jeremy gordon

Ballooning!

2009-10-28T23:09:00.000-07:00

Stop being so evil - an SF muni vignette

2009-09-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

An exciting night for theatrics this evening on the 22 northbound.

"Stop being so evil," said the woman to the driver, "I don't have any money for fare."
"Then get off the bus." The driver was already angry.
"All I've got is a check, and I can't put that in the machine," said the woman, shrugging.
"If you don't pay, you can't ride."
"I'm riding this bus!" the woman points at the floor.
"I'm getting the police."
"That's fiiine -- my family is the police. They know me."

The driver storms off the bus and walks away (hypothetically to hail the law).

"Does anyone have 50 cents?" asks the woman to the bus. The other passengers look around, a few check their pockets. There's no response.

Several minutes go buy. The woman continues to ask for help paying the 50 cent disability fare, but it seems no one is simultaneously carrying change and willing to help. Some of the passengers get frustrated, "I have to get home, she needs to get off the bus." A debate breaks out about whether the disability fare is indeed 50 cents. It is.

Finally a hero emerges from the back of the bus with a whole dollar and delivers it to the woman. The bus breathes a collective sigh.

Several more minutes pass and eventually the driver returns. The pair resume their previous argument. But wait, this time she has the fare! Things should be resolved very quickly. The fare, however, does not emerge from her pocket. Wide-eyed disbelief from the other passengers turns to laughter. How funny! We were all duped!

Another helpful passenger feels this may still be but a misunderstanding, "But you have a dollar. It's in your pocket. You can pay now."

"Does anyone have 50 cents?" the woman reverts to her previous plea. Paying extra fare is not an option.

"You have a dollar?" asks the driver, catching onto what happened during his leave.

"Ohhh NO. You're not taking my last dollar!"

"Her last dollar," chimes in the bus, indicating with eyes and fingers the forgotten hero who frowns and pleads again, "can we just go?"

There's more, of course, but in summary:

money is flung (source: woman, target: fare machine and/or driver)
convenient municipal laws are invented (fares must be placed in the fare machine by the riding party and no one else. Thank you driver.)
charity is repaid (with interest!) to the original hero (source: sympathetic passengers)
the police eventually arrive and remove the woman

In defense, this rider was completely cashless.

Eating WELL in Singapore

2009-09-25T17:05:00.000-07:00

Part III
I am completely impressed with Singapore, and it's not just the food. Well, much of it is the food. After all, the food is incredible. Hainan chicken has been a favorite for a while. Before I knew its name, some coworkers introduced me to this dish at a hopping joint 5 minutes from Mori Tower. But in Singapore, Hainan chicken has reached the level of perfection. We got a chance to try two versions -- the first from a stall in Maxwell's food court, and the second from Golden Mile Thien Kee Steamboat (a Chinese restaurant, not in fact a steamboat). Both were incredible, and very likely stops 1 and 2 next time I find myself in Singapore.

Besides the food, though, I fully appreciated the deeply international feeling one gets from Singapore even during brief stints of exploration. Signage is nearly always quadrilingual (and sometimes nearly philisophical), and it was exciting to hear the diversity of languages mingling on the trains. It's not completely unlike something one might experience on muni, but it seems to me conversations in Cantonese or Spanish (even in the Californian context) are still considered foreign. On the other hand, it almost seems hard to consider any language foreign in a country where four (English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil) rather than one are classified as official. This is, of course, a foreigner's perspective, and a 2-day visitor at that.

Eating WELL in Bali

2009-09-25T00:35:00.000-07:00

Part II
We enjoyed quite a few delicious meals in Bali. Favorites were at Ubud's Cafe Batan Waru (the fried duck and chicken noodle soup) and Ibu Oka (famous for its suckling pig: the picture of which was a bit too intense to post, but the meal itself was certainly a highlight), and the immense seafood feast on the southern side of Jimbaran.

A sweet chili sauce seemed to appear at nearly every meal, and added great flavor without completely overwhelming the dish with spiciness. I'd love to figure out how to make this, but suspect--as with most awesome sauces--that it's more difficult than it looks.

Eating WELL in Saigon

2009-09-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

Part I
It turns out that pho lives both indoors and out, but the rain in Vietnam was light and infrequent enough not to interfere too much with the all important eating. We in fact only had a couple of meals in sit down restaurants in Vietnam -- the good stuff could be found most anywhere, and cost around 2 US dollars. Most impressive, I think, were the bahn mi sandwhiches, made with french bread that tasted just-baked, even after midnight. We never did spot a bakery, however, so the source of this freshness is still a mystery.

Thankfully, pho lives indoors

2009-08-26T01:22:00.001-07:00

The thick fog that descended on Alamo square tonight seemed like a good indicator that our trip far far away was coming at a pretty good time. I sort of liked the idea of a misty kiss farewell--one for the road as we escape, for a bit, to a sunnier part of the world.

Google weather wasted no time adding a dose of reality.

Dogpatch dogs

2009-08-11T19:25:00.001-07:00

My coworkers and I have many times walked past these absurdly fluffy dogs passing their day on 3rd street. The first time I got a glimpse of the mechanism behind this fluffiness, however, was during Allegra's brief introduction to the dogpatch neighborhood.

Man blow-drying dog #1.

Allegra inspecting dog #2 post-blow-dry.

And for the record:

Dogpatch was named for the stray dogs that used to hunt for food among the meatpacking factories, which have since been converted into live-work lofts. (source)

Ah.

Thai sauce algebra

2009-05-03T22:04:00.000-07:00

A waitress at the tenderloin Thai House Express was nice enough to reveal the ingredients of the absurdly delicious spicy green sauce that's served with the house beef. Proportions, however, were not supplied, so clearly some experimentation was in order.

For the sake of:

science
those outside the reach of a late meal at THX, and
the pride of discovery

I'm posting the results for popular enjoyment.
I'm still trying to figure out the morality of reverse recipe engineering, especially from such a beloved restaurant. But for now:

Ingredients:
Cilantro (all of the above, 1/2 a grocery store bunch?)
Chopped garlic (2 cloves)
Honey/Sugar (2 Tbsp)
Fish sauce (3/4 - 1 tsp)
Lime juice (3 small limes ~ 1/4 cup)
Rice vinegar (2 Tbsp)
1/2 - 3/4 of a medium-sized jalapeno

Instructions:
Mix sugar/honey with liquid ingredients, and combine all in food processor until it looks approximately like below.

We'll need to do some side-by-side testing to evaluate the match, but the final iteration was ultra-flavorful and definitely reminiscent of the in-house flavor.

Please note that there is no substitute for the tenderloin experience (let alone the rest of the menu, yum).

Inaugural waffling

2009-04-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

First use of the new waffle iron -- these were delicious. Note the powdered sugar flakes captured mid-fall. Thanks Allegra! Can't wait for moffles.

Hunting and gathering

2009-04-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

There is nothing better than jiaozi

2009-03-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

My trip to San Diego included a lesson on how to fill, wrap and boil the delicious and culinarily intimidating pouches that are Chinese dumplings. Actually, it was my first time eating these outside of a Chinese restaurant, and both the making and the eating were extremely enjoyable.

The chosen variety was filled with pork and cabbage.

I took copious notes on the process, but I'm guessing that my first solo attempt will be quite humbling.

Though my Nikon is probably now being enjoyed by a lucky craigslist bargain-hunter, my phone did a semi-acceptable job of capturing some of the action.

Roll, chop, roll, chop, flatten, rotate, flatten, rotate.

Fill, pinch, boil, cool, boil, cool, boil, cool.

In addition to dumplings, San Diego had a lot to offer. Notably, at Balboa park, one of the tastiest ice cream bars I've ever had.

Ineffective PSAs all over my commute

2009-03-15T19:20:00.001-07:00

I don't know whether I'm naturally very aware of advertisements, or if Mad Men has made me that way. This one in particular seems to be everywhere, particularly at bus stops, and it really shouldn't be.

In case it's too blurry to read, the three lines are:

started going for short walks during lunch hour
stops ordering take-out and starts cooking healthy meals
just bought bikini that challenges some obscenity laws

Yikes. There are plenty of good points here about why this ad is completely mislead and offensive.

Obviously there are a lot of problems with the campaign in general, but I find--particularly when forced to stand next to this poster for any length of time--the word-choice extremely frustrating. The grammar is completely non-parallel and tense inconsistent. So who's responsible for placing this ineffective, offensive, and poorly constructed thing into my line of vision on a near-daily basis?

The Ad Council last year, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, launched a public service campaign that urges Americans to take small steps to lose pounds and inches. On the screen you see step 19 of a 120 small steps, all of which can be found on-line at www.smallstep.gov. The pro-bono work is by McCann New York and includes humorous ads showing the positive results that taking enough small steps might produce. (link)

Thank you DHHS for the wasted tax dollars and McCann for the shoddy copy and offensive/ineffective message.

Goodbye to liberal arts?

2009-03-08T22:28:00.000-07:00

There have been a few reports recently, like this one in the New York Times, warning about the increasing share of family income required to put a student through college.

Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.

That's scary. But besides increasing numbers of families unable to pay for higher education (or going into more debt to do so), I wonder whether we will see another short to medium-term recessionary effect on education--a shift in choice of studies, particularly at the undergraduate level.

When I was beginning college in 2003, the economy was pretty significantly different. It wasn't great (unemployment 6%, compared with today's 8%), but we hadn't just been hit with a financial crisis, and we weren't in a deep recession. I remember many conversations about the all-important choice of major, most of which revolved around personal interests, professors, university-specific requirements, and of course, careers. At least back in freshmen year, however, the career portion of these conversations was only but a segment, and focused on the breadth of things one could go on to do after getting a degree in chemical engineering, psychology or public policy.

Today, at college campuses across the country, I'd imagine the conversation sounds a bit different. College freshmen--and even high school students--hear the stories from fellow-students approaching graduation and considering the options (work, travel, more school). Included in those are most definitely the subset of horror stories from students who are finding the job outlook shockingly more bleak than they had expected (even after widening their scope to less-relevant or less personally interesting fields). My personal experience tells me that these challenges travel quickly through the grapevine of friends, classes, and parental cautionary tails. Surely college frosh are listening; some of them must be asking themselves how attractive their intended major will really be. It's not a new question by any means, but perhaps the stakes have changed.

My guess is we'll see a trend in education, starting right now, towards departments with direct links to the industries that are still hiring the largest numbers. I'm not sure which majors will see the largest benefit (but I might guess computer science, economics, and biology/biochemistry--though med-school applications are way up too, and therefore even more competitive than usual) but you can bet the liberal arts aren't on the list.

So departments will shrink, funding will be redistributed. But the medium/long-term effect on the workforce? Perhaps less generalists and more unhappy students (compelled to study a field fit for a dreary job market, but not for them). The arts will suffer, that's clear, but I think there's more.

The kids who majored in Italian literature--these are the ones that chose their field because they were intrigued by it, not because it would land them a good salary once they tossed their caps. As a society, I want to believe we get something very important from encouraging those guys to study what they want.

Of course there are interest-motivated students outside of the liberal arts (I'd like to think I was one of them). But in fields with few post-graduation perks, I think you find a lot of very valuable minds, and I don't think I want those minds to be coerced into anything, let alone today's most marketable degree.

Wicked lottery

2009-03-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I saw Wicked at the Orpheum, which was excellent and very cleverly written and acted. Especially exciting, though, was that we got L&M row orchestra seats (from which most of the stage was quite visible) for $25 as opposed to the typical $99 for weekend performances.

I don't know whether the Orpheum does this same-day lottery drawing (details here) for all of its performances, but it's extremely worthwhile if heading into SF isn't a full-day commitment for you. I went on Saturday which I'm sure is more competitive than the weekday shows, and I'd guess there were 100-120 names in the bucket by the time they began drawing (2 hours before the show). They called about 7 names for connected seats, and another 5 (including us, yay!) for split seats, which turned out to be in front of one another. You're allowed to submit one name per person so our chances were around 20%, though it definitely felt like a bit of a long-shot amidst the crowd.

Needless to say, an excellent deal, and another great perk of living in the city.

Dogs spotted

2009-03-03T17:20:00.000-08:00

...and captured with my phone.

Outside cafe Mojo.

Parked on Fulton.

Jewelry shop display on Divisadero.

Grandma's macaroons

2009-03-02T15:16:00.000-08:00

I got an excellent lesson in one of my all-time favorite baked goods from Fran's oven: almond macaroons. Here's the recipe we used, originally from Julia Child and adapted by Fran Raboff:

Makes 2 dozen macaroons 2 inches (5cm) in diameter.

Ingredients:
8 ounces almond paste
1 cup (1/4 L) sugar
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 tsp pure almond extract
pinch of salt
1/4 to 3/4 cup egg whites (2 to 4 whites)

Equipment:
Food processor, 2 baking sheets lined with parchment paper or brown paper.

Instructions:
Prepare cookie sheets, but do not grease them or grease the paper. Preheat oven to 325 F, set racks in lower and upper middle levels.

Cut almond paste into 1/2-inch pieces. Put into container of processor and cut up finely by pulsing processor. When almond paste resembles coarse brown sugar, add granulated sugar and process again in spurts. Scrape down sides of container with spatula. Add almond extract, salt, and 1/4 cup egg whites, and process until no lumps of almond paste remain. Mixture should hold onto a spatula. If it's too stiff, add more egg white and process again.

Remove mixture to a bowl and beat well with a wooden spoon. Use pastry bag or drop mixture from a spoon to form 3/4 inch blobs on the paper, spaced 1 1/2 inches apart.

Bake in preheated oven 15-20 minutes, switching sheets on the racks halfway through. Macaroons are done when lightly brown and crusty on top.

When cool, turn parchment paper over and dampen the back until macaroons come off easily.

Then the fun part.

Melt in a saucepan over water at low heat:
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 tbsp butter
1 tbsp corn syrup

Dip, dip, dip. Thanks Fran!

Marketing religion

2009-02-28T00:49:00.000-08:00

The other day I was distracted by an ad on the side of a passing Muni bus (it looked a lot like this one, but oranger). Apparently the ad is part of a medium-sized campaign sponsored by a bay area Islamic organization.

Their goal is to urge more non-Muslims to learn about Islam and help remove negative stereotypes.
"We're basically sick and tired of people labeling us, of defining us, framing us, so I think it's time for us to stand up and basically inform the American public of who we are and what is our true identity," said Muhammad Hanif with the Islamic Circle of the Bay Area.

I don't think I would have even given the ad a second thought if it hadn't been just a couple days before that I ran into this while riding BART:

"All viewpoints. One platform. Join the discussion," in the little blue text, and a link to the website www.godridesbart.com.

This one I gave some thought to (granted it was more difficult to ignore since I was stuck inside a BART car with it for half an hour). My reaction was complete confusion. Despite being a fairly drab advertisement, there's a lot going on here. Unable to figure out the connection between God's choice of public transit and his interest in American politics, I bit, and checked out the website.

It turns out this is not a BART campaign intended to guilt riders into upstanding behavior, but is in fact (as the blue text hints) a forum for religious debate. The main page entices you into one of three discussion topics including, "Can there be justice without God?" and "Do we really need marriage anymore?" The resources page has a list of informational links in categories: Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Other (coming soon).

So public transportation seems to be a popular target for the new religious marketing campaigns. There's no deception going on here, both campaigns are forthcoming with their mission (at least, after you've visited the site): the first, to improve the public image of Islam, and the second, to encourage debate on God.

What's most interesting to me (besides the question of whether one was inspired by the other) is the decision to use traditional advertising. Some people have questioned the morality (or even legality) of a municipal agency posting religious material. That, I take no issue with. The very premise of advertising is the subjection of the public to intentionally biased information. Whether the topic is Islam or a ski resort probably shouldn't bear on an ad's right to be posted in public (though at school is another matter). I do wonder, though, whether the association of consumer products and religion through use of traditional advertising is a particularly good idea for either mission.

Lyric search for Ubiquity

2009-02-26T01:47:00.000-08:00

Another simple ubiquity command--similar in method to my attempt at nextmuni--to grab song lyrics from astraweb.com. There's a basic alternative version here, but I thought I'd improve slightly on the simple google search (install link at bottom). I've already found this command handy, and it highlights a great benefit to using Ubiquity for quick lookup tasks like this one... avoid ads!

If tools like Ubiquity become popular across the spectrum of online search (as I imagine they will) what's the implication for ad revenue? I'd worry that search sites and hosts for this type of data might try to combat the trend. The two commands I've written so far are extremely tenuous (though much of that is a result of novice javascript use) in the way they grab their data, and it wouldn't take much more than a change of font-size on my chosen lyrics host to kill the command.

If Ubiquity continues ad-free, there isn't much incentive for search engines and data providers to play along. Unfortunately, this may encourage previously "free" ad-funded services to adopt less open monetization models.

lyric command (again, ubiquity required)

Tokyo Stitched

2009-02-24T00:21:00.000-08:00

Tokyo Stitched 2007-08 from Jeremy Gordon on Vimeo.

I took quite a few pictures, and a handful of short videos on my pocket-sized Nikon P5000 last year. Finding none particularly interesting on its own, I decided to edit the videos together into a bumpy montage of a music video that does nothing less than perfectly summarize my experience in Japan.

Thanks to Frank Sinatra for allowing* me to steal his song, and thanks to Vimeo for, as of yet, failing to strike down this little video despite its questionable use of unquestionably copyrighted materials. Thanks to a new YouTube policy spurred by Warner Music Group, these 3.5 minutes of video have been nearly impossible to share, even privately. I don't know much about fair use, but seriously WMG, if you would show me the damages, I'd willingly pay.

* Sinatra did not allow me to steal his song. But he would have.

NextMuni for Ubiquity

2009-02-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

I took a first run at writing this ubiquity verb mostly out of curiosity. NextMuni is an extremely useful service for even infrequent SF public transit-goers. When things work well, it lets you completely avoid the unfortunate waiting around Divisadero wondering when the 24 is coming.

A number of people have created tools to improve accessibility to the NextMuni service, including Mikhail P's yourmuni which I use constantly and is perfect for frequent commuters with a data phone. As far as I can tell, no one has written a NextMuni command for ubiquity yet, and it seemed an ideal candidate to benefit from command-line access, especially considering the somewhat-clunky interface on the current site.

Writing the command was, indeed, impressively straight-forward. Despite NextMuni's inexplicable lack of an API, extracting the relevant data from the simplified lookup pages was a task well-suited to jquery.

For those interested in trying out this rugged code, it can be subscribed to with the link at bottom. The command has some definite issues (cross streets must be capitalized and there's some flakiness in the preview update that I don't yet understand) but perhaps it will be useful to someone as an example or a tool.

muni command (hosted at github, requires ubiquity)

Edit: the nextmuni website has changed since the programming of this command, and it is no longer working. Any developers interested in updating the code to work with the new layout are welcome to do so.

Competitive philanthropy

2009-02-20T08:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a silly idea, why don't we use competition--that tool that drives innovation and initiative--to inspire achievement in philanthropy.

There are a number of incentives cited by those who give: 1) some feel that giving is objectively important and are driven by a sense of duty, 2) some enjoy the feeling that they have done "good," and 3) some believe strongly in the causes which they support (and may even hope to personally enjoy the benefits of their charity). Additionally, there is giving that is directly self-serving (not that this is necessarily wrong), e.g. donating to a university that you hope will one day accept your daughter.

The relationship between the first three motivations is complex, and from personal experience, determining the relative contributions of each to any decision to give is quite challenging. But for the moment I'm going to ignore the root incentive. Say I do decide to donate $25 to the Red Cross, or to an entrepreneur in Pakistan. I wonder, would I enjoy twice the benefit had I donated $50 instead? Probably not. When it comes to charity, the benefits rarely scale with the cost. If I could somehow graph the benefit I receive (whatever the mechanism may be), I would see the typical curving line of a good with decreasing marginal utility. For that reason, at some point, my additional dollar would be better spent contributing to tonight's dinner, or any other line-item in the massive portion of my non-giving budget.

So this is all fairly obvious, but it represents a serious problem for philanthropy. Some people's utility curves will decrease faster than others, and for many (particularly in the face of economic uncertainty), their curves will cross the Y-axis at such a low point as to prevent the donation of the first dollar.

Attempts to increase individuals' interest in giving isn't new. I've seen marketing appeals towards the previously mentioned sense of duty, feeling of "good", and of course promotions of the importance of a particular cause. I'm unconvinced that these strategies could become very much more effective.

I'd rather consider some other factors of influence, for example: ease of donation, financial burden, transparency of impact, and expected recognition. One of the most exciting recent breakthroughs in charity has been that of Kiva, and I believe their success has mostly to do with their innovations in the first three of these levers.

First, with Kiva, donation is trivial (it takes seconds) once you have a basic account. Second, the financial burden feels extremely manageable since Kiva transacts in micro-loans with repayment rates typically in the high 90's. Finally, donors see who is receiving their loan, which organization is managing it, and receive updates on the status and impact of each investment.

Still, Kiva exists as a completely non-competitive system for obvious reasons--there is something seemingly distasteful about direct competitions involving the exchange of money. This obstacle is a cultural one, and I believe there is a way around it. What if we could devise a system in which investors or donors compete for recognition, and what if that recognition was based not on one's capacity to give, but of one's willingness to give within their capacity.

Awarding philanthropy is no new concept; consider plaques on university buildings, names printed in concrete, credits following public television programs. But those competitions don't take place on a level playing field, most of the world can't afford thousands of dollars of charitable giving. But anyone with a non-zero disposable income (and let's not forget that this certainly isn't everyone) can afford to give something. The problem is, the incentives aren't clear.

The experiment could start small. Kiva, or any similar service, could offer participants to opt-in, report an estimate of their personal income and costs, and be ranked according to the percentage of their capacity they choose to give.

There are technical obstacles, of course. How do you accurately estimate capacity? Is there any way to ensure honest self-reporting? And even with perfect honesty, how do we define capacity? Which costs are living costs and which are luxury goods that should not count against disposable income?

And there are additional concerns. Would we reduce the incentives for some of the largest, wealthiest donors? Are we discrediting in-kind donations, volunteering, and philanthropy of a non-monetary nature?

These issues make such an idea extremely tricky to implement, but nonetheless, imagine a world where individuals and organizations compete to give within their means. I think its possible to paint a very interesting picture. Then again, we might run the risk of dehumanizing charity altogether.

There must be some way to turn donors into heroes. Those making the biggest sacrifices should be awarded the highest praise.

ping.fm + ubiquity = crazy handy

2009-02-19T21:55:00.000-08:00

I haven't gotten into twitter-style microblogging yet, and one of the reasons is that there are too many overlapping services. I opened a twitter account a year ago, use facebook occasionally, have gmail open constantly, and have friends who frequent just one or two of those. When I feel like sharing a link or a thought with the world at large, I tend to choose one of the three quite arbitrarily and that just seems unfair.

The problem is solved, though.

Ping.fm integrates status messages across facebook, twitter, gtalk and frighteningly many others that I know nothing about. There's a clean mobile and iphone interface, email access, a gtalk bot, and easy ways to target updates to a subset of your status platforms.

Ubiquity is extremely useful on its own (for reasons I won't detail now), and the ping.fm ubiquity command allows command line updates from firefox very gracefully. Crazy handy.

Justifying the utility of status updates in general, however, I'm still working on. One possibility: contributing to real-time data. It's sort of appealing.

Graphical, contextual news

2009-02-17T13:57:00.000-08:00

I'm sort of a news junky, in a loose sense. I was happy when all the major news sources began making their content available online, and I think it's convenient that secondary sources like news aggregators, RSS readers, and the blogosphere in general made accessing and organizing the massive datastream of online news significantly more manageable. Despite the advances in these distribution channels and the technology surrounding them, the way that news is presented seems archaic. It's as if the news medium is still boxed in by restrictions that were torn down long ago. I'm talking about the presentation of news information itself. I read Google News nearly compulsively because it's customizable, uses an effective (though fairly opaque) algorithm to choose stories of interest from credible sources, updates in real-time, and is extremely searchable. All these are excellent improvements on radio, television, printed news, and even online primary sources, but I think we can do much better--the basic form is still a better-organized portal to the same static news we've been reading since the beginning of news.

One of the frustrating aspects of online news is its overwhelming quantity. Despite the fact that I read at least the headlines and basic summaries of hundreds of articles a week, I find that I retain fairly few of the actual details, or even the bigger-picture concepts. I find myself editorializing as I skim the news stream: "another story about X" or "the Nth story this month about the debate on Y." Sure, I can choose the primary article on any given topic (as chosen by the Google computation) or I can choose one of a few thousand articles on the same topic from other sources. But, as I select a BBC story entitled Clerics urge new jihad over Gaza, I realize that what I'm really missing--and what even a background paragraph in this 558 word story can't adequately provide--is decent context. I don't want a link to the wikipedia article on the conflict in Gaza. I want to see how this article, and the 2,536 others like it, fits into the bigger picture. There's a ton of data surrounding any given news story, there are geographic locations, dates, names of political players, organizations, and pundits. Then, there are the hundreds and thousands of news stories leading up to this one; some of them are intricately related, and some are more subtly connected, but all help shed some light on what this particular story should mean to me.

I want all that context summarized for me and I think the best solution is a graphical one. I've seen news timelines, news maps, and other clever attempts, but none are focused on context. Those examples visualize and stratify news according to its meta-data.

If I were to design a graphical representation of news context, I would want to make sure that the high-level data was immediately accessible (with details available by drilling down). High school journalism classes teach that a good lead includes all of the vital statistics: who, what, where, when and why. This visual summary should provide the same, but with a scope that extends backwards in time, and outwards to related players and events that might provide incite into what this particular story means.

The Players. People, groups and organizations. Who is involved and why? Are they stakeholders or observers? What are the arguments being discussed, and have they changed over the history of this issue?

The Location. Is there regional context? What else is happening there right now?

The History. What were the events that lead up to this. Example: the Euro falls below $1.26. Show me where it was this time last year, upon its introduction in 1992, last fall when the US financial crisis hit, and its trend since. Where there are other spikes, show me the associations and correlations.

The Implications. What is likely to happen next? Have similar events occurred under similar circumstances? Example: flight 1549 to Charlotte, NC crashes after it strikes a flock of birds. Tell me about other recent plane crashes and the aftermath. Will US Airways market share shrink? Will there be an investment in bird-safe engines? Will air travel dip?

Having never consumed news in this way, I can't say for certain that such a reformatting of news data would help me retain the information that matters most, but linking small pieces into the "bigger picture" often helps to develop a more complete understanding.

I wanted to take a shot at this graphical approach, so I chose this article and did some related news search through Google to compile the big picture. I'm working on couple of formats which I will post here when I get a chance.

Combining this sort of graphical representation with technologies like Seadragon--introduced in this Ted talk (skip to 1:25 for the most relevant part)--could also be extremely effective.

Interacting with data in this way needn't be limited to the consumption of news either. It is, however, a good place to start and could be a great proof of concept. It seems to me that Google, a company dedicated to the accessibility of information, is extremely well-positioned to take another stab at it. With the ever-accelerating generation of new data, of which news is only a small slice, it seems to me that effective techniques at summarizing, contextualizing and interpreting this data will become more and more valuable.

Outdoor dim sum

2009-02-14T13:21:00.000-08:00

I don't understand the reason, fully, but eating dim sum outdoors (particularly when coupled with a view) is a completely different experience, and it's amazing. That Cha Xiu Bao right there set records.

Step 1: Pick up a large pink box of goods from Good Luck, the new favorite Clement St. gem. No illustrated instructions here, but the English menu is very clear and pointing at trays that look particularly tasty usually turns out well. Shrimp dumplings, BBQ pork dumplings, chive dumplings, turnip cakes, and even the less-typical potstickers are all excellent. Don't forget napkins, chopsticks and chili sauce.

Step 2: Drive/bike/jog across the bridge (the big red one) and enjoy the built-in delay between purchase and arrival. Be careful not to taste anything prematurely. Yes, it smells good, but you're almost there.

Step 3: Arrive approximately here, or really anywhere suited to sitting, eating, and viewing, but that particular stone wall has been tested and is ideal for this activity.

Step 4: Enjoy the cool breeze (but not too cool. choose day, season wisely).

Step 5: Appreciate fluffly cloud-like bun dough when juxtaposed against actual fluffy clouds.

Step 6: Enjoy breakfast audibly, and enjoy even more the longing glances from hungry nearby tourists.

Non-Californians with access to a Cantonese restaurant and a place without walls (a bridge view isn't required but is certainly a bonus) adapt as necessary.

Colorful fleet

2009-02-13T07:45:00.000-08:00

From Angel Island

A lucky view on the ferry from Tiburon to Angel Island.