I think the easiest mistake in the world is to — at the moment you recognize the flashbacks, as they come — throw up your hands and say, “I know this story.” The whole point of this movie is to tell you that you don’t, and never did: it’s a story that plays out in faces. It could be boring to hear or see the same stories we already know, so you have to come in at a different angle: not the horrors and the acts, but the faces and the feelings behind the horrors and the acts. That’s the story here.

— Recap of Razor by Jacob Clifton on Television Without Pity

Riding a bicycle in Boston is something akin to combat. Cyclists routinely rank the city America’s worst. Stung by national criticism and hoping to take a bite out of traffic and air pollution, Mayor Thomas M. Menino is vowing to change that.

— "Pedal Pushing" by Matt Viser in the Boston Globe

Playing around on the Daily Show site, I saw for the first time how the Web might really change TV — not by streaming a promotional teaser here and there or allowing users to post random screen grabs on YouTube, but by providing searchable online databases of years’ worth of content that are updated to include current episodes. When The Daily Show does come back (please Lord, let it be before Super Tuesday), I may well start watching even new episodes this way: at my desk in the morning, instead of on the couch at 11 o’clock at night. Multiply that defection by the size of the show’s fan base and the subsequent migration of advertising dollars from screen to Web, and the writers’ demand for a piece of the online action starts to make plenty of sense.

— "Why it's pointless to watch The Daily Show live" by Dana Stevens in Slate

Pushing Daisies is like nothing else on television. Sure, it’s still a bit too in love with its own cleverness, and sure, sometimes it threatens to get a bit cloying. But it tugs at my emotions in a way few shows have ever done, and it does so episode after episode, without fail. It’s the only show I’ve seen in ages that has me not only impatient for next week’s episode at the close of each installment, but actively interested in going back and watching the same episode again.

— Sweeter Than a Strychnine Lollipop by Nathan Alderman on TeeVee.org

Orson Scott Card offers a Christmas gift to his millions of fans with this short novel set during Ender’s first years at the Battle School where it is forbidden to celebrate religious holidays.

The children come from many nations, many religions; while they are being trained for war, religious conflict between them is not on the curriculum. But Dink Meeker, one of the older students, doesn’t see it that way. He thinks that giving gifts isn’t exactly a religious observation, and on Sinterklaas Day he tucks a present into another student’s shoe.

This small act of rebellion sets off a battle royal between the students and the staff, but some surprising alliances form when Ender comes up against a new student, Zeck Morgan. The War over Santa Claus will force everyone to make a choice.

— Jacket copy for A War of Gifts: An Ender Story by Orson Scott Card. Oh my.

For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru. And civilization’s assault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder.

— "The Dark Side" by David Owen in the New Yorker

Your site is good, it’s fun, it makes me smile, it helps me connect. But your site is not my social network. It’s just part of the online social ecosystem. It helps me do something — or many things — but not everything.

— "There are no social networks" by Cameron Adams

Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages.

— "The War as We Saw It" by five soldiers in the New York Times

The success of _High School Musical 2_ is an indication of Disney’s long-term efforts to reposition its cable channel to appeal to the underserved 9-to-14 age group and to rope in youngsters for whom Mickey Mouse seems too babyish. For the time being at least, the movie has made a trio of fictional high school students named Troy, Gabriella and Sharpay as recognizably Disney as that 79-year-old mouse.

— "Move Over Mickey: A New Franchise at Disney" by Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times

I know what the path to old age is supposed to be: You’re young, you marry, you work, you retire, you become small, cute, and certain, and you die. But […] here I am, hanging out on the Internet where no one knows you’re an old dog, and where the pace on the treadmill has been turned up from cane-assisted to massively multiplayer intellectual marathon. The simple journey we’re supposed to take, one of ascent and descent, has been disrupted

— "Older than Lennon" by David Weinberger in Joho: The Blog

Kids and Cars, a child safety advocacy group in Leawood, Kan., said about 50 children are backed over in a driveway or parking lot every week in the United States and at least two die.

— "Wis. lawmaker drives over granddaughter" from the Charlotte Observer

Excelling in grand spectacles of carnage and brutality, al-Qaida has succeeded in focusing the spotlight on itself. But it has won the west’s attention for another reason, which most would find difficult to acknowledge. It happens to confirm existing stereotypes and deep-seated prejudices about Islam and Muslim as emotive, violent, irrational, and fanatical. […] The truth however, is that the Muslim scene is much too broad and colourful to be reduced to al-Qaida and its holy warriors.

— The myth of al-Qaida's omnipotence by Soumaya Ghannoushi in Comment is Free

After more than a decade of tightening guidelines, Europe has made green architecture an everyday reality. […] In the United States, architects cannot make the same claim with equal confidence. Despite the media attention showered on ‘green’ issues, the federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings. Yet, according to some estimates, buildings consume nearly as much energy as industry and transportation combined. And the average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its German counterpart.

— "Why Are They Greener Than We Are?" by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times Magazine

18-year-olds have a right to marry, adopt children, serve as legal guardians for minors, purchase firearms from authorized dealers, and are trusted with the vote and military responsibilities. So, [McCardell] says, it is not unreasonable to think that they can, with proper preparation, be trusted to drink.

— Lowering drinking age may lower troubles among teens in The Argus

It was the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen in Washington, Furukawa says. Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn’t do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?

— "Pearls Before Breakfast" by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post

Kiko has shut its doors, and that makes me sad. And not just because the Kiko team was headquartered in Medford, MA, my town (at least for another week). Kiko was an online “web 2.0” calendar, an interactive personal calendaring app that you can use from your web browser. The first version was pretty awful, but version 2.0, released a little before Google Calendar appeared on the scene, was really powerful and fairly awesome. Sadly it was competing with the inexplicably popular 30boxes as well as Google Calendar, which integrates nicely with Gmail and Gtalk and all the other Google properties, which really kills you if your market is the kind of person who would be using Gmail in the first place. The Kiko folks were a scrappy bunch of college kids, and I was really rooting for them to succeed, especially after my calendar project failed to get off the ground.

They got burned out, they knew that they had lost, and they are shutting their doors gracefully, which I think is a very respectable thing to do.

From the IMDb page listing goofs for Back to the Future Part III comes this marvelous entry:

bq. *Incorrectly regarded as goofs:* The complex logic, and conflicting theories, of time travel have resulted in a great many potential plot holes, especially when the movie is viewed in the context of the whole trilogy. But time travel movies are like that.

I find it highly amusing (and a bit disturbing) that people on the IMDb message boards are still to this day debating the logical inconsistancies of the Back to the Future time travel storylines. I could not possibly think of going into that movie as a “serious” treatment of time travel. I mean, they have hoverboards and ads for _Jaws 17_ and Michael J. Fox plays his own daughter. Not hallmarks of a “serious” time travel movie.

From the commentary on a Questionable Content strip (my current obsession), a simple but important truth:

It takes strength to recognize that if you did not succeed at something it does not mean that it was not worth the effort. Sometimes taking big stupid risks is worth it, regardless of whether the outcome is what you were hoping for.

Apple released the new MacBooks, as expected. I knew they were coming and bought my MacBook Pro anyway because I knew I still wanted something in this performance range, and didn’t want to make the compromises to have the cheaper MacBook.

So its not cool that the top-of-the-line MacBook, at $1000 less than my Pro, is almost exactly the same in capabilities with the exception of the smaller screen and wimpier graphics card. I mean, seriously? I’m glad Apple didn’t make silly compromises just to make artifical distinctions between product lines, but come on! If you can sell the same thing for $1000 less, then why is mine $1000 more? Argh!

Reader poll: is an extra 2.1″ (diagonal) of screen real estate and the ability to run a 30″ Cinema Display worth $1k?

I was never a big fan of Facebook, except as much as I’ll acknowledge that its the best of the various social networking sites out there. But as I have to sign in from time to time for social reasons, I start noticing things. For instance, I have 47 “friends” at Brandeis, and through them I am “connected” to an additional 5,395 people. Which, really, is probably about everyone to have attended Brandeis since Facebook was brought online there. 😉

In contrast, at Harvard I currently have *2* “friends” (one of whom is a carry-over from Brandeis), and through them, I am connected to 23,211 people.

Make of that what you will. I dunno, maybe it means I’m just way more popular at Harvard. Or maybe, ya know, the number is absolutely meaningless, which would lead one to wonder why the heck it is even displayed at all…