via GIF Movie

Neil Armstrong died this past weekend. First man on the moon. Amazing stuff.
But he is human, and therefore bound to make mistakes. Like the one in his legendary speech. Larrick was kind enough to bring this to my attention this morning.
I found a BBC article from 2009 talking about this lunar mess-up:

Neil Armstrong missed out an “a” and did not say “one small step for a man” when he set foot on the Moon in 1969, a linguistic analysis has confirmed.

The researchers show for the first time that he intended to say “a man” and that the “a” may have been lost because he was under pressure.

They say that although the phrase was not strictly correct, it was poetic.

Yeah, yeah. He messed up. I’ll let it slide given the circumstances.

Over at AllThingsD, John Paczkowski has Samsung’s response to the verdict in the Samsung-Apple patent trial:

Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer,” Samsung said in a statement. “It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies. Consumers have the right to choices, and they know what they are buying when they purchase Samsung products. This is not the final word in this case or in battles being waged in courts and tribunals around the world, some of which have already rejected many of Apple’s claims. Samsung will continue to innovate and offer choices for the consumer.

This shows Samsung still doesn’t get it.
“It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners“
Because that’s all an iPhone is, some rounded rectangles. And a Ferarri is just a fast, red car. And Whole Lotta Love is just a song by Led Zeppelin. And The Sirens of Titan is just some book by Kurt Vonnegut.
Apple doesn’t and shouldn’t have a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, but that’s not this trial was about. Apple didn’t sue Samsung for copying them, they sued Samsung for the degree to which they copied them.
Samsung didn’t just take a few paperclips and and some pens from Apple’s supply closet. They emptied out the whole damn closet. Maybe that’s a little too antiquated an analogy. Samsung didn’t just torrent the latest pop music single, they torrented every album released in last 5 years.
Samsung could have easily avoided this whole messy trial if they hadn’t copied as much as they did from Apple, but they got greedy and when you get greedy there’s a good chance you’ll get caught.

By now every knows about the elderly parishioner in Spain who ruined a 19th century fresco.
To my eyes, it looks like Modigliani was hit in the head with a bat, drank a bottle of Jameson and then decided to paint an Ewok:

I love how the woman blames the priest for letting her “fix” the fresco. Nice, lady. Real classy. Jesus is going to remember that.

I lived in New York City for 11 years so I know about great pizza. You need 2 things: great dough and great sauce*. Sounds simple, but it’s not.
It’s the same with gadgets. You need great hardware and great software. You take away one of those and it ruins the whole thing.
* For simplicity’s sake, yes, I left out cheese in this equation.

Back in June I thought Windows 8 looked half-baked.
Tim Edwards just reviewed it for PCGamesN (via DF):

The email app is horrendous. It is the worst email client I have ever used. It’s a full-screen Metro abomination that hides or is missing basic and vital functionality (search, column sorting, filtering). It’s full-screen, but only shows a small sample of your messages – so the screen real-estate is massively wasted. If you have multiple email accounts, there’s no combined inbox view. It’s slow to check and sync your email – unless you force a manual refresh. And the first time you use it, you will struggle to find the ‘send email’ button. Pro-tip – it’s the (+) in the top right.

Yep. Still not baked.

Why you make that sound?!

PSFK: Would You Check Your Smartphone At The Door For 5% Off Your Dinner Bill?
Hell yeah I would.
…but I’d also drop-kick the ma√Ætre d’ if they couldn’t find it when I was leaving.

I had a conversation recently with a friend, and we discussed information. Nothing complex, we just marveled at the way we had seen the way we collect information change in our lifetime. We were going through stacks of records at her place and I mentioned that I had gone almost completely digital. I’m an analog guy, just ask Mulvey. But what I’m more interested in now is the compactness of information rather than quality. That is, the very weight of the information I was keeping in my apartment, whether it be printed books, or music and movies on discs, had become too heavy for me to accept in my life. I have purged much of this physical material from my immediate surroundings, shedding hundreds of pounds of weight in the process. (Most of it joined my paintings in storage, so it’s still a bit of an anchor. But the point is, my immediate surroundings are lighter.)
All of the music I own has been ripped onto a hard drive, and I won’t be buying any more cd’s unless it’s something that isn’t available online. The movies I don’t worry about unless I get a hankering to see something specific, and then it’s worth the three bucks just to rent it online. After all, it’s a good bet any movie I watch I won’t want to see again for years. As for the books, most of what I own I haven’t cracked open in the slightest since the day I finished them. They really were just taking up space and weighing me down. Intellectually, they are the most valuable items I own, but who has the time to reread a book?
It was painful packing them up, however. I’d grab a handful of books from the shelves to pack away, and there would be at least two or three that I loved. Just seeing them in my hand again made me want to drop everything and start reading. This happened dozens of times. When I realized how ridiculous this was, how impossible it would be to commit the necessary time, it became easy to just toss them in the boxes and seal them up. Into the storage space they went, along with the paintings, the only items I own in there that I truly cannot do without.
I’m not all the way there yet. I still have some real paper books; all the ones I haven’t read yet. And I have some DVDs. But like I wrote above, the music is all ripped and stored, at about 15% of the quality of the original media.
And that’s the problem with digital. It has made information lighter, but it’s done so by, well, making it lighter. And lighter information, unlike lighter human beings, is not necessarily a good thing. It represents loss of information. Incompleteness. Corruption. And it’s spreading.
What we are finding in the digital age is that, rather than information being preserved more effectively, we have shortened the lifespan of information. If a book is printed on quality paper with quality ink, and is bound well, it can sit on a shelf for literally thousands of years and lose none of its information. But manuscripts that were written by great authors only thirty years ago, and stored on big floppy disks, are now virtually inaccessible. Computer disks decay at a rate measured in years, not millennia, and storage formats and operating systems have changed so rapidly in the last generation that oftentimes it takes specialists in computer forensics to extract information first encoded not all that long ago.
Information is spreading more rapidly due to the internet, which mitigates much loss due to decay and formatting issues. But the corollary to that is inaccurate information is also spreading. Books are a useful example here, as well.
There is a whole segment of the population that no longer likes to pay for information. Representing mostly music and movies, pirating is costing media companies big. But there are also pirated books. And while the quality of pirated music and movies is pretty consistent, that is, there is little if any noticeable deviation from that available from legitimate sources, for books it’s another story.
Pirated books are generally rich text files made from jailbroken epub files or even scans using software designed to convert printed pages quickly. The result, especially with the scanned files, are typos. Lots of typos. Below is a comparison of three short sections from Isaac Asimov’s book Prelude to Foundation. The top of each is taken from a legitimate copy purchased from the iBooks store, while the bottom is from an epub file I made from a bootleg rtf file I got from a Torrent. Who knows what went on at the source. The sections are taken completely out of context here, so don’t worry if they don’t make sense (although the first section may have had something to do with my idea for this post). They don’t need to make sense. They only need to showcase the corruption that can happen to information, especially when it becomes free. I’ve highlighted the differences in the text.

Dors said defensively. “Records don’t last forever, Hari. Memory banks can be destroyed or defaced as a result of conflict or can simply deteriorate with time. Any memory bit, any record that is not referred to for a long time, eventually drowns in accumulated noise. They say that fully one third of the records in the Imperial Library are simply gibberish, but, of course, custom will not allow those records to be removed. Other libraries are less tradition-bound. In the Streeling University library, we discard worthless items every ten years.
“Naturally, records frequently referred to and frequently duplicated on various worlds and in various libraries—governmental and private—remain clear enough for thousands of years, so that many of the essential points of Galactic history remain known even if they took place in pre-Imperial times. However, the farther back you go, the less there is preserved.”
Dors said defensively. “Records don’t last forever, Hari. Memory banks can be destroyed or defaced as a result of conflict or can simply deteriorate with time. Any memory bit, any record that is not referred to for a long time, eventually drowns in accumulated noise. They say that fully one third of the records in the Imperial Library are simply gibberish, but, of course, custom will not allow those records to be removed. Other libraries are less tradition bound. In the Streeling University library, we discard worthless items every ten years.
“Naturally, records frequently referred to and frequently duplicated on various worlds and in various libraries-governmental and private remain clear enough for thousands of years, so that many of the essential points of Galactic history remain known even if they took place in pre-Imperial times. However, the farther back you go, the less there is preserved.”

Seldon said, dismayed, “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not. Hummin’s asking it. I must guard you. After all, I failed in connection with Upperside and should make up for it.”
Seldon said, dismayed, “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not. Hummin s asking it. I must guard you. After all, I faded in connection with Upperside and should make up for it.”

“I know,” said Seldon. “Sometimes I wonder what he really wants of me.”
“What he says,” said Dors. “He’s a man of strong and idealistic ideas and dreams.”
I know, “ said Seldon. “Sometimes I wonder what he really wants of me.”
“fit he says, “ said Dors. “He’s a man of strong and idealistic ideas and dreams.”

Most of the differences are minor. Only two turn sentences into nonsense. But all the typos in the bootleg version presented above happened within a few pages of one another, and there were others I didn’t include. Over the course of a 600 page novel, we’re now talking hundreds if not thousands of typos. And all this loss of information occurred in the merely thirty years since the book was first published. It gets worse. It didn’t take thirty years for the typos to happen. It took a day. The day the bootleg file was made. And now this file is proliferating across the hard drives of the world. If information does want to be free, then this free version of Asimov’s book could become the most popular version, even though its information is corrupted.
Preservation is one of the battles we face with all the information we’re producing these days. Recent past generations were known by their factories and machines, now turned to rust. It’s a virtual guarantee that what we will be known for, our information, will be indecipherable in the not-too distant future; collections of random squiggles in computer files, if they can even be accessed at all. Should science ever discover a way to store information without loss, that will be a good thing for longevity, but will have no effect on corruption due to flaws in the people or software that produces the information. The person or persons that bootlegged Asimov’s book and the software they used are now as responsible for the information contained therein as Asimov and his editors. So, I guess the point is, score another one for analog, even if it does mean you have to keep too much shit in your apartment.

via BITM

Busy Monday, just links:
Despite the sorry state of the (print) magazine industry, Dan Frommer thinks its a great time for magazines.
Jason Fried has a piece in the NYTimes Opinions section and over at his company blog he connects the dots on how it happened.
Speaking of print, Graphic-ExchanGE always features some gourmet shit. Why do they insist on not deep-linking to their posts? All I have are their RSS pages. I love you, GE, but I hate you too.
Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger, Twitter) is up to something new.
The Great Discontent has a profile up of Seth Godin. I’m loving their responsive layout too.
Social Print Studio has a great site and some great projects.
The history of revolutionary interfaces. (via The Loop)
This seems to be the year of video game-related Kickstarter projects. Panetary Annihilation looks incredible.
Steven Heller has what looks to be an awesome new book out on Comics Sketchbooks.

The work of Nathan Fox (via Imprint)