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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.

family / history / iPhone / Monday / music / photo / site / video — Comments Off
14
Jul 14

Going home, and home again

Woke up this morning, pleased with how I felt considering the race the day before. Packed up the car, loaded the bike and said my goodbyes to grandparents and mother. I drove two towns over to visit my other grandmother.

She lives in between a town that has 1,250 residents and a village that has 281, a place where the arrival of the first 24-hour convenience store heralded the closure of a Piggly Wiggle and the local supermarket.

There’s a McDonalds and a Hardee’s and a Foodland, now, so they’re in high cotton. The barbecue place where I picked up lunch uses the walk up model most often seen at ice cream stands. The menu is littered with delightful typos. The town library, which looks like a bank, is closed on Sundays and Mondays. But they’ve expanded their Wednesday hours, where you can now get a book until 5 p.m. All of this isn’t bad for a literal one stoplight town.

Fishing and being between here-and-there are the two main calling cards of the community, which is growing. A few more storefronts popped up last year, and there are 51 more people in the town than at the turn of the century.

At the second largest intersection in town — a block from the largest, which is really just the U.S. highway that runs through the area — there is an old Coke sign on the side of a building. When it had faded beyond recognition they re-painted it. They displayed the same old Christmas decorations for at least 25 years, and they were old when I first saw them as a child. Hanging on to history is important here. I suppose that is why most of the local websites haven’t changed in years.

Just down the street from that second intersection is a four-gravestone cemetery with this marker:

I found that in 2010. Andrews volunteered in 1862, at the age of 69. He was a pensioner from the War of 1812 when he signed on to ride for the CSA. There are some arguments, apparently, that he would have been the oldest soldier in the Confederacy. His captain, John H. Lester, would remember him in 1921 in a publication called Confederate Veteran:

He was discharged in 1863, in his seventy-first year, on account of old age, against his very earnest protest; in fact, he was very angry when informed that I had an order to discharge him. I appointed him fifth sergeant of my company and favored him while in the army in every way consistent with my duty. He was a neighbor and friend of my great-grandfather, Henry Lester, in Virginia.

The local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is named in his honor. One day I’ll meet one of those ladies and find out what they know about Andrews. The only other thing I know about him is that he was a grocer.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if he was behind that old, local supermarket?

Anyway, down the side road, beyond the place where we once ran out of gas and all the familiar old houses and the new sports fields and through a miniature subdivision that sprouted from a fallow field. We’re back on roads that just have county numbers now, in a place that, until recently, still used “rural route” on their mail until they thought being a bit more precise might be a useful thing in case of emergency.

Finally to the road that my grandmother lives on, next to the house that her parents built, where her son lives. She’s surrounded by pastureland and woods and a babbling little creek, idyllic places where I spent so much time as a child.

We had lunch and chatted and watched a bit of television. She caught me up on family health and pictures of people’s kids. There’s always a medical update or a studio portrait to see.

Drove home, in time for the neighborhood potluck. Tonight’s theme was country cooking, guaranteeing I would overeat, know it at the time, and not regret it at all. All of those things came true.

Oh, yes, these. There’s a new interchange coming that will serve as a southern bypass around Montgomery, a city that already has a bypass. I have to go under them every so often and am interested in the progress. You look up through the thing when it is just framework and imagine, “One day, there’ll be cars and trucks there.”

This phase, which started in 2011, was originally slated to be completed this year. That seems unlikely at this point. The entire project is estimated at a cost of $500 million and a completion goal of 2022. If you’ve ever seen a highway project, you’re guessing over and after.

And if you think that is plywood, let’s just all assume it is a trick of the light. We’ll also let someone else be the first people to drive over it.

Lastly, Weird Al Yankovic is releasing a video a day for the next week in what is surely the most brilliant marketing move we’ll see from the music industry this year. Here’s his first:

journalism / links / music / things to read / Tuesday / video / World Cup — Comments Off
1
Jul 14

Tim Howard saved this blog

In honor of America, and the U.S. Men’s National Team:

Here’s the team’s hype video:

And, this, easily, is one of the most amazing pre-game packages you’ve ever seen:

If you find a better one, let me know.

The game was revealing and frustrating and pretty much what we expected. Tim Howard was nothing short of impeccable, Belgium was fulfilling their destiny. The U.S. never really played to their potential. The defense still has holes. We lost another starter to another hamstring. And despite all of that it fell to an agonizingly close piece of physics, the bend of an ankle, the arc of one ball and a great, great spirit. The U.S. played hard, even when they weren’t playing well. If the young members of this team improves, and the work that’s going into the larger program nationwide pans out, there are big things ahead. And they’ll play like it.

Tim Howard, briefly, was the Secretary of Defense. He was a lot of things today, becoming the newest and best meme of the day — since that’s the way we talk to one another now, this is worth noting. He was surely impressive, and he deserved a better defense in front of him.

Things to read … because you deserve to have great things to read.

Just the links, because the links should be good enough today.

BBC makes its training resources free to the public in 11 languages

The headline isn’t even the most damning thing about this story. I-Team: Acton Vet Finally Gets VA Doctor’s Appointment – 2 Years After He Died

I’ll have mine to go … 3D Printed Organs Coming Soon

adventures / music / video / weekend — Comments Off
5
Apr 14

New Orleans videos

Another busy day of conferencing. I chaired a panel that included papers on President Johnson’s 1965 Howard University commencement address, President Obama’s commitment to women, Rep. George Henry White’s farewell address to Congress.

I listened to other panels, including a brilliant paper The Yankee did. Later I listened as she critiqued a paper by the man who was our master’s advisor. As I said at the time, it would have been awkward if he weren’t so cool.

At the evening’s reception there was a buffet of beignets. They weren’t the best you’ve ever had, but they were beignets in a buffet. I had some.

I did a nice 10K, with three eight-minute miles, which hasn’t happened since college or high school. That has never happened at that distance. So, truly, I do not know what is happening. None of this bothered me until my evening walk taking pictures.

Here are a few clips I’ve shot this weekend.

This first one is of a Bananas Foster, made fresh at your table by the nice people at Palace Cafe. I recorded juuuuust in case something happened …

Only fire happened. And an entire table full of tourists recording the thing. Oh, sure, we all said we were doing this to show the kids later, or for social media, or for our websites. That’s what we said. I’m sure a few people were hoping they’d get to yell “Worldstar!”

I asked the escorting officers about the purpose of the festivities. Mardi Gras was long over. Was this a wedding? “Just a parade,” he said tiredly, the voice of a motorcycle cop who has probably done hundreds of these. This group, which was swelling with the addition of passersby as it marched, was just crossing Decatur Avenue.

“Iko Iko” tells the story of a parade collision between two “tribes” of Mardi Gras Indians. The song, under the original title “Jock-A-Mo,” was written in 1953 by James “Sugar Boy” Crawford in New Orleans. The spy boy, a lookout, confronts the flag boy of the other tribe and threatens to set the flag on fire.

Tomorrow we head back home. But there will be pictures to see. I took a lot of pictures and the site may just live on them for the next several days.