it apparently did well at Sundance and the Tribeca Film Festival.

For those of us who grew up on 80’s to 90’s hip-hop, Tribe’s oeuvre is seminal at the same level as Public Enemy and KRS-One. Hope the documentary lives up to their contributions.

Looks like the film gets a limited release starting in July. This might be the only movie I see in the theater all year.

Via Unclouded by Ambition. Bonus points if you know who played Floyd without hitting IMDb.

With some much valued quiet time over the Memorial Day weekend, I decided to stock up my Kindle with a few new e-books. On my laptop, I tooled over to the Kindle books site, and started rooting around for some candidates. Took a peek at the top sellers, checked in with the Science Fiction and Fantasy list, looked to a couple of old familiar authors, and finally settled on some fresh faces. Kameron Hurley and Ian Hocking if you must know.

All in all, I probably spent about an hour on a full-featured computer, researching and selecting three items. Just for grins I decided to see if the iBookstore had my titles, maybe at a reduced price. They’ve gotta have a site on the Web right?

Wrong!

Straight from the official Apple iBooks FAQ (as of May 30, 2011):

Can I purchase a book from the iBookstore using my computer?

“No, the iBookstore is only available through iBooks on a compatible iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch at this time.”

Criminy! You can’t even use the execrable iTunes on the desktop to buy iBooks.

I’m pretty much convinced that the type of background work I did is not really feasible on a current mobile device. And I think this effort may be typical of serious book purchasers. Ergo, Apple is severely limiting the market of iBooks customers. About the only reason I could see buying a book in the iBookstore is as an impulse purchase, where I just want to get an author or title fast. I couldn’t really imagine building a collection through my iPhone, even with such a nice reader interface.

Game, set, match, Amazon.

Apropos Elle Driver. I’ve always liked that word… “execrable”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.

A grouchy NCAA football fan said earlier this year:

Guessing Tressel didn’t get a fine.

Well, today the floor fell out from under Jim Tressel as he had to resign from his head coaching position at The Ohio State University. Half shoved, half jumped. An impending front page story in Sports Illustrated seems to have triggered the event.

While I’m definitely not in the The Cult of Coach, Jalen Rose, of all people put a little nuance on this story. Tressel might have been covering up to protect his players, who could have been struggling financially. Although trading goods for tats doesn’t strike me as indicative of severe economic hardship, I might buy Rose’s thrust as consistent with the devotion Tressel seemed to generate from his players. A coach who averts his gaze when guys are in a tight spot and really need to make a fast buck seems completely plausible. This time the guys pushed the envelope and things blew up fast.

Still, the massive (and increasing) financial asymmetry between the schools/NCAA and the players will continue to expose the intense hypocrisy of the whole enterprise. I’m not saying we’ll see an increase in eruptions like this, but the NCAA does seem to be taking on a little water these days.

Yesterday was a random confluence of having an evening mostly to myself and all major North American sports, other than baseball, on hiatus. So I did something I’ve infrequently had opportunity for over the past few years. I rented a movie.

Actually, it wasn’t much of a rental. Since I’m an Amazon Prime subscriber, Amazon graced me with a free streaming access to a number of videos through its Instant Video service. So I gave it a test drive with Guy Ritchie’s movie, Revolver, a surprisingly psychological gangster film.

Overall, the experience was pretty good, although not great. I watched it on my laptop over Wi-Fi, with Verizon Fios as the backhaul. There were only the occasional drop outs and stutters. And I paused and resumed with no ill effect multiple times.

This brought to mind the slew of options I now have to get digital content including:

• The aforementioned Amazon Instant Video
• HBOGo, which is offered through Verizon. Had a few glitches the couple of times I’ve tried it, but where else am I gonna get every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm for free?
• The iTunes Store, which I’ve used to good effect for nomadic content fixes
• And Netflix, who seems to hit me with a new promotion every other month or so since I’m a former subscriber

Not to mention other services like Hulu which I haven’t even bothered to stay informed about.

There’s a burgeoning groundswell of “cordcutting” to get rid of cable/dish through such Internet services. For me, they’re not quite easy enough to deal with (or more accurately train up my wife), and I’m a serious sports junkie. It’s just easier to pay the monopolists and graze the live broadcast sports buffet.

Evol Intent’s Us Against The World has been rocking my iPhone the past couple of weeks. Didn’t think it was possible, but there’s a worthy challenger to The Human Resource, which was pretty high on my list. While the last half of The Human Resource is still the height of brilliance, Us Against the World is a great ride.

Of course this makes complete sense. While The Human Resource is credited to Dieselboy, a close read of the cover reveals it’s “Dieselboy presents…”. One CD is remixes of various DnB tracks. The other, a continuous play mix, is entitled Assemble The Monster,…

… by Evol Intent.

Now if they’d only drop a few more DJ mixes.

Link parkin’: Thought this Wired backgrounder on near field communications (nfc) was pretty well written and informative.

Ob whine: Jeez what’s with the cruft on links in newsfeeds these days? makes linking using feed items painful.

Okay, so the Eastern Conference Finals are looking pretty grim for my Chicago Bulls. They’re down three games to one against a Miami Heat with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and a host of sequentially resusscitated role players ala Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller. What next? Eric Dampier goes for 20?

I had been telling people around Christmas that this might be the year LeBron embraces his inner villain and gets mean enough to grab a ring. They were playing that sick D that led to the Lakers getting hammered on Christmas day.

Somewhere along the season, that level of defense started to brown-out against the other elite teams in the league at the worst possible time. But, as The Sports Grid noticed, the D is back with a vengeance:

Obviously the Heat are more than one guy on defense. They are more than two guys. They’re a whole team of guys with long arms who are committed to shutting down the other team, plus Mike Bibby. However, having LeBron James at their disposal certainly makes things easier.

Got a pretty good laugh out of that Mike Bibby dig.

So Da Young Bulls will probably exit stage left after a great season. Even as currently configured, they’re challenging the Heat. If D Rose drains one of those last minute shots, we’re talking a three game series with home court advantage. This could be the beginning of a great rivalry. I figure one more top notch (not elite) scorer for Chicago could make the difference. Then again, the Heat will have some cap flexibility next year and can upgrade too.

Link parkin’: The Most Human Human

Based upon Peter Merholz’s recommendation this book looks really interesting. To wit:

It’s a delightful and discursive book, wending its way through cognitive science, philosophy, poetry, artificial intelligence, embodied experience, and more. The author, Brian Christian, writes with a deft touch, in an episodic and occasionally meandering style that feels like you’re taking part in a good conversation.

Which makes sense, considering the book’s supposed raison d’etre is the author’s preparation for being a confederate (a human participant) for the Loebner Prize, in which judges of a Turing test have conversations with computers and humans, to determine both The Most Human Computer and The Most Human Human.

Available on The Kindle to boot.

As a proud graduate (1989 6-3) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Institute is winding down the celebration of its 150th year. And that was a pretty productive 150 years for one institution.

There’s plenty of stuff kicking around on the Interwebs about what a great place it can be, but I really liked Ed Pilkington’s take on MIT in the UK Guardian. Over and above the outstanding engineering performance, Pilkington gets into the openness to excellence simultaneously nurturing the wackiness of the Media Lab and the seriousness of Noam Chomsky.

And as a true blue 6-3, who UROPed at the LCS, it pains me to say something nice about the Media Lab. Ha, ha. Only serious.

IHTFP!

I’m not sure that data science isn’t just the tech world buzzword du jour, but I’ve got a gut that there’s something important going on. David Smith’s summary of the 2011 Data Science Summit would seem to support my hunch. Looked like an interesting mix of tech, biz, and art.

Also, Joe Hellerstein seems to be working this circuit and he has good taste.

With Dick Ebersol leaving NBC and the network begin sold to Comcast, it feels like there’s an opening for the rights on a couple of major sporting events. NBC clearly has overpaid for the Olympics in the past. Can Comcast afford to do so? Does it make sense to re-up on a big contract with Notre Dame football? What’s the commitment to Wimbledon, the French Open, and PGA Golf?

The only untouchable I could see is Sunday Night Football.

With any of these opportunities ESPN is an obvious candidate to swoop in and expand their hegemony. Attributed to Ebersol is the following:

“ESPN basically has to have one of their talent talk about Hitler or put a picture of their dick on a phone — which is what that Salisbury guy did — before they’ll do anything about any of these various crazies because they don’t have to. Nobody can touch them.”

And as a disciple of Roon Arledge, along with being a legend in his own right, Ebersol should know what he’s talking about.

Which got me to thinking, what would it take for ESPN’s dominance to unravel? You might say the Internet, or mobile, but they’ve been pretty savvy on both fronts. The talent going Animal House? Who cares, they’re just a bunch of replaceable talking heads. Overpaying for rights? They can always jack up the cable operators.

Obviously this is mostly a thought exercise, but a fun one. Have to say ESPN’s management is on top of it’s game at this point. Here’s a few that feel plausible:

• Anti-trust regulation due to some underhanded collusion.
• Overreaching by attempting to expand into foreign markets. I have an intuition that ESPN might like to take on Fox in soccer. There’s a lot of money and a lot of programming in that sport.
• Some wacky legal or technology loophole, similar to how satellites enabled ESPN, that allows a disruptor to sneak in.
• I dismissed overpaying for some rights, but the Olympics could be expensive enough to put a dent in profitability if not capitalized on correctly.
• Actually, if Comcast went all-in they have a bunch of regional networks that could provide a foundation. But that doesn’t seem likely with Ebersol leaving.
• And speaking of Ebersol, maybe he winds up at Fox and architects something.

I may not be in the majority, but I really like The Matrix Reloaded. It’s showing now on AMC (you’re a freaking cable channel! leave the curse words in) and this is the first time I’ve watched it in a while.

Oh I admit the movie’s significantly flawed. Frankly, I think if they’d never gone to Zion at all, and left it as a mystery, the whole saga would have been better off. But then adding in the primal dance club sequence just put it over the top campy for me. And the highway chase scene was completely cliched.

The draw for me is the implications and complications raised by Neo seeing Trinity’s future. Starts with the great in media res opening of the movie. The Morpheus speech sequence (This is a war. And we are soldiers. Death could come for us at any time.) and how it threads the past, present, and future of the mission is brilliant. Not to mention the bit of “random” chance (incoming!) that seemingly triggers Neo’s crisis.

And oh for The Merovingian, a quite worthwhile villain.

Lord knows though, after all the times I’ve seen The Matrix Reloaded, I can’t make any fucking sense of The Architect’s speech. I think I got the bit about choice, but I’m lost after that. May have to go to the Interwebs to solve this one.

Today I Learned (TIL), that there exists an iOS App for managing a WordPress installation. The app was recently updated to provide some new features along with a big stability boost. Will definitely have to check it out along with the JetPack plugin.

Quick posting from the iPhone could become addictive.

Late to the vent since they went to commercials back in December, but I find IFC nearly useless now as a cable channel. Nothing like a chain of 30 second spots right in the middle of Pulp Fiction or Basic Instinct.

Sad, because IFC introduced me to Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake which is similarly brutalized by commercials. Hard enough to get in synch with the British accents, but the cognitive interruptions just spoil the whole thing.

Alright, I’ll admit I still watched most of Basic Instict. Nothing can stop that Sharon Stone freak show.