Catching up is always a Sunday afternoon post. Tomorrow’s plans are different, though, and I have to get rid of these pictures somehow. So follow along with me now …
First, a study in Chick-fil-A bovines … This guy may just barely fit under the name Bos primigenius.
This one, meanwhile, is much larger, and of course fits the mental image Chick-fil-A has given us of barely literate dairy cattle advocating that you should really leave their kind alone and, instead, enjoy delicious poultry products. This one will have some explaining to do when all the other Holsteins realize that’s a leather glove.
In stop and go traffic, more stop than go, I ran across this piece of heavy machinery. I think it might actually be a transformer. See the guy on the left? He struck a pose for me. I did not take a picture of that.
I finally got a halfway decent shot of the bridge with no road in it. I can now move on:
This machine makes bacon, and has no qualms about shooting it into your eyes. Bring your own safety glasses:
Today I did a little 7.75 mile ride and just under a mile of jogging as a brick. All it did was convince me that I’m kidding myself about my training. Tomorrow, we’ll prove it!
I so rarely see cyclists on the road. They’re almost always, always going the other direction. And, without fail, I am struggling up some tiny incline when they go by. They’ll just be breezing along happily and I’m obviously struggling to turn over the pedals. It is uncanny.
I think I’ve passed maybe four or five cyclists on the road in a casual day’s ride because they are always going the other way. But I saw this guy, and that was pretty great:
Right through this area, recently, my CatEye said I touched 40.5 miles per hour. I can be a little faster through here, I know:
Around midday, on a cool, overcast, windy, rainy day, a spring day that featured a public football practice, thousands of people were crawling over campus. And this was hours before the actual festivities. Auburn folks are ready for some football:
We went to the baseball doubleheader instead. In the first game we listened to the crowd and the audio from the big screen. We could hear a tailgating band and the marching band each vying for attention. It was a wonderful day to be on campus with friends, a group which keeps growing each time we get together.
This guy’s been in the group for a long while. He was born just after the Georgia game two years ago. (His mom was at the tailgate right at her due date. Where were you?) He’s a cool dude:
A year ago, now, some of us were listening to scanners in Boston again. This is what we heard:
I loved that one call: “America.”
cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on My ride: It felt like pneumonia without the pain 31 Mar 14
Took this while I was panting and wheezing and considering the alternative hobbies life might enjoy. I’d just gotten off my bike, the first exercise I’d had in a week since I couldn’t shake my illness and the first time I’d been on the bike for two weeks for other shameful reasons.
I’d decided late this evening that the weather was nice. It was a beautiful day. And I allowed myself to ignore my coughs and listening as I rationalized how I felt so much better, really. And I did, on the sofa, or in a chair or on the bed. I even felt good pedaling off my little neighborhood street, and then over the freeway and through the old neighborhood and all of that was fine. Right up until the first little hill, where I realized I couldn’t take any breath into my lungs.
It felt a lot like pneumonia, but without the pain, so at least there is that.
My route was going to be a simple one. A few weeks ago I saw a guy riding up the ramps of one of the parking decks and I thought That’d be fun. So I laid out a little route to get two of the parking decks. I figured this would be about six miles all told, just enough to stretch my legs and get the parking decks off my mind.
So I did the one and then the other and I thought, There are those other three parking decks … so then I had to do those. Four of them were great fun. The fifth one, the oldest one, was a bit narrow and sketchy. It has a nice view of … rooftops, though. So I sat up there and had a banana and smelled the smell of the barbecue coming from next door and looked out over the air conditioning units and satellite receivers of downtown and feeling a little like Batman, which is to say self-conscious in spandex.
About that time The Yankee texted me that she was going for a ride, so I descended the parking deck, got back on the road and had a woman almost pick a fight with me because she doesn’t understand traffic laws or how she almost hit me. She had her window down, so she heard my reaction to all of this. Anyway, I went back through another old neighborhood, by one of the city parks and up a little hill where I met the local riding group coming from the other direction. So I felt the need to make a good showing for them, standing up out of the saddle and smiling when I really wanted to be panting and moving listlessly. My legs felt OK, but it seems my lungs aren’t as over being sick as I’d like them to be.
Down another two hills and then onto the back of the local time trial route. On one end I passed my beautiful bride smiling and riding the other direction, “I know you!” she said.
So I turned around to follow her, but she was off like a rocket. Took me forever to catch her, and that was just before she got back home. Somehow my two parking deck, six-mile-or-so adventure turned into a nice 20 mile meandering course. Watching the sunset I wasn’t sure how I felt about any of it. I told her that I regretted the ride, which seemed the wrong thing to say after a bit. I’ve only regretted one ride, and that was just the abrupt and unexpected end of that particular ride, really. I didn’t regret today’s ride, just how I felt on it, and that it had been two weeks since I’d been in the saddle.
Here’s what I did this month. The red is on the bike, as you can see. The dark blue is obviously running and the light blue is in the pool. It is another month without enough work, which is now not only disappointing to say, but even more so when I realize I’ve said that for several months in a row. On the other hand, I did do these things …
Everyone seemed OK. The troopers were there. We had just a slight slowdown and I met no ambulances coming the other direction for the rest of my drive. Even still, you see these small accidents and know that these people just had their week ruined. And on a Monday morning, too. But at least everyone is OK.
And now, to change the subject, here’s another hit from Kid President:
It is probably selfish to say, but I hope that guy never changes.
In class today we talked about mobile marketing. This is the part of the conversation where students always find the line dividing acceptable and creepy. Say you’re walking down the street and your phone buzzes, “Hey! We noticed you’re just a block away from Starbucks. Couldn’t you go for a nice coffee and muffin? Here’s a coupon!”
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, traveling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.
In November, the Macy’s department store chain began testing a product called ShopBeacon at stores in San Francisco’s Union Square and New York’s Herald Square.
The app, created by Shopkick Inc. of Redwood City, Calif., enables a merchant to offer discounts on specific products that a customer has expressed interest in or, perhaps, has lingered near, prodding him or her to buy.
“We can find out where you are standing and how long you’ve been standing in front of the Michael Kors handbag and if you haven’t purchased,” Macy’s Chief Executive Terry Lundgren said at an analysts conference in November. “And if you haven’t, I’ll send you a little note to give you encouragement to do so.”
And that’s the new world in which we shop. Or does something like this just push you further away from brick and mortar stores?
I didn’t mention it but I did have a nice, brief bike ride yesterday evening. I got in a quick 14 miles, wherein I managed to have two thoughts. The first was that I haven’t been riding my bike enough. I knew this because I hit too small little uphill segments and pushed my feet down and accelerated and that was a wonderful feeling. The ride was really meant to be the first half of a brick workout, where I would take on a long run. Just as I went back outside, though, it started to rain. And while I enjoy riding in the rain, I don’t much see the need to run in it. But the other thought I was continually having on the bike was “I wanna run.”
I do not know what is happening.
I did not run, however, because of the rain. This evening I swam a mile, 1,750 yards. It even felt pretty good, which doesn’t happen often. Didn’t want to run, though!
Things to read … because I still don’t want to run.
“It actually started with me reading an article by Steven Levy in Wired about algorithms and news content — ‘Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” Christer Clerwall tells Wired.co.uk. “My first thought was ‘maybe it doesn’t have to be better — how about ‘a good enough story’?” Sadly, Wired may turn out to be the architect of its own destruction. Because Clerwall, an assistant professor of media and communications at Sweden’s Karlstad University, has found the answer to this question. And it’s yes.
This is the second small study I’ve seen like this. Both have to do with sports copy, which probably means something. What may be promising, however, is that as the algorithms improve this could free up writers from the more basic stories and allow for better storytelling.
Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, was jolted awake at 6:25 a.m. on Monday by an earthquake. He rolled out of bed and went straight to his computer, where he found a brief story about the quake already written and waiting in the system. He glanced over the text and hit “publish.” And that’s how the LAT became the first media outlet to report on this morning’s temblor. “I think we had it up within three minutes,” Schwencke told me.
If that sounds faster than humanly possible, it probably is. While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.
The copy, which you can read in that story, was basic, to the point, and not perfect regarding style, but it shared the pertinent information, apparently within three minutes. What happened afterward was telling. ” Quakebot’s post had been updated 71 times by human writers and editors, turning it from the squib above into this in-depth, front-page story.”
This first story, the early morning Quakebot copy, is a first step. It didn’t save the day, or save even a big part of a reporter’s day, but it is the sign of a utility to come, or, rather, a tool that is already here.
Daily time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the U.S. for the first time, according a newly-released 2014 AdReaction study from Millward Brown.
Americans now spend 151 minutes per day on smartphones, next to 147 in front of TVs. But the numbers are even greater elsewhere.
“2013 was the first year for multi-channel video industry losses, but the modest losses represent only about 0.1% of all subscribers,” said Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “While the overall market remains fairly flat, further share-shifting has taken place. Cable providers now have a 52% share of the top multi-channel video subscribers in the US, compared to a 58% share three years ago.”
We are at something of a hinge point in entertainment history.
The three news reports followed the same format: Television reporters walked into schools with hidden cameras, under the premise of testing the security measures. Each time, the anchors provided a sobering assessment of the findings.
[…]
Critics say these kinds of undercover efforts do not provide an accurate portrait of school safety, and question whether they serve any public good. Some journalists question whether the news organizations become too much a part of the story, and whether it is dangerous for reporters to wander into schools now that students and staff are often on heightened alert.
