Michael Jackson “Leave me alone” and “Tabloid Junkie”

June 26th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

Back in the early 90s, when I was growing up, I thought I had all of Michael Jackson’s albums in my tape collection. I was surprised when I first saw this video on MTV India of the song “Leave me Alone”, as I had never heard this song before. The credits on the song attributed it to the album “Bad”, but my copy of that album didn’t have it. Back in India, before the age of the internet, I didn’t even know there could ever be a way to find out why my album didn’t have this song. This song tormented me as I would randomly catch it once a year on MTV or VH1.

Many years later I found out that this was a single, released separately, and only on the CD version. And Wikipedia says that it was never released in the US either.

It interesting to think about how this song stayed apt for him all these years leading to yesterday.

Another lesser known song from one of his more recent albums where he lashed out at the media was “Tabloid Junkie”. There is no official video to that song but the following version by a fun comes very close to capturing the essence.

The fake IMAX at Lincoln Square in Bellevue

May 18th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Thought you saw star wars in an IMAX? They cheated you.

IMAX are ruining their brand and deceiving their advocates. For those that want to know, here is a map of known "real/fake" IMAX screens, based on screen size and aspect ratio.
A green marker indicates a "real" IMAX screen, meaning a screen that is totally immersive and fills your field of vision. A red exclamation mark indicates a "fake" IMAX screen, meaning a screen that is branded "IMAX" the same as giant screens, but is not that much larger than regular movie screens, and does not fill your field of vision. OMNIMAX or "domed" screens are indicated by a purple orb shape.

[Destroy Fake Imax via email from John]

How we lost our bike virginity

May 12th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

When I was in Boston two summers ago, I had attempted to get a bike to commute to work. I was overwhelmed by the options available. Craigslist was full of people selling bikes – some had 10 year old bikes for $300, while some had 3 year old bikes for $250, some were giving away road bikes, some giving away mountain bikes, some had cruisers, while others had comfort bikes. WalMart had bikes from $75 to $275, while other stores started at $350 and went up to $2000. I was so confused by the options available and the different prices that I ended up whiling away the whole summer figuring out what I want.

Jen and I moved to Seattle and decided with a stronger resolve to become bike people this summer. Though we had had bikes before, mainly as kids, we both really didn’t know much about what are the different kinds of bikes and which ones are good for what. We were determined, however, and finally ended up with a very well informed choice which we are very happy about. Read on if you are bike virgins like we were and are trying to navigate around the sea of options to get a bike and make use of the awesome summer ahead of us. Also, this post will be most relevant to you if your main use is going to be around daily/frequent commuting 5-15 miles, paved trails in parks, or a little off-roading and dirt trails.

Getting started

We started out by doing a lot of research online. It quickly emerged that there were mainly 3 kinds of bikes: road bikes, mountain bikes and hybrid bikes. Road bikes are very thin and light bikes, with large but thin wheels and drop-down handlebars. These bikes are built “tight” to be responsive to every little pebble on the ground or the microscopic motions you make as you shift weights. Mountain bikes are the exact opposite with thick and strong frames, smaller and thicker wheels and straight handlebars – these will often also feature disc brakes and front and/or read suspensions. Hybrid bikes are the catch-all for everything in between. They are not so thin and light, nor are they too thick or heavy. They have not so thin wheels, nor do they have very thick wheels. They may have suspensions, may not have suspensions. This, it emerged, was the category of bike that would work for us. Read on for what happened next …

Read the rest of this entry »

Long exposure shows Roomba cleaning path

May 9th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

If you have been following my tweets, I am a big Roomba fan. I have been quite fascinated by the way the Roomba seems to get every part of the room, detects corners to spend more time and energy there etc. The user manual that comes with it tries to explain that the seemingly random motion is actually a concerted exercise in discovering, maximizing power use and efficiency. However, it’s easiest to understand if you look at the long-exposure shot taken by signaltheorist.

The above image shows the entire path taken by a Roomba over 30 minutes. I would really like to see how this looks in a bigger room.

[Doobybrain via Gizmodo]

Why I love my Saturn Ion: A visual graph of my MPG

May 6th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

We have a 2004 Saturn Ion. Check out the awesome MPG we get on it:

This is real data. From actual data points my wife and I have painstakingly recorded each time we fill up. The spikes in the chart above correspond to road-trips. You can tell by the nature of the spikes that we have not taken more than one-tank road trips lately

Predictably, there is a lower MPG in the winter months where you have more stops and slow-downs.

Corresponding to the above, this is how much we have been using our car:

If you want to record and view data about your car in a fun way like this, head over to http://www.mymilemarker.com

A Brief History of the Web by Microsoft

March 21st, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

These are promotional videos, but quite interesting, as they take a mix of comedians and academics talk about the history of the internet.

View more of these videos at http://windows.com/ie8nethistory

Wordpress auto-updates itself

February 23rd, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Having spent years dutifully upgrading to the next secure version of Wordpress using the famous 3 (or 4) step upgrade, it’s good to see that from now on it will happen automagically.

I see this dialog in my admin interface.

I click on “upgrade automatically” and I am done!

No more download zip, extract onto server, replace files, preserve the .htaccess file and the wp-content folder etc.

Art of Kissing: Invented in India

February 16th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

This special video on YouTube explores the history of how kissing originated and spread across the world. I had no idea that the earliest recorded history of anything even remotely close to kissing was thousands of years ago in India. An interesting watch. Almost makes the case that kissing is not as much an innate primal instinct as it is an acquired social norm. It’s also funny that the modern day India, that I grew up in, shuns this act and is not publicly permissible. In fact, some organizations in India would have us believe that it is a western attack on Indian morality.

“The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” begins production

February 2nd, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

Production on the much awaited Tintin movie has finally started.

“… is being directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by Spielberg,  Peter Jackson (that’s right, Peter muthafucking Jackson) and Kathleen Kennedy, and shot in 3-D motion capture by the geniuses at Jackson’s own Weta Digital.  Epic. These men are titans in this genre. This movie. Will be. The shit. …”

I don’t think I can top that quote!

[via shape+color]

FeedFlix: How much does Netflix actually cost me?

February 2nd, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

If you have always wondered if you are extracting your money’s worth from your Netflix subscription, head on over to FeedFlix. Just “connect with Netflix” and it will fetch your data using Netflix’s APIs and quickly give you graphs like below:

I am paying an average of $0.44 per movie – this includes movies I get as DVDs and those I stream online through my Xbox or Windows Media Center PC. Not bad at all!

[Feedflix]

America’s Most Wired City - Seattle

January 24th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

Forbes reveals that Seattle has overtaken every other city in the country and emerged as the most wired city in the United States. What’s surprising is that Los Angeles (ranked 13), San Diego (ranked 12) and San Francisco (ranked 11) do not make it even to the top 10!

Here’s the top 10 list:

[America's Most Wired Cities - Forbes.com]

Putting conflict in perspective – Israeli/Palestinian Coffin Counter

January 17th, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

Back in August 2006, infosthetics posted the Israeli versus Lebanese Coffin Counter project, which depicted the proportionality of casualties by nationality in the conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

With the dramatic current events of the war against Hamas in Gaza, this project has just been renewed and updated [moiz.ca] with the latest (depressing) casualty figures. Each coffin icon represents a single person killed as reported by BBC News, sorted as either Israeli or Palestinian.

[coffin counter via information aesthetics]

More statistics and background information can be found at http://ifamericansknew.org/

The 27 stamps of Seattle Public Library Passport

January 3rd, 2009 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

To mark the completion of the 10 year Libraries for All program that resulted in 27 new and remodeled branches all around Seattle, the Seattle Public Library created a Passport project to encourage people to visit all the branches and experience how they function to serve each neighborhood in the city.

Starting September 13, 2008, they started giving patrons a passport book that contained information about the Libraries for All program, a map of the city with each branch marked out and individual pages with details about the renovation/building project for each library, its pictures, bus routes. Each branch page also had a blank space to get it stamped from the branch when you visit it.

Click on the image above to see a detailed view of each stamp.

My wife, Jen, and I graduated from the School of Information (a hybrid library science school) at the University of Michigan before moving to Seattle this summer. Jen works for the Seattle Public Library and that’s how we learnt about the Passport program. We thought it was a great way to learn about the city and observe and interact with the people here.

Partly because of my wife’s work and partly motivated by the passport program I got a chance to visit all of the branches. It was great to observe the different architectures, sizes, resources of all the libraries. It was even more interesting to see the stamps and learning about what they signified – which was obvious in some cases and not so obvious in many.

Though I had been to most branches in the past few months, I had often forgotten to get my passport and didn’t get a stamp. Last week, I was a little alarmed to realize that I only had 10 stamps out of the 27 and only five days to go for the deadline of January 2, 2009. Unlike others who did more interesting things like hiking to each branch, or running to each branch in one day, I took the lazy way by just driving to the remaining 15 or so branches.

Both Jen and I completed our passports and submitted them. Now we are both waiting for the prize drawing on January 7, 2009. It seems that by December 17, only about 130 had people completed their passports. Factoring in the last minute scramble that many might have done, the odds still don’t seem so bad.

Simpsons Makes Fun of Apple and Steve Jobs

December 30th, 2008 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

Had somehow missed this.

[via Gizmodo via Teencast]

12 days of Christmas - Indian Style

December 25th, 2008 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

[via (possibly) viral email]

Arundhati Roy’s response on the Mumbai Terror attacks

December 13th, 2008 by sameer | Posted in General | No Comments »

Arundhati Roy makes very interesting points through a view at the larger context of the history and incidents in the Indian subcontinent.

Some interesting excerpts:

If you were watching television you may not have heard that ordinary people too died in Mumbai. They were mowed down in a busy railway station and a public hospital. The terrorists did not distinguish between poor and rich. They killed both with equal cold-bloodedness. The Indian media, however, was transfixed by the rising tide of horror that breached the glittering barricades of India Shining and spread its stench in the marbled lobbies and crystal ballrooms of two incredibly luxurious hotels and a small Jewish centre

All these years Hafiz Saeed has lived the life of a respectable man in Lahore as the head of the Jamaat-ud Daawa, which many believe is a front organization for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He continues to recruit young boys for his own bigoted jehad with his twisted, fiery sermons. On December 11 the UN imposed sanctions on the Jammat-ud-Daawa. The Pakistani government succumbed to international pressure and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. Babu Bajrangi, however, is out on bail and lives the life of a respectable man in Gujarat. A couple of years after the genocide he left the VHP to join the Shiv Sena. Narendra Modi, Bajrangi’s former mentor, is still the chief minister of Gujarat. So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India’s biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata.

In this nuclear subcontinent that context is partition. The Radcliffe Line, which separated India and Pakistan and tore through states, districts, villages, fields, communities, water systems, homes and families, was drawn virtually overnight. It was Britain’s final, parting kick to us. Partition triggered the massacre of more than a million people and the largest migration of a human population in contemporary history. Eight million people, Hindus fleeing the new Pakistan, Muslims fleeing the new kind of India left their homes with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Hafiz Saeed of the Lashkar-e-Taiba is from Shimla (India) and LK Advani of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh is from Sindh (Pakistan).

Anti-terrorism laws are not meant for terrorists; they’re for people that governments don’t like. That’s why they have a conviction rate of less than 2%. They’re just a means of putting inconvenient people away without bail for a long time and eventually letting them go. Terrorists like those who attacked Mumbai are hardly likely to be deterred by the prospect of being refused bail or being sentenced to death. It’s what they want.

What we’re experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet’s squelching under our feet.

The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.

[via Guardian]

Fall panorama

November 6th, 2008 by sameer | Posted in Environment | No Comments »

All the shades of fall outside the window. Panorama created using Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Book Art

September 26th, 2008 by sameer | Posted in Art, Culture, Environment | 1 Comment »

Interesting art made with books. I wonder what my librarian friends would have to say about it

[DarkRoastBlend via Gizmodo]

Japan’s online social scene isn’t so social

September 26th, 2008 by sameer | Posted in Culture, HCI, Privacy | 1 Comment »

MSNBC has an interesting story on the differences in how social networks are used in Japan as compared to the US.

Welcome to Japan’s online social scene, where you’re unlikely to meet anyone you don’t know already. The early promises of a new, open social frontier, akin to the identity-centric world of Facebook and MySpace in the U.S., have been replaced by a realm where people stay safely within their circles of friends and few reveal themselves to strangers.

[from MSNBC]

It reveals some interesting facts about people’s expectation of privacy.

People rarely give their first names to those they don’t know well. Spontaneous exchanges are uncommon even on the tightly packed trains and streets of Tokyo. TV news shows often blur the faces of those caught in background footage and photos to protect their privacy.

This is quite in line with the open letter to Google last month by a Japanese blogger pointing out the cultural inappropriateness of Google Street View

According to the morals of urban area residents in Japan, the assumption that “it is scenery [viewable] from public roads and therefore it must be public” is in fact incorrect. Quite the contrary, [these morals state that] “people walking along public roads must avert their glance from the living spaces right before their eyes”.

Japan’s cultural difference was again brought out in the response it gave to Apple’s iPhone 3G launch in July, 2008.

"The iPhone was welcomed here with long lines of gadget fans. But it’s also being seen as shockingly alien to this nation’s quirky and closed mobile world… For example, young people in Japan take for granted the ability to share phone numbers, e-mail addresses and other contact information by beaming it from one phone to another over infrared connections. Being without those instantaneous exchanges would be the death knell on the Japanese dating circuit," Kageyama reports. "While the iPhone has Bluetooth wireless links, it has no infrared connection."
"Also missing from Steve Jobs’ much-praised design: a hole in the handset for hanging trinkets. Westerners may scoff at them as childish, but having them is a common social practice in Japan," Kageyama reports.

This is a good example of the tension between centralization and specialization of service and control. Making one device or service for all is a very cheap process; however, making it fit the long tail requires intense resources for customization and is harder to achieve.

Feature Creep

August 26th, 2008 by sameer | Posted in General | 1 Comment »