Joe Stracci's blog. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: writing, art, technology, Apple, food, fatherhood, parenting, and music. And photography. And design. And sports. Oh, and probably some politics too.
Posted in: Links
Some of the world’s oldest trees are tucked away on untouched mountainsides, isolated lands, and private islands. And for 14 years, photographer Beth Moon traversed these farflung places to capture photographs of ancient trees before they died or got cut down by man.
Incredible images. Makes you want to the Monkey Wrench Gang.
Bezos drove the team hard on one particular feature: Dynamic Perspective, the 3-D effects engine that is perhaps most representative of what went wrong with the Fire Phone. Dynamic Perspective presented the team with a challenge: Create a 3-D display that requires no glasses and is visible from multiple angles. The key would be facial recognition, which would allow the phone’s cameras to track a user’s gaze and adjust the 3-D effect accordingly. After a first set of leaders assigned to the project failed to deliver, their replacements went on a hiring spree. One team even set up a room that they essentially turned into a costume store, filling it with wigs, sunglasses, fake moustaches, and earrings that they donned for the cameras in order to improve facial recognition. "I want this feature," Bezos said, telling the team he didn’t care how long it took or how much it cost. Eventually, a solution was discovered: Four cameras had to be mounted at the corners of the phone, each capable of identifying facial features, whether in total darkness or obscured by sunglasses. But adding that to the phone created a serious battery drain.
And team members simply could not imagine truly useful applications for Dynamic Perspective. As far as anyone could tell, Bezos was in search of the Fire Phone’s version of Siri, a signature feature that could make the device a blockbuster. But what was the point, they wondered, beyond some fun gaming interactions and flashy 3-D lock screens. "In meetings, all Jeff talked about was, ‘3-D, 3-D, 3-D!’ He had this childlike excitement about the feature and no one could understand why," recalls a former engineering head who worked solely on Dynamic Perspective for years. "We poured surreal amounts of money into it, yet we all thought it had no value for the customer, which was the biggest irony. Whenever anyone asked why we were doing this, the answer was, ‘Because Jeff wants it.’ No one thought the feature justified the cost to the project. No one. Absolutely no one."
This is the chink in the armor of the auteur theory. When the auteur is wrong—you can’t give it away.
The continued massive growth of connected mobile devices is shaping not only how we communicate with each other, but how we look, behave, and experience the world around us. Smartphones and other handheld devices have become indispensable tools, appendages held at arm's length to record a scene or to snap a selfie. Recent news photos show refugees fleeing war-torn regions holding up their phones as prized possessions to be saved, and relatives of victims lost to a disaster holding up their smartphones to show images of their loved ones to the press. Celebrity selfies, people alone in a crowd with their phones, events obscured by the very devices used to record that event, the brightly lit faces of those bent over their small screens, these are some of the scenes depicted below.
This is my favorite.
This reverent but disengaged attitude toward the military—we love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them—has become so familiar that we assume it is the American norm. But it is not. When Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the supreme commander, led what may have in fact been the finest fighting force in the history of the world, he did not describe it in that puffed-up way. On the eve of the D-Day invasion, he warned his troops, “Your task will not be an easy one,” because “your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened.” As president, Eisenhower’s most famous statement about the military was his warning in his farewell address of what could happen if its political influence grew unchecked.
At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.
With everything that has taken place in NYC the past couple of weeks, I feel like this is as timely of a read as ever.
Much of the company’s success online can be attributed to a proprietary algorithm that it has developed for “headline testing”—a practice that has become standard in the virality industry. When a Dose post is created, it initially appears under as many as two dozen different headlines, distributed at random. Whereas one person’s Facebook news feed shows a link to “You Won’t Believe What This Guy Did with an Abandoned Factory,” another person, two feet away, might see “At First It Looks Like an Old Empty Factory. But Go Inside and . . . WHOA.” Spartz’s algorithm measures which headline is attracting clicks most quickly, and after a few hours, when a statistically significant threshold is reached, the “winning” headline automatically supplants all others. “I’m really, really good at writing headlines,” he told me. “But any human’s intuition can only be so good. If you can build a machine that can solve the problem better than you can, then you really understand the problem.”
I hear a lot of people complain about the big names in the tech and social media worlds—Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al. But after reading this piece, I have to say, I think Emerson Spartz represents everything that is wrong with our media and social landscape.
ESPN:
Stuart Scott, a longtime anchor at ESPN, died Sunday morning at the age of 49. He inspired his colleagues with his talent, his work ethic, his personality, and his devotion to his daughters, Taelor, 19, and Sydni, 15.
The 15-minute video ESPN put together is a must-see. Deadspin also has reactions from a bunch of his colleagues. I’m not one for over-dramatizing celebrity deaths, but this one feels—different.
I’ve seen Goodfellas many times and I’ve watched The Sopranos all the way through three times and I never realized that Christopher says, “It happens,” when he shoots the guy in the foot in the bakery.
/via Uproxx
It gives me hope for the future that this is something that humans—real humans—can still do by hand.
/via Devour
Lauren Collins, The New Yorker:
“IKEA at its worst is like a sect,” Goran Carstedt, a former head of IKEA North America, once said. According to Stenebo, employees parse Kamprad’s frequent handwritten faxes as if they were pages from the Talmud: “If he starts with ‘Dear,’ it is neutral. If he starts with only your first name it is a sharp request. If the fax starts with ‘Dearest’ you are in his good books.” The atmosphere at IKEA reminded me of that of a political campaign, with true believers, whispering skeptics, inside jokes, and deflection of even the most innocuous questions. A former senior executive told me that, although he still admired the company, he had found it suffocating. He said, “For me, it was like North Korea.”
When I was at the IKEA hotel, the sun stayed up until midnight. In Tillsamans, I wandered into a sort of rec room (it is used for conferences), which was equipped with a karaoke machine. On the wall, someone had painted the lyrics to an IKEA version of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: “As long as there’s human life on earth / A strong IKEA has its worth / We satisfy the many needs / A strong IKEA that succeeds / Our culture leads us on our way / That’s the IKEA way!” Eventually, I went to my room. It was furnished with a pair of spartan single beds. Two books sat on top of a pine desk: the IKEA catalogue and the New Testament.
Come to this article for the inside look at your favorite maddening furniture company; stay for the brief look into the founder's (and no, I'm not joking) potential Nazi connection.
The story begins during the halcyon days of the Lower East Side where, as Jennifer 8. Lee, the producer of ‘The Search for General Tso,’ said, “Jews and Chinese were the two largest non-Christian immigrant groups” at the turn of the century.
So while it’s true that Chinese restaurants were notably open on Sundays and during holidays when other restaurants would be closed, the two groups were linked not only by proximity, but by otherness. Jewish affinity for Chinese food “reveals a lot about immigration history and what it’s like to be outsiders,” she explained.
I like the idea that, through exclusion, some people still found a way to feel included.
