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things to read

Live, from Columbus

I am wearing this shirt today, because where else can I wear a triathlon shirt? It would seem the only place to do it is at another triathlon. Otherwise, this is just a t-shirt with too many weird things going on.

Plus, if you take the time to read it, you might notice the date on the back of the shirt, which indicates this race was last weekend. This might, I thought, look impressive to people preparing for this weekend’s triathlon.

“This guy is doing two in a row? He’s a monster!”

Or some such.

One person did notice, a race referee. We agreed last weekend’s race needed more shade. When the guy in stripes — and the triathlon refs wear stripes — says you need more shade, you need more shade.

This shirt is a “technical shirt” which means … as I look at the tag … it is 100 percent polyester. So that period of fashion was no event horizon after all. This is important to learn.

We are in neighboring Columbus, preparing for tomorrow’s race. And by preparing I mean signing in, discovering one Italian restaurant is closed, waiting for 10 minutes at another despite counting nine open tables, getting to our hotel, getting a room, changing rooms and finally settling in for a quiet, early evening.

I saw this sign today:

Sound advice: Trust in the Lord and, for your prosaic braking needs, call Midas.

Anyway, the finish of tomorrow morning’s race will be streamed online. Check it out, if you’re interested. We should be coming across around 8:30 Eastern.

Things to read … no matter your timezone.

Here are three stories on Malaysian Flight 17 worth your time:

AIDS conference says 100 researchers may have been on flight MH17

This Is What The Victims Of Flight 17 Did For AIDS Research

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 And The Future Of The Conflict In Ukraine

That last link discusses a wide swath of policy issues.

Here’s a story overcome by MH17 coverage: Islamic extremists kill 270 in attack on a gas field in central Syria, report says

Now we’re just piling onto Detroit. But the piece is worth a read. If You Don’t Pay Your Bills, You Don’t Get Stuff

Maybe you saw this one: Police: Fla. father beats accused child abuser

He is nice and knocked out on the floor for you,” the father told the 911 dispatcher. “I drug him out to the living room.”

[…]

The father has not been charged with any crime.

“Dad was acting like a dad. I don’t see anything we should charge the dad with,” Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood said.

Closer to home:

Jobless rate up in Birmingham, but unchanged in Alabama

Shakalaka, Huntsville’s new all-ages extreme trampoline park, ‘turns you into a kid again’

Updated USGS earthquake risk areas include Alabama, Mississippi

When you can’t fall asleep, a potential new feature sharing the material I find when I’m wide awake too late in the evening. Our first entry is this intriguing Coke promo:

And then I stumbled across this truly impressive piece on football Hall of Famer Y.A. Tittle. It is human and intimate and vulnerable and it doesn’t seem the least bit exploitative. It is tremendous story telling:

On a December morning, he’s sitting in his usual spot on his couch, flipping through a photo album. His breathing is labored. There is fluid in his lungs. Waistline aside, Tittle doesn’t look much different now than he did in his playing days: bald head, high cheekbones, blue eyes that glow from deep sockets, ears that have yet to be grown into. His skin is raw and flaky, and when he scratches a patch on his head, a familiar line of blood sometimes trickles down. He shares his large house with his full-time helper, a saint of a woman named Anna. His daughter, Dianne de Laet, sits nearest him, leaning in as he touches each yellowed picture.

“That’s at Marshall High School!” Y.A. says, pointing to a shot of himself in a football uniform worn long ago, long sleeves and a leather helmet. That takes Y.A. back to his tiny hometown of Marshall, Texas, near the Louisiana border. Friday nights in the town square, where “I’d neck with a girl, if I was lucky.” Brown pig sandwiches at Neely’s barbecue. And football, always football. In 1943, he says, Marshall High traveled 200 miles to play Waco, ranked second in the state. The Mavericks pulled off the upset, and on the couch he recites the beginning of the newspaper story: “From the piney woods of East Texas came the challenging roar of the Marshall Mavericks, led by a tall, lanky redhead with a magical name: Yelberton Abraham Tittle.”

He is slightly embarrassed as he utters his full name. As a teenager he reduced it to initials, and it later became legend. Remembering his Texas days seems to bring a youthful spirit out of him, which is why Dianne gave him this album today. But then he flips to a photo of himself during his college days at Louisiana State, and something slips. “Where did you get these pictures?” he says to Dianne. “I haven’t seen them.”

It was good enough to read twice.

And now, truly late into the evening, I should be sleeping, but I’m looking for stories by or about one of my favorite writers, Willie Morris. Here’s a 1982 profile that appeared in a newspaper. It is hard to imagine so much time being spent on a story today, but the read is worth it.

Here are the first three paragraphs to a Texas Monthly profile on Morris that make you want a subscription to Texas Monthly (which would be a good subscription to hold):

Everybody thought they knew him. Few truly did. Willie Weaks Morris was a man of many parts. Some did not mesh with the others. The private Willie Morris—the brooder, the loner, the man who could lose himself in sleep because wakefulness was too painful, the man who called his telephone an instrument of torture and hid it in the refrigerator to muffle its rings, the man who at bottom was as stubborn as any mule William Faulkner ever owned, the man who became known, in plain ugly language, as the town drunk—well, that contentious and complex fellow is a Willie Morris his adoring public never met. You haven’t read about that fellow either.

No way to rhyme that private, haunted, sometimes terribly difficult soul with the public Willie Morris of legend: the glad-hander and shoulder hugger, the good ol’ boy from Mississippi, the incomparable raconteur of the Texas saloon or the New York salon, the literary star whose reputation soared at the daily paper of the University of Texas and later at the Texas Observer. In Austin he learned the skills that made him not only near-perfect in matching writer to subject but also so adroit an editor that writers felt chagrin that they hadn’t written it that way.

Willie’s emotions were as primitive and as changeable as the weather. He was the worst I ever saw at hiding his true feelings; he had little talent for the duplicities or wicked dirkings of office politics—a trait that ultimately cost him the job he once loved above all. We drank together, laughed together, cried together, worked as editor to writer and friend to friend. We had a foolish drunken fistfight in 1972 over which of us owned the affections of a certain fickle woman; it turned out that neither of us did. I thank such gods as be that we were fast friends when Willie Morris died suddenly on August 2, 1999, or otherwise I could not have borne it. I will miss the man so long as I have breath.

That’s before the essay even begins.

And today, from Weird Al:

Don’t forget! You can see the finish of tomorrow morning’s race thanks to the nice people at WRBL. We should be coming across around 8:30 Eastern.

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17
Jul 14

Doubly handy

This handy list is making the rounds today, boasting of 57 different views of the Kick Six. I settled in to watch them all, but realized it was over two hours long. And it didn’t include this one, which is my favorite, not just because I made it:

Mixing the band’s reaction — a brilliant, brilliant, video unto itself — with the actual play was a bit inspired, if I do so say myself. I think about how the stadium felt, how everyone reacted and remain so impressed by how the band pulled it together and did their job when everyone about them was losing their heads. It was an impressive performance.

Sadly, you couldn’t hear them in the stadium just then. It was so very, very loud.

We’re going to watch that game again soon, come watch it with us.

A friend of ours wrote this about that game, and it is worth a read if you like football or romance:

I would later ask why. Why that night? What changed? I had been ready for a while but had been patient. She told me plain and simply that as she watched the Kick Six, as she hugged and celebrated with her friend that had attended the game with her, that something was missing. She told me she wished that I had been there with her to celebrate that unforgettable moment. That same feeling I was feeling less than 50 yards away.

Everything was incredible, everything was unbelievable, but something was missing. That something was one another. Now, we had finally found one another and we were never going to let go.

That’s not coincidence.

Sounds like that one has a happy ending, doesn’t it?

Put in a few minutes on the bike this evening, my last ride before the weekend. I spun my feet in tiny circles just long enough to start sweating. And I did that just as the sun started to hide behind the trees. An already mild day, with the breeze of an easy ride blowing into me, felt positively coolish. That’s a strange sensation for July in Alabama.

Never question mild weather. I was going to say here, but that philosophy probably applies everywhere. You start to doubt what is going on, or fundamentally disagree with the disproportionate amounts of whatever you are having relative to the seasons and the barometer will hear about it. Next thing you know there are arctic winds in the summer or heat blisters in February.

Just enjoy the mild weather, and compliment the green things for how green they are. Maybe it’ll all stick around for a bit longer that way.

I learned this evening that I can’t eat Jelly Belly on my bike. The company sponsors a bike team and some of their products are supposed to be halfway decent for exercise energy levels and provide a little bit of fuel in a nice, self-contained package.

I received some as a stocking stuff from my mother-in-law this year and I’ve been waiting to give them a try. I stuffed them in my jersey pocket and set out for the ride, got halfway through it, reached back, wrestled with opening the thing for an entire downhill stretch and finally was able to coax out them out one at a time over about four miles.

Sitting down, I’d eat jelly beans that way, and with a nod to some completely arbitrary color scheme. On the bike, just give me the food. But they were all jammed up in the packaging. Obviously that’s not good when the point should be a quick snack for nourishment. So, delicious, but not practical for me.

Things to read … because reading is always practical.

Air Force research: How to use social media to control people like drones:

Using Graph theory, Dixon and his fellow researchers created a model to find the mathematics behind how much influence a social media “leader” needs in order to exert power and shift behavior. Dixon’s research, like many of the DARPA studies, did not perform real-world research to confirm findings—it was all simulation. And that’s a tripping point for taking this work further, one that Cornell Social Media Lab researchers hurdled with Facebook, creating an outcry in the process.

“The problem is, how do you perform a closed loop experiment? That’s something DARPA has struggled with,” said Dixon.

To that end, the SMISC program has pushed for experimental environments that use “closed” social networks. On the DARPA project page, the SMISC project team wrote, “SMISC researchers will create a closed and controlled environment where large amounts of data are collected, with experiments performed in support of development and testing. One example of such an environment might be a closed social media network of 2,000 to 5,000 people who have agreed to conduct social media-based activities in this network and agree to participate in required data collection and experiments. This network might be formed within a single organization, or span several. Another example might be a role-player game where use of social media is central to that game and where players have again agreed to participate in data collection and experiments.”

So, the more “thought leaders” you have, the better.

I suppose that sentence works in a great many contexts.

About two-in-five (41%) of U.S. households had only wireless phones in the second half of 2013, according to a report released today by the National Center for Health Statistics. The center, the statistical arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimated that 39.1% of adults and 47.1% of children lived in wireless-only households.

The share of wireless-only households was 2.8 percentage points higher than the same period in 2012. That’s slower than in previous years. In 2010, the wireless-only share grew by 5.2 percentage points; 4.3 percentage points in 2011; and 4.2 percentage points in 2012.

Something to keep in mind when phone surveys are mentioned.

This isn’t a new story, but it is certainly an impressive one. Soldier Keeps Fighting After Being Shot In The Throat By Tracer Round:

As their dawn raid on a Taliban position commenced, Mononey and another machine gunner were positioned on a rooftoop overwatch position to provide support. Suddenly 30 Taliban fighters engaged the patrol from all directions in horseshoe ambush.

Moments into the fight Lance Corporal Moloney was struck in the throat by a tracer round which passed clean through. “It winded me like I’ve never been winded. I was thinking “I’ve been shot in the neck, it’s game over. I figured I had minutes left.”

The bullet passed just behind his windpipe, missing arteries by millimeters.

“When after a couple of minutes I was not dead and I could still talk I started to get a better feeling,” he said. “We had to crack on. They were pushing quite hard so it was either maybe die or definitely die because they would have over-run us.”

And, after being evacuated, he was back in the fight in under a month. So it came to pass that we all earned a great deal of respect for the gritty bravery of the Blues and Royals, a cavalry regiment of the British Army.

And today is, tragically, an important day to trot out the short version of the Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook, which is distilled down in to nine excellent points. I’d add “Wait, just a moment” which is a corollary to the Reporter’s rule of “Verify” and is most closely related to rules 1, 3, 7 and 9 in that excellent list.

Would that such a thing wasn’t necessary, but good that we have a way of sharing the information it contains.

Finally, Weird Al gets handy:

I have a feeling this one is going to stick around awhile.

cycling / I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / journalism / links / music / photo / running / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
16
Jul 14

The day I biked to the track to run

My run is slow. So slow, in fact, that I can tell when it is even slower. So slow, in fact, that it is impossible for me to go out too fast. Would that I could.

But, hey, my next run is over a flat downtown course. So, today, I decided to run on the flattest terrain I could find, at the old Wilbur Hutsell Track. In school I watched Olympians and record holders there, putting their athletic potential on display. It has never made me any faster. But, I noticed today, if I run on a flat course I can drop a few seconds off of my neighborhood pace.

Just to insure I am that guy I rode my bike to the track.

So I rode about eight miles. I would have ridden more — but there were dinner plans — and ran three miles. Maybe I’ll get in one more run and ride before the race this weekend.

I was listening to music as I ran. Here is the obligatory “Where were you when ‘Party in the USA’ came on?” shot, the east side of the track:

I have to add miles back into my legs. I need to run more miles, too. I recently read the relationship should be about 80/20 cycling to running. And I need to swim, a lot. The art, science, skill, talent and philosophy of triathlons, I’ve decided, is balancing the training and maximizing your minimums.

If you figure out what all that means, please let me know.

Things to read … because reading shows us what we need to know.

Technology journalists are facing extinction:

(W)hile my personal capacity to tell technology stories in the past year has diversified, I’ve noticed something: my beat is rapidly disappearing.

We don’t need someone “watching the internet” during elections anymore, that’s clear. But we’re also now approaching a point where the most pressing — and let’s face it, interesting — technology stories shouldn’t be thought of as technology stories at all.

That is an essay, really, about the ubiquity of the web and the blurring of specialization. That the author is still thinking in terms of “beats” is the first step to fixing the problem. Atomize the thing is important. Developing a contextual curation is important, and that will come from those with a background and depth of understanding, or as Steven Rosenbaum calls it, the Second Law of the Curation Economy. So if you are on a tech beat and feeling marginalized, figure out how you can flex your muscle in a new light.

Citing a story about a bar brawl that led to jail, and, now, the new EU’s rule on search engine forgetfulness, the editor of the Bolton News offers up the Streisand Effect. Bolton News story ‘erased’ from Google search results because of EU ruling:

(I)t is a completely pointless exercise. Those who ask for these articles to be removed simply invite more publicity on themselves.

This was an extremely serious court case, which merited a front page when we ran it back in 2010.

To have this disappear from Google searches is frankly ridiculous, which is why I feel it’s so important to highlight this issue.

Won’t it be interesting when the EU’s media outlets start pointing out content from which Google (Bing, Yahoo! et al) is removing their links? The story still exists online. The removal becomes a story — hence the Streisand Effect — and ultimately it becomes a badge of honor. There comes a day when the Bolton News proudly shows off all of those stories, they linked to this original one twice in one story, because they stand behind their news judgment. Some other site will then come along and become a clearinghouse for stories that Google (Bing, Yahoo! et al) can’t link anymore.

And that’s how the League of Shadows is brought into the light.

And four quick links:

The newspaper crisis, by the numbers

Essay: Hey, Publishers: Stop fooling us, and yourselves

Apple Teams Up With IBM For Huge, Expansive Enterprise Push

Fed reports modest economic expansion for South region

There’s more on Twitter, and more here tomorrow.

Weird Al likes foil (foil). This is a fine sendup. And have you noticed these are all coming from different places? Interesting.

cycling / I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / running / things to read / Tuesday / Tumblr / World Cup — Comments Off
15
Jul 14

Tuesday’s thousand words

We’re in something of a mild stretch of weather. Not too far north temperatures are 10 to 20 degrees below average. At least, for a brief time, our sky looked like this:

The high today was 88 and it was mostly cloudy. I rode a few miles, just down through the back of the neighborhood and then out and up over the top of it. Of course it was raining by then. The plan was to use my legs a little bit before running a 5K through the neighborhood. After an Olympic-distance triathlon last weekend I get to simultaneously rest and taper for a sprint triathlon this coming weekend.

A real triathlete would probably find no problem with that schedule. I’m trying to figure out how to not work (rest is an important part of training) and train (because there’s clearly a lot for me to do) especially since I need improvement (a lot of improvement).

Things to read … because reading always brings improvement.

Two World Cup stories, to wrap up the mega-event. North Korea Is Telling Its Citizens That Their Team Is In The World Cup Final:

The report says North Korea’s brave side crushed Japan 7-0, USA 4-0 and China 2-0 in the group stages, before going on to reach the final… against Portugal.

I think the scores against that fictional group indicate a lot about North Korea’s geopolitics, too.

I wonder how many times North Korea has won the World Cup in their propaganda.

Dutch beat Brazil to claim bronze:

There was no lap of honour for the hosts as they trudged off down the tunnel with their heads bowed in shame.

Fragile in the back, runs that couldn’t produce from the middle and when they lost Neymar they lost their entire offense. They simply weren’t a good side, but they deserved better than they got from their crowd.

Here are two versions of a big local story: GE Aviation selects Auburn for $50 million 3D printing facility and GE Aviation in Auburn: Details on the new manufacturing project, incentives and how to apply for jobs. It is described as a first-of-its-kind facility. The plant now has 70 employees and should have 300 by the end of the decade.

Two more things about the Renaissance Man Triathlon: Husband and wife coordinate triathlon in Florence and some advice I received, in the comments.

A few other quick stories for varied interest:

New @congressedits Twitter Account Tracks Anonymous Wikipedia Updates

New Cosby show could debut as soon as next summer

Research: Human friendships based on genetic similarities beyond the superficial

Sydney Cromwell, the new editor of The Samford Crimson got an opinion piece published in Editor & Publisher. We’re excited for her for this and plenty of other reasons. She’s a talented student, strong young journalist and she’ll be a great editor, too.

Here’s a timeline for word nerds. “Language evolves”: The AP Stylebook during the last 30 years. Some of the changes are better than others, of course.

We knew this was coming: Sports Illustrated’s ‘Dirty Game’ articles spark false-light lawsuit.

This may be one of the best reads of the week: Retargeting Is Flawed; the Future Is Pretargeting:

There is no time in my life I am less likely to buy some white pants, a toaster or a ﬂight to Los Angeles than after I’ve just bought these items, yet that’s precisely the time I see ads for these products or services.

These ghostly images stalk our internet journeys like shadows. While ineffective, these ads come to us by some of the most advanced technology there is. By some measures, they are the most appropriate ads to serve us; they can be the most noticeable, but they are also the most pointless.

The subhead reads “The future lies in targeting based on what we’re about to do, not what we’ve just done.” That’s very true. If you look at retailers, and some of the more forward-thinking online locales like Amazon, you’ll see the solutions coming in algorithms based on your habits, locale, where you are in the store, what you’ve looked at or purchased. It is based on your history, and trying to peer you up with other previous customers. Algorithms, by their very nature, have to improve, and the user experience will improve with it.

There’s a great chart in this story which deserves a careful examination: Which Types of Ads Do College Students Pay Attention to?

Our parents were all felons. Remember when your mom or dad told you to go outside and get lost? North Augusta Mother Charged With Unlawful Conduct Towards A Child:

A North Augusta mother is in jail after witnesses say she left her nine-year-old daughter at a nearby park, for hours at a time, more than once.

The mother, Debra Harrell has been booked for unlawful conduct towards a child.

The incident report goes into great detail, even saying the mother confessed to leaving her nine-year-old daughter at a park while she went to work.

The little girl is fine, but some say an area the mother thought was safe could have turned dangerous.

On the basis of “coulda” a child was entered into the South Carolina Department of Social Services. There is a fund raiser in the mom’s name.

So every time I was in the woods, walking in my neighborhood or spending a Friday night at the mall, the movies or the mini-golf place, to say nothing of the hundreds and hundreds of hours at the YMCA were all an opportunity for the authorities to step in. The silliness of this story, and the coverage, suggests there may be some changes in the charges. This is a simple and sad overreach.

I feel safer already: TSA Agent Stops Reporter Because He Didn’t Know Washington D.C. Is Part Of The United States.

I recently published three pictures on Tumblr that I haven’t yet mentioned on the site. You can find them here, here and here.

Today’s Weird Al is a catchy little ditty, guaranteed to make word nerds swoon:

cycling / family / Friday / history / I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / running / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
11
Jul 14

Scene chewing

Today I changed a doorknob. Four screws out, the new hardware in place and four more screws to install it.

I was listening to Pandora at the time. It took less than two songs, and that was because one of the screws was stripped.

But that wasn’t even the height of my industriousness today. I also built one of those shoe racks that you hang over a closet door and immediately regret having purchased! There’s just no end to my usefulness, it seems.

The door knob was on one of the houses that my great-grandfather built, let’s say, 60 years ago.

Here he is, the older gentleman:

He built three on some of his property for rental income. They’ve all stayed in the family over the years. A few years ago I sanded down door frames in one of the houses and went through all those decades of paint. It was a smooth glimpse of archeology.

At the time I wrote:

And suddenly I’ve found myself kneeling in the dust of the place, sanding smooth at least six layers of paint, peeling away the canvas of perhaps a dozen lives or more, letting that old lumber breathe again for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.

Sometimes I overwrite.

I walked around the side of that little rental and saw this, and wondered much the same thing as I did about the paint: Did he hang this?

That’s a small question that’ll never be answered. Who would remember? Who is left to know? Who would pay attention to the details of when a screen door went in? And is that the original, or something put up during the Reagan years?

I noodled up and down the road for five miles and then jogged one, the last effort before the Sunday race. We’ll see how much I come to regret that.

Usually, by this time, I am very much aware of how unprepared I am for the thing. This time I am choosing to not consciously acknowledge how unprepared I am.

Because, you know, I am.

Played with my grandparents’ dog:

She’s a smart one.

Things to read … so you can be smart, too.

There’s a super moon tomorrow night. Pretty large tonight, too.

US GIVEN HEADS UP ABOUT NEWSPAPER DATA DESTRUCTION:

In a statement to the AP, the Guardian said it was disappointed to learn that “cross-Atlantic conversations were taking place at the very highest levels of government ahead of the bizarre destruction of journalistic material that took place in the Guardian’s basement last July.”

“What’s perhaps most concerning is that the disclosure of these emails appears to contradict the White House’s comments about these events last year, when they questioned the appropriateness of the U.K. government’s intervention,” the newspaper said.

The White House said Thursday that the British government had acted on its own in destroying the Guardian drives.

Digital advertising will pass 25% of total ad spending this year:

Global spending on advertising will hit $545.4 billion this year, according to a report from eMarketer, and digital ads will make up more than a quarter of that spending.
Digital ad spending is likely to hit $140.15 billion this year, with $32.71 billion spent on ads for smartphones and tablets.
Growth in total media ad spending should be 5.7 percent this year, eMarketer said, more than twice the growth rate a year ago, which was 2.6 percent.

A properly sanitized report, from ESPN. Pete Carroll headed to Trojans HOF

And when ESPN disappoints you like that, they redeem themselves like this. Marcus Lattimore doesn’t walk alone

The Widespread Effects of Facebook’s Latest Outage:

The lesson, therefore, is a poignant one: When utilizing any third-party tags, particularly ones that have such a big effect on your end users interaction with your site, it’s imperative that you make sure the code is asynchronous with your own to prevent it from affecting your entire site’s performance.

Whoops. Anthrax investigation turns up ‘distressing’ issues at CDC

Stuff on my Tumblr: The mysteries of modern shipping, an examination of modern currency, an old Scout and an older swing.

On Twitter:

Maybe I should just start using this as a sarcasm face … pic.twitter.com/TuOzfR6NO4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) July 12, 2014

Leonard Nimoy had just stolen all of William Shatner’s scene chewing.

I made fun of the Horta episode, with plenty of photos. Check it out.