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Save Pluto

Pluto has been demoted. Jason and Meg are having a mnemonic device contest in protest. Mule is offering a badge for those who want to show their solidarity.

Update: Shortly after posting the above satellite images of Pluto and Charon, CNN replaced it with this revisionist image of our solar system:

Update (2): Mike says: "Using dwarf as a modifier to cancel out the relationship of the parent noun is insulting." I agree.

Developing...

Mail Time

mail time
Originally uploaded by david.

Curious Sponsors

Fans of the San Francisco Giants have been flummoxed by FusionStorm. The billboards in the Giants' Baseball stadium are populated by Levi's, Budweiser, Cingular and other usual suspects. FusionStorm has taken out two billboards in completely different colors and type treatments on different sides of the field. I thought I would investigate on the Internet (I like to do that). FusionStorm.com, whose mission appears to be to simply "Make Technology Work" greeted me with this:

That image is not working. It looks to me like dude is about to fall off a cliff! I don't want to fall off a cliff.

But one preposterously wasted chunk of baseball sponsorship dollars does not justify a Hello, Typepad post. Two presposterously wasted chunks of baseball sponsorship dollars, on the other hand...

Enter Azek Trimboards! Mets fans High and Inside note: "This year, one of the most prominent sponsors of the New York Mets has been an entity mysteriously known as Azek Trimboards."

Azek Trimboards match FusionStorm tag for tag in sheer web ineptitude. The Azek source code represents web soup at it's worst, so much so that Google takes a seemingly random snippet off of Azeks' info page to describe Azek in Google search results as: "Manufactured in a proprietary process, AZEK Trimboards are consistent and uniform throughout with no voids."

Sadly, there's no trimboard blog (trimboardeo? gizboard? trimway?) that has written about Azek so that I could glean more information (if I wanted to.) And that's the other reason FusionStorm and Azek have stuck with me - I'm used to trivia becoming available within fourty seconds of my first wandering thought, if that. If Apperceptive advertised with the Mets or the Giants, I hope we'd do a slightly better job of communicating who the heck we were. Speaking of which, I have to get back to work.

Apperceptive is consistent and uniform throughout, with no voids!

Dashes.com Redesign

Nice redesign by Anil Dash, "Pretending to be an authority since 1999." Hello, Typepad's own collage is getting a little long in the tooth, this may inspire me to clear the cobwebs around here.

Assassination Vacation

I'm late to the Assassination Vacation party, but I'm here. What a book! This book reminds me very strongly of a few close friends of mine - the ridiculous missions, the obsession with American presidential history and radical politics, and the deep appreciation for a good coincidence. I can recommend this book to anyone, although since it seems like everyone has already recommended it to me and I'm late I'll just stop repeating myself.

Dave Welch's interview with Vowell at Powells.com is a fun read. Dave Welch asks Sarah about her love for Siskel & Ebert and her response is worth quoting:

That show was important for me as a hick kid from nowhere; it was my first exposure to criticism.

I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms. They talked about things they liked, not things they were supposed to like.

...

And that's one of the things I think my work is about, really, the difference between things you're supposed to like and things you actually do like.

What I think I appreciated most about the book was how much Vowell loved America. The architecture of the tiny memorial stalls most of us skip by without thinking, all of the docents and historians she encounters along the way, even the freeways and mall parking lots were transformed into sites of high (or at least medium) adventure. Most of all, Vowell loves a good road trip, the unique freedom of traveling in America.

Flying home Saturday afternoon, I was clutching only this book and my MacBook as I trudged through security. Big dude in front of me was upset about having to pour out his Coke (Coke was, of course, for sale not twenty yards further down the concourse.) I commiserated with him, and also made a sympathetic nod to the mother ahead of us who was pouring milk out of her baby's bottle, and his response was "This is why I can't wait to get back over there and kill more of them. I've already killed of six of them for y'all, and I want to get to ten."

I realized that the foiled spine declaring ASSASINATION in all-caps arial was on full view under big man's nose in the grey security tupperware also containing my shoes, quarters and cell phone. Of all the days to travel with a book called Assassination Vacation. I skirted away and made it home without further incident.

Bubbles

Yesterday I was walking up fourth avenue in San Francisco when someone offered to trade me a free copy of the Chronicle if I would consider subscribing. I took the paper because I saw baseball players on the cover, even though I live in New York and wouldn't be interested in subscribing to the Chronicle.

I caught the bus, opened the paper, and was immediately disappointed to see that an article about baseball cards was framed by scans of four cards that have dramatically lost value. These weren't cards that were part of overproduced sets, with the exception of 87 donruss. There was an 85 Topps, an 86 Topps, and a 1990 Leaf. These are all relatively valuable sets. So what do Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa have in common? They obviously aren't the cards that have lost the most value in the past twenty years.

This is intellectual dishonesty at best. Of those four players, only Palmeiro has tested positive for steroids. No one will be surprised if Sosa, Bonds and McGwire are ever proven guilty of steroid use, but that hasn't happened yet. The collapse of the cards market was a clear case of supply dwarfing demand. This happened in the mid 90s, when baseball fans barely cared at all about steroids. The 'roid rage of fans and San Francisco columnists is obviously more recent than that. I just wish they could have mocked up a Floyd Landis baseball card.

You're on notice, Henry!

You're on notice, Henry!
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.

Also, from Rhizome: While not necessarily created as an artwork, the piece speaks to the immediate nature of online collaboration and the fleeting kinds of community that can develop. (via Anil Dash)

CSI: Sidewalk

CSI: Sidewalk
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

More to come soon.

Blog All Open Tabs

• Mr. Ratner’s Neighborhood: Manipulative developers, shrill protesters, and a sixteen-tower glass-and-steel monster marching inexorably forward. What the battle for the soul of Brooklyn looks like—from right next door. Related: The Atlantic Yards Report.
• The Wire behind the scenes:
  

  Whoever you were in Baltimore, you were getting fucked. The second season was to describe the death of work. The third season was to show what happens to reform and reformers and to examine the whole nature of why policy never changes.
  
  And this season is to take argument with those who feel that if you're born without privilege, but make the right set of choices, that you will be spared. To do away with that bit of national mythology.

  This is the kind of blogging I like: Stills from the set, no spoilers, and well-constructed English language.

• Future HBO links should be considered in the context of Ian McShane's lawyers' disdain for Deadwood fans.
• Coffee and Conservation, via Harold's exceptional Typepad featured weblogs.
• Jason Kottke: How I Blog. The secret sauce boils down to building trust with your readers. This is why Corporate Blogs Still Suck.
• UPDATE: Since I began drafting this post a tab to Idle Words has been opened.

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard Sneak Peek - Xcode 3.0

Is it just me, or is this copy on Apple's site about the new Xcode 3.0 a little... off?

Focus is about saying no

Today’s coding environments are simply more distracting than those of yesteryear. Mail notifications, chat status beeps, the barista bussing your table, dual cores and multithreading letting you do more without running out of resources — all this adds up. While you can do so much more today, sometimes, you just need help concentrating on the smallest loop. Enter the new Xcode 3.0 text editor that offers an elegant ribbon to highlight scope.

iChat-like message bubbles provide a snazzy way to read build errors, breakpoint definitions, and debug values — all displayed inline with the relevant source code, so you know just where you your colleagues went so very, very wrong. Staying focused in one window lets you stay focused. You’ll also enjoy snappier performance, as Xcode 3.0 loads source files four times more quickly than previous versions.

They even said "snappier."