Rich Mintz

• Coming soon: "Urban umbrellas" to replace NYC sidewalk sheds http://bit.ly/6ZpUu2 #
• pieces of the Gehry tower are apparently falling in the street near my apartment http://bit.ly/843TMi #
• @jddc dumb question: why are there movies at jury duty? isn't there supposed to be, like, court? in reply to jddc #
• This bridge needs a big sign reading HAVRE DE GRACE MAKES, THE WORLD PAYS NO ATTENTION #
• I'm at Blue State Digital (734 15th St NW, Washington). http://4sq.com/bSXpq1 #

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Ben Gunnink has released the Now Reading Reloaded plugin, an update of Rob Miller’s original Now Reading plugin. Among other things, the update patches for Amazon’s new* requirement that a short-term key be calculated off the AWS ID and secret key, so the plugin works as advertised again. Hooray!

You can see it in action in the sidebar at left.

*Not sure how new this is, but it doesn’t seem to have been accounted for in the original plugin.

• Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces (homage to Schoenberg) spellbinding!! More of this, please! @nyphil #
• Today's NYC snapshot: out the third-tier window, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center http://yfrog.com/audncj #
• good Sunday morning everybody: strong coffee, Greek honey cookies, and "Monarch of the Glen" via Netflix streaming video (@mcgregormt ) #
• Designing the Swiss anti-minarets propaganda poster (NYT): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/arts/design/17abroad.html #
• http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/reviews/01-2010/ruddigore_24208.html heading to City Ctr to see NY Gilbert/Sullivan's Ruddigore #
• Au Bon Pain mobbed by slow-moving elderly Gilbert & Sullivan fans 30m before curtain #adorable http://yfrog.com/au39ssrj #

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As much as I respect Jeff Bezos (as you know if you follow my Twitter feed, he’s now my primary source of physical media products, and on top of that he’s now selling me hair gel and Chex), this well-intentioned comment from his recent Newsweek interview (probably tossed off at a particularly aspirational moment in a particularly breathy chat about the Future) doesn’t seem to me to correspond with reality as we all know it, unless you take an uncommonly generous view of “eventually”:

Do you think that the ink-on-paper book will eventually go away?

I do. I don’t know how long it will take. You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world. That’s not going to go away; that’s going to thrive. But the physical book really has had a 500-year run. It’s probably the most successful technology ever. It’s hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what’s remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

Do you still read books on paper?

Not if I can help it.

The Kindle, the Internet, all this is very nice. But around the world today there are somewhere in the range of 3 billion people (give or take a billion or so) for whom a Kindle is not even remotely in their foreseeable future. (And there are probably 50 million such people, at least, in the United States.) It seems to me that as Bezos formulates his predictions, he’s simply overlooking about half the human race. For another generation, two generations, maybe much longer and possibly forever, the book will almost certainly kick the Kindle’s ass as “preferred reading technology” for those 3 billion people.

Not to mention that there are many (many) contexts in which reading is called for but an electronic device is impractical, even here on the Lido Deck where all of us technoelitists spend our time.

Even in the most aggressive Kindle-adoption scenario I can imagine, it is virtually inconceivable to me that the printed book will somehow “go away” within my lifetime. Printing and distribution economics will change for sure, but until someone comes up with something that beats the book for durability, versatility, and simplicity of OS, it’s still going to be part of the mix, and for many, many people it will be the only part.

Note: I don’t own a Kindle (although I’ll buy one as soon as Bezos puts one on the market that isn’t an aesthetically and visually horrifying experience to use). I do, however, read books (purchased from Bezos) from my iPhone, and I’ve had some good experiences with that. Maybe the Magical Apple Tablet that’s arriving Any Day Now will square the circle for me.

This weekend was a double portion of arts-’n-culture for me — Saturday night at the New York Philharmonic, and Ruddigore Sunday matinee with the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players. First, the Philharmonic — believe it or not, the first time I’d ever seen the NY Phil and the first time I’d ever set foot in Avery Fisher Hall. (I was on the Lincoln Center campus once before for a business meeting, a year or two back when all the construction was going on.)

Avery Fisher Hall — what an incredible building, and visually interesting, especially from the inside. The way the concert hall is suspended inside a shell that reads as “transparent” to the occupants at night — open to the whole city outside, from high high up — that’s the kind of grand experience that is the right setting for a trip to the Philharmonic. I was in the nosebleed section, on the third tier, but it didn’t matter — the building itself is momentous.

The concert itself was well composed — Haydn’s Symphony No. 49, John Adams’ setting of “The Wound-Dresser,” Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, and Alban Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces.

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On our trip to Florida last week, we rented a Ford Fusion. They tried to upgrade us to something larger, but I’d been interested in test-driving the Fusion since I first saw one.

The car they handed over had only about a thousand miles on it. Nothing remarkable about it, but an all-around positive experience — good power, very good handling for a car of its class, generally good visibility with a couple of blind spots. I probably wouldn’t buy this car, but if I won one on a game show, I’d keep it. So far so good.

But.

The car had one of those magical digital gauges showing the mileage and the “miles to empty” on two lines, like this:

1172 MI
137 MI TO E

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From a New York City TLC public release issued last week, new enforcement guidelines for the taxi driver no-cellphone policy:

Effective January 29, 2010, all TLC licensed drivers must comply as follows:

You MAY NOT have a Bluetooth or other wireless or wired telephone device in or near your ear – even if you are not talking on it or listening to it.

You may not use a handheld or hands-free cell phone while driving – you MUST be “Legally Standing or Parked.”

While driving, you may NOT use any portable electronic devices that allow you to talk, text, communicate or become distracted in any way.

Only FHV drivers may receive dispatch information from a base using a mounted electronic device or FCC-licensed two-way radio. Communication must be brief and strictly business-related.

If you are convicted of using prohibited electronic devices while driving, you will be fined $200 and will earn three (3) penalty points on your TLC license under the TLC’s Persistent Violator Program. (Please be reminded that within any 15-month period if you accrue six (6) TLC points, you will serve a 30-day license suspension, and will have your license revoked if you reach 10 TLC points).

If you are convicted of a third violation within a 15-month period, your TLC license will be revoked – three strikes and you’re out!This includes any combination of summonses issued by TLC officers as well as those issued under the Vehicle & Traffic Law that are heard at the NYS Dept. of Motor Vehicles’ Traffic Court (e.g., summonses issued by NYPD police officers and any other authorized law enforcement personnel).

If you are convicted of any cell phone violation, in addition to accruing points, possible suspension and fines, you will be required to attend a mandatory Safety Refresher Course that illustrates the dangers of distracted driving. The course will review the rules governing the use of portable or hands-free devices, and the dangers of driving while distracted. Also, all newly licensed drivers, and probationary drivers, will be required to receive similar training as part of the licensing process.

Full text of the rule here (PDF).

For my search engine homies, via Dave Farber’s Interesting People list. Comments?

United States Patent 7,650,331
Dean, et al.
January 19, 2010
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System and method for efficient large-scale data processing

Abstract

A large-scale data processing system and method includes one or more application-independent map modules configured to read input data and to apply at least one application-specific map operation to the input data to produce intermediate data values, wherein the map operation is automatically parallelized across multiple processors in the parallel processing environment. A plurality of intermediate data structures are used to store the intermediate data values. One or more application-independent reduce modules are configured to retrieve the intermediate data values and to apply at least one application-specific reduce operation to the intermediate data values to provide output data.
________________________________
Inventors: Dean; Jeffrey (Menlo Park, CA), Ghemawat; Sanjay (Mountain View, CA)
Assignee: Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA)
Appl. No.: 10/871,244
Filed: June 18, 2004

On my old computer, I had Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac, and on my new one I have Windows XP running under VMWare Fusion 3.

I’m only an occasional Windows user, so I don’t want to have to configure it or tune it — I just want it to work. And on that criterion, Fusion is kicking Parallels’ behind.

Under Parallels, I very often had window freezes, Windows freezes, annoying display glitches (“don’t move the mouse too far over there, or everything will go haywire”); I had trouble figuring out what resolution was right for my applications and getting it to work; “suspend” mode almost never worked properly; and so on.

Under VMWare: install VMWare, install WIndows (both completely painless), install apps, launch everything, and it Just Works. I don’t know anything about how to configure or tune VMWare because I haven’t yet needed to learn anything. (In contrast, I had to learn a bunch of stuff about Parallels, which hopefully I’ll never need to use again.)

What I like best: I can keep my Windows applications running, put VMWare into Suspend mode, and forget about it for 3 hours or 3 days; when I wake it up again, state is exactly restored and things resume where they were.

I note that I’ve upgraded (somewhat) in processor speed and (significantly) in memory, but my old machine was pretty high-powered for two years ago. And on that machine, even on a clean restart with no other apps running, Windows under Parallels was pretty rickety.

If you have today off work (as I do) and you’re spending the day (as I am) catching up on some combination of [laundry|dishes|work email|bills|picture-hanging|TiVo|letters to family|closet organizing|etc.-ad-nauseam], don’t forget to take some time to reflect on why today’s a holiday in the first place. Maybe you want to start here, with “Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said” (video, 2 min.), from Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine hip-hop video blog. (Posted by Sam Graham-Felsen.)

If you’re feeling more substantive:

• Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (video, 22 min.)
• AFSCME documentary on the Memphis sanitation strike (video, 10 min.)
• David Halberstam, The Children (via Amazon.com)