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N.K. Jemisin has resumed blogging. Excellent!

e for education

Tim suggests today's announcement will go as widely predicted. Totally disagree!

• Smaller iPad, the ePad. e for education.

• The ePad will feature Sub-pixel cameras. We know all about the screens, but one advantage of them not being retinal is that there is more room between the LEDs for cameras, which will make FaceTime truly FaceTime. I have been predicting this since the first iSight in 2003. Just as we are four years closer to Iran having nuclear weapons, we are also nine years closer to sub-pixel cameras in all Apple devices.

• iBooks 3, with deeper video & iCloud integration than ever. Better payments, smoother production, epub export for iBooks creator. All of this is a no-brainer. Smaller iPad is for education. We at 29th Street Publishing are very happy to have the world of publishing go down the road of more bells and whistles while we focus on the the written word.

• Apps on iTV. This isn't as far off as you think, and the reason is, as above, education. Many more schools have TVs hooked up to VCRs & DVD players than projectors, and replacing that with an Apple TV that can pair nicely with Airplay enabled ePad apps is probably among the most disruptive technologies that Apple could bring to the classroom. This is absolutely core to Apple's DNA, and you are going to hear those words come out of Tim Cook's mouth today.

• App and video providers are going to be featured front & center — Not just the textbook providers and the Elements app, Khan Academy, McGraw Hill, Rookie's Ask a Grown Man and more.

Boom.

Proofread by Blake Eskin

Michael Stipe on Animated Gifs

Fifteen-year old David Jacobs and Thirty Six-year old David Jacobs have the same crush, Michael Stipe:

Bullett Media: The most buzzed topic—what comes up when you Google your tumblr—is the brief cock shot in that art video you posted of your getting dressed. What was your reaction to the internet’s focus on your penis almost exclusively?

Michael Stipe: That was the same year, 2009. Again, it’s exactly like MichaelStipe.com—I took a bunch of still images and put them together and created a moving film that again, loops on itself. I mean, I guess, there was a little more chatter about it than I expected. I looked at it as an art piece. Of course I knew that people might freeze frame, but if people want to look at my penis, I don’t have a problem with that. [Laughs.] It raises a kind of more interesting question, which is where we are right now in terms of what the still image has become. We’re at this very fascinating moment in the history of photography and representation, where the still image is disappearing and becoming something very different, that is, a moving image that we will now be able to freeze frame. That’s what gifs represent in a primitive way. If Susan Sontag were alive, or Marshall McLuhan, they’d have a lot to say about where we are, and where this is all going. Over 100 years the photograph went from being this amazing thing that seemed impossible, to being something that was positive proof of an event occuring; and then we realized images could be manipulated to the point that now, with new technologies, everything is manipulatable and the still image is beginning to—like many other things, with the advent of digital and existing technologies—disappear. Our idea of what a still image is has now becoming very different. It’s almost like a scene in Blade Runner where they zoom in on a certain part of a photograph or, I think there’s another scene, where we’re looking at a still image and it moves slightly. Now I’m starting to sound like a science fiction geek…

BM: Science fiction geeks are great. It’s interesting too because a lot of the flat images we are looking at are on a screen which has a dynamism to it.

MS: Yeah, backlit, and you are in control as to how you interact with it. When you go to one of those pages that are largely gifs and you’re looking at, say, 80 images with each of them moving, how does your mind and your eye and your memory regard those single images? Are they to be seen as a still image that happens to be moving? How does a 12 year old, who is younger than the technology that we’re talking about, and has lived with it their entire life, view that? That’s what we’re talking about.

Lauryn Hill

Just caught the bartender shazamming a lauryn hill song. Cannot make this up.

— David Jacobs (@djacobs) May 17, 2012

For whatever reason¹, Lauryn Hill has come up in a bunch of different contexts in recent conversation. In the scenario above, the bartender in question offered the following: "I knew it was Lauryn Hill, but I want to remember to listen to the song again later." And I think I buy that. Even If it was a lie, that was a pretty great one to come up with on the spot.

I've also recommended Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine episode about some fans' tortured relationship with Lauryn Hill a few times recently. Here it is, for easy reference!

¹Actually I know the reason, because her albums were amazing, and great albums tend to echo over years and emerge from your subconscious when you don't expect it.

Switch to Open Street Maps

New guide to switching to OpenStreetMap: switch2osm.org Everything you need in one handy place: how-tos, links, and why. #switch2osm

— Stamen (@stamen) January 25, 2012

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was hoping to see wider adoption of Open Street Maps this year, and the new site Switch2OSM.org is a great resource, with articles ranging from "Why Switch?" to different tiling sets & server strategies. With Google's recent announcement that they're going to share data and identity between projects & products, I expect this initiative will find the wind at it's back.

People don't think about location search as something that betrays confidential data, but of course it does — starting with where you live, work and shop. Of course lots of people proactively share this data with Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and other products, but as Google reduces the number of privacy controls that they allow users to control, they cede one of the last philosophical differences (advantages?) they had over Facebook.

On Singing

I've been enjoying Tarajia Morrell's blog The Lovage recently, especially her appreciation of Harry Belafonte and the documentary Sing Your Song:

He used his gifts to shrewdly foster change and connect leaders to the masses. He is stoic and steadfast, refusing to be diverted from his path toward justice. At age eighty, he still tirelessly works on behalf of youths and minorities to try to right the mistakes that humanity can’t seem to stop perpetuating.

This seems like a decent time to remark how much I love this video of Obama singing the opening lines of "Let's Stay Together." Everyone's seen it but here it is again:^*

It's not just a good video because everyone loves Al Green, but also seems to mark a general thawing of the anxiety and disappointment surrounding Obama's presidency. It's not just that the Republican primaries have gone further off the deep end than even the most cynical lefty could have imagined (or hoped), it's that Obama seems to have reclaimed a confidence that was feared lost.

This is the kind of moment that cannot be scripted or acted. As he sings, he looks downward shyly. He loves Al Green - who doesn't? When the crowd applauds he looks at once surprised, appreciative, and embarrassed at the raucousness of their response. There's a difference between Obama's real smile and his "picture taken with a politician smile," and his sincerity is intoxicating. He briefly nods his head to the side in deference — a posture he rarely takes in public — to let the crowd know how much he's enjoying their reaction. Then the moment is over. He throws his shoulders back and reclaims his campaign persona, talking trash to his staff, an underrated staple of his stump speeches. Addressing Al Green in the audience: "Don't worry Rev, I can't sing like you, but I just wanted to show my appreciation."

That's the essence of leadership: "I can't do what you do, but I appreciate how well you do it."

^*"Everyone's seen it but here it is again" is more or less my mission statement nowadays.

Fraser Speirs' Thoughts on iBooks

Commercial iBooks textbooks are a marketing head fake. They're the equivalent of carbon fibre buggy whips. iTunes U is the game changer. Put iBooks Author and iTunes U into the hands of great teachers, put iPads in their students hands, put them all in a room together then step back and see what happens. That's the ballgame.

via speirs.org

Fraser Speirs is one of the leading experts on using technology productively in the classroom. This goes beyond buying hardware & providing technical support; it includes writing curriculum, reinforcing basic reading and math skills, and training teachers. I couldn't agree more with his comment about iTunes U - it's much closer to my imagination of "the future of education" than iBooks, which reminds me of the Pat the Bunny app that Lev loves - lots of shiny, but very little meat on the bone.

Also see Matt Jacobs' talk on The Multi-Layered iPad:

Holy Crap

HOLY CRAP. Just look at this chart talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/… #GOPneardeathexperience

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 20, 2012

After following @joshtpm's HOLY CRAP link (I never gave up on Newt, for the record) my eyes were drawn (as always) to the permalink. What I saw was thrilling: holy_crap_8.php. Of course this led to me wonder - what happened to holy_crap_1 to holy_crap_7? I had the tools to find out.

Please allow me to share with you a playlist of TPM's "holy crap" links.

1. November 20, 2008 - Waxman ousts Dingell on Energy & Commerce. I'm surprised this isn't much earlier, but there you go.
2. holy_crap_2.php - lost to the ages. Perhaps it was a TPM Cafe post?
3. January 6, 2010 - Chris Dodd announces his retirement from Congress.
4. February 15, 2010 - Evan Bayh announces his retirement from Congress.
5. June 1, 2010 - Al and Tipper Gore are separating. I have to admit I forgot about this, and it made me a little sad again.
6. October 4, 2011 - Cain takes the lead in several state polls. In hindsight, Cain's run was less incredible considering how crazy the rest of the reds have gone.
7. December 2, 2011 - Cain launches “Women for Cain” in response to accusations of harassment & womanizing. This seems no less incredible than it did then.
8. January 20, 2012 - Newt's (un)favorability.
   

Friend of Hello, TypePad Anil offers a playlist of Barack's Greatest Hits:

BREAKING: Friend of Hello, TypePad Al suggests an index of bamboozles and mentums is in order.

The object in question is a small bronze "coin" -- with a scene of sex on one side and a the Roman numeral XIIII on the other. Assuming that it is genuine (and there are quite a few fakes of these circulating and this one was not actually found in an archaeological context), then it is what archaeologists term a "spintria". This is a Latin word for male prostitute... but it is an entirely modern practice to apply it to these little objects; we haven't got the foggiest clue what the Romans called them... or (despite what you read) what they used them for. Quite a few have been found across the Roman world (there's another on the right).

Fantastic article by Mary Beard about the bronze coin recently discovered that tabloids are calling a "Roman Brothel Token." The reality is unfortunately somewhat less sexy:

More likely, if you ask me (and as the curator at the Museum of London concedes it might be so), is that it is a gaming token, for one of the many Roman board games... whose rules and customs were anyway shot through with sex (the best throw of the Roman dice was called a "Venus throw"). This belonged, in other words, on a board in a Roman bar, not in a brothel.

The trouble is that we just want the Romans to take us into the world of their brothels, and we want vicariously to enjoy their wicked sex lives. Though, in this case, there has been a politically correct, early 21st century twist added to the tale. After ogling at the Romans for a bit, many of the eager journalists (prompted by the Museum of London) have finally chosen to spare half a thought for the victims of the ancient sex industry. Don't forget, insisted the curator (correctly), that many prostitutes would be slaves. "It has resonance with modern-day London because people are still being sold into the sex trade."

The entire post is worth reading, as is Beard's blog about our modern perceptions and assumptions about the "ancient" world.

Election Year Tech & Maps

@erikhinton
erik hinton Guys, I hope you are all ready for 10 months of tweets about reverse proxy caching and maps. #nov6giddyup
Jan 03 via Twitter for iPadFavoriteRetweetReply

The election season is a great driver of web innovation, because so many news organizations rely on these cycles for the survival of their business, and the spiky nature of election traffic & news is among the hardest to design for from both a presentation & infrastructure perspective.

Al Shaw reminds us of thinner. There are a lot of moonshine cache invalidation schemes, but thinner is pretty good. This is the year varnish becomes a part of the core stack formerly known as LAMP.

Mike Migurski designed a solarized stylesheet for Open Street Map tiles (available on github). In addition to being lightweight to render and easy to read on low resolution or small devices (like phones), these styles are beautiful. I'd love to see more people running tilestache instead of Google Maps for location projects. The same news organizations who have been relying on google for traffic and infrastructure are going to be looking for technology independence going forward — and an open maps component is a huge piece of that independence.

Speaking of maps, don't miss Slate's coverage of David Imus' handcrafted map of the US. Imus worked on this seven days a week for two years, examining (and usually adjusting) every text label, outline, and location. I'm not an über map nerd, but the attention to detail is breathtaking, and the improvements are immediately obvious even in the limited detail offered in the article above. You can buy the map on Imus' site.

I'd also like to follow up on my Mixel post from a few weeks ago. Paul Soulellis has decided on 16x24 prints on rag paper for the presentation of his mixes. They'll be up in Denver until Valentine's Day.