Salon & The Unviewable Web

While some sites have put thought into clean, simple, readability, others are going over-the-top bonkers in the opposite direction. Floating banners and footers that obscure text and mess up scrolling. Ads that bounce text and layout around, shifting the content like a crappy online puzzle game while you wait for things to settle enough to start reading, right after the headache and vertigo clear.

Salon had been bad before but their recent redesign makes it even worse. Way to go, Salon design team! Here's a recent article. As if the riot of colors, animations, floating crap, accidental strikeout lines weren't bad enough, notice what's not on the page? That's right, content! An entire content-free page. I have to scroll a full page just to get to any content. And when I do, the floating nonsense screws even that up. Horrible stuff, Salon, truly stupendously awful.

Victoria Park Playgrounds

The new playground in the west half is almost completely open, with even the water features working, and the larger revamped playground in the east half is open as well. Took much longer than it should have, but really nice results.

the big slides are still there

several new climby things

this is... well, I don't know, but it tilts, has screens, and has lots of sand!

more sand, with added digging

cool new park for bmx and skateboard, with hemisphere

Little River Canyon

Alabama is home to the deepest canyon in the eastern half of the USA, Little River Canyon, most of which is a national preserve. It's a surprising and hidden gem of terrain, stretching much of the length of lookout mountain, with waterfalls, rapids, turkeys, trees, snakes, bluffs, boulders, swimming holes, the occasional very happy kayaker. (And no, despite Bear Grylls' comical claims of worry, you will not find any alligators up there). No shortage of challenging terrain but plenty that's accessible as well. Virtually no marked trails - careful with the cliffs. Recently went in search of Grace's High Falls (41m, seasonal waterfall). Found it from the top, but upon shuffling down to the canyon floor and hiking upstream, didn't quite find it again. Lovely hike, though.

iPad, iCloud, and The Multiple ID problem

Coming up on two years with my original iPad. I still love it. Use it daily. I am sorely tempted by the iPad 3, mainly for the fantastic display upgrade, but will have to wait a while.

I only just updated the iPad to iOS5.x. Good upgrade. Nice improvements in mail client, for one. I'd gone to iOS5 on the iPhone a while ago, a big win if for nothing else than the revamped notifications system.

The new iPhoto for iPad looks great. I probably won't get around to trying it, since I'm firmly entrenched in the Lightroom camp. Looking forward to the day Adobe doesn't an integrated iPad Lightroom for me. New iMovie also very interesting. As are the new features with GarageBand, especially collaboration.

iTunes U, though, takes the cake. This predates the new iPad by a while, but I hadn't paid much attention. Phenomenal idea, well executed. This would be incredible even if the MIT OpenCourseware was the only offering. Astonishing to see so much free content. Want to sit in on MIT physics lecture series? Lots to add to my aspirational list of activities for retirement I think.

iCloud? Well, it's great that if I take a photo on my iPhone it automagically ends up on my desktop mac (and will now also do so on my iPad). Other features seem perfectly fine and cloudy. App purchases, music, etc., all syncing across devices quietly and effectively. Great.

What Apple has completely botched, for me, is the ID-handling. I have apple store IDs that predate the iTunes music store and predate the mac.com addresses. Initially I used my yahoo emaill address for the apple store in the US. After that, two things happened, I got a mac.com address and moved abroad. So my non-US apple account is based on my mac.com (or me.com) address, while my US apple account is based on my yahoo address still. I would prefer to use my mac/me address for my iCloud account, but most of my content is from the US account. Apple ID can be changed, unless it's a mac/me account.

So I'm stuck: I can't change my UK Apple account to something other than my mac/me account, apparently using the mac/me address now makes that immutable (I can only add additional addresses). I can't change my US Apple account to use my mac/me account, because that's already being used by my UK account. So I can't merge accounts or even keep two but swap the email addresses, which is pants.

Legalize It

Despite the US Government's war on food, the madness has not yet spread to the UK, were you can still buy raw milk. Good stuff. Got some from Broadway market today (along with some Polish cured pork products, apples, olive oil, garlic stuffed olives, a few slices of cheesecake, ...)

The Muppets

Cute movie. Very sweet. Enjoyed even by the kids.

I'd like to see The Muppet Show back on, but in limited runs. This is an idea taking hold more recently on US cable shows, but too many US shows are locked into old the idea of 20+ shows per year. In the UK no one seems to have any problem with the notion that you do a run of shows that is as long or short as required, then wait a while and maybe put together another.

So my idea for the Muppet Show would be a seasonal run, about 5 episodes year, running from Thanksgiving to New Year's. It would the old format, in the theatre. The show-within-a-show format is pretty adaptable, and fewer episodes would make it more likely to be something to look forward to, would make it easier to book multiple guests per each show, and so on. There's clearly a lot of affection for the muppets out there. Television would be the best vehicle to tap into that. It would likely take until Easter each year to get the theme song out of my head.

Mean Reversion

Neil Steinberg, my favorite columnist, writes a spot-on dismissal of the Oscar "curse", pointing out that for some, the oscar-worthy performance is the abberation, not the norm, but makes a common mistake on the subject of reversion to mean.

"So if you flip a coin and it come up heads five times in a row, while the odds are always 50-50 on your next flip, at some point you’ll likely have a run of tails, since the odds of heads will gravitate toward 50 percent."

Intuitively, and what I think he's implying, we expect that a run of heads now makes it more likely that a run of tails will later occur, as if there's some sort of mandatory balancing act and if we've just used up an allotment of heads there's a vein of tails waiting patiently for us to tap into, keeping our sums tidy as we tunnel into the future. That's not how it works.

If you get five heads in a row, you're no more likely to get a run of five tails than you were before [and that is actually fairly likely to begin with, but that's the subject of randomness]. You are, however, still looking at 50-50 odds. Mean reversion doesn't work by evening things out, it works because the odds don't change, and given a large enough sample, the mean will be as expected. In the example, suppose we start off flipping heads 5 times, then flip 10,000 times more. Suppose we get 5000 heads and 5000 tails, without a single "run" of tails. After 5 flips, we were at 100% heads. After 10,005 flips, we are at just over 50.02% heads. Continue like this for 10 million flips and we are at 50.00005%. Looks like mean reversion, without requiring any special "catching up" on the part of team tails.

In other words, the "reversion" is just averages acting like averages, rather than any cosmic compensation at work. Just like how it's possible for player A to have a better batting average than player B for the first half of the season AND for the second half of the season but have a worse batting average than player B over the whole season.

Velodrome!

The London Olympic Velodrome just finished hosting the final round of the Track Cycling World Cup. This was one of many test events for the London Olympics, held in the run-up to this summer that tests venues as they come online.

Although we live within walking distance of the western edge of the Olympic complex, the site is still very much under construction, so to get to the Velodrome we had to take a bus to the opposite side of the site, in Stratford, walk through the new Westfield shopping centre [yeah, it's tacky that the transit hub and the Olympic site are linked via a shopping mall], enter the site near the aquatics centre, then take a shuttle bus to the velodrome.

The velodrome itself is fantastic. Seats around 6000. It's a 250m track that's getting good reviews from the cyclists, and seems to be very fast. I hadn't thought about it, but the track is kept warm and airflow is well managed, to the point of people manning double doorways for ingress and egress to avoid any errant airflow especially during timed events. It looks great on the outside and in.

Fun crowd and exciting racing. I'd never seen track cycling in person. The quality of competition was outstanding. Everyone wanted track time before the olympics. We didn't manage to get cycling tickets for the olympics, but anyone who did will not be disappointed.

Sir Chris easing around the track in the Individual Sprint quarterfinal. He went on to win gold.

Noises Off

Saw Noises Off in the Old Vic last night. It was brilliant. Pure, undiluted, trousers-dropping silliness executed with awe-inspiring craftmanship and energy. This by the same guy who wrote Copenhagen, a play we saw quite a few years ago and loved, but a different thing altogether. In any case, I didn't expect to laugh as hard as I did, at things such as a bag and box being on stage when they shouldn't have been. "They've *both* not gone!"

It's moving to the west end from March 24th. Heartily recommended.

The Social Network

Finally watched The Social Network the other night. Heartily recommended! Snappy dialogue that's not dumb, fantastic acting all around, and nicely filmed. Just a well-crafted exercise all around. It's fictionalized, stylized, alphabetized. Just enjoy it like a high-budget techie edition of Sports Night or something, rather than expecting it to be a documentary. There are enough facts to hang the structure off of and give it a little extra weight, but veracity is not crucial to its success. It's just a good movie.

I've read some comments along the lines of "I hate facebook so I won't see it". I'm not sure what the relevance of that is to the movie. I hate getting eaten by wolves but I still enjoyed The Grey [it's still not about the wolves].

Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield and Armie Hammer were all outstanding. And Justin Timberlake! His performance was astonishingly good, what a pleasure.

The Liver Test, or, Best Rabbit Ever

A measure of a restaurant for me is if I trust them enough to order the liver. I really like liver, but I'm particular, and it's one of those things I don't bother with cooking at home. As much as I loved Frock's before it closed shop, they overcooked their liver to my chagrin, and that by itself always made me cast a critical eye down the menu, ruling out the dishes that required too much finesse and attention to detail to get right enough to enjoy. Liver is why I'll not return to Bistrotheque. Veal sweetbreads were good, liver was bad. They just whacked a big chunk off a liver and fried it up, skipping the part about carefully trimming and removing any gristle. Which is why I don't bother at home, except on occassion. Which is why I do bother to order at a restaurant. Bistrotheque came through on the veal sweetbreads, but failed so disappointingly on the liver they lost my business, and that was a couple years ago.

Boundary, on the other hand, has never let me down. Went there (Shoreditch) tonight for the first time in nearly a year. Excellent. Native oysters followed by foie gras followed by duck leg confit and the Best Rabbit Ever. Confit is easy to make well at home but I still will order it in restaurants just because I love it. The rabbit, though, exceeded all expectations. Luxuriously tender, with a wasabi crust and served with a mustard sauce. I'm not sure how they did it. The only method I could think of as working that well would be to cook the rabbit sous vide, then finish it with the wasabi crust and a very quick roast. If they did it some other way, I have no idea how. Very impressive in any case. And worked really well with the aligot. Aligot is like a cross between fondue and mashed potatoes. Like an upmarket version of tartiflette, it's roughly on the order of 1/3 cheese and 2/3 potato, with butter and other top-shelf dairy contributors in there somewhere, pureed and blended to a decadent satiny creaminess.

Well, that was nearly it. Of course the St. Emilion au Chocolat was good, but then, of course it would be.

It's Not About The Wolves

I haven't even seen it yet [of course I will, and I will like it, because I'm a guy], but I can tell you The Grey is not about wolves. Predictably, tizzies, frenzies, and lathers are being worked up into. Typical headline about wolf experts unhappy, inaccurate portrayal, etc etc etc. Thank god for midwesterners: "It was a movie." And, from the first article as well, "Rasmussen said she doesn’t worry about wolves, even though she lives in the country where packs run through the yard — but she does keep a close eye on their little dogs."

Jaws is not about sharks
Blues Brothers is not about cop cars
Moon is not about cloning
Total Recall is not about getting your ass to Mars (ok, yes it is)