Fascinating. Certainly nails why I am a gun owner, despite being non-violent and non-confrontational. I’m extremely invested in ideals of independence and autonomy.
The web is what you make of it
If you are one of the people who creates amazing experiences and unforgettable moments on the web, watch this video. Go ahead, feel proud. You’ve earned it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk
Nick Pitera Disney Medley
You may remember Nick Pitera from the video where he sings both the male female portions of A Whole New World from Disney’s Aladdin. It has, as of this writing, over 22 million views. Go watch that first, if you’re one of the few who missed it.
Well, he’s back. And this is mind-blowingly awesome:
Marble Machines
These marble machines (with interchangeable components) are blowing my mind.
T-shirts for tall, thin men
I’m over six feet, four inches tall. I’m also long in the torso. As of this writing, I weigh 220 pounds. Not super-thin, but not hefty by any means. Finding shirts that fit me is a challenge.
As the weight of the average American goes, it seems that shirts get more and more square-shaped. I’ve found that for many shirts, larger sizes means that the shirts only get wider. They assume that if you need more room, it is for girth, not height. I need a large shirt for girth, but an XL (or often XXL) shirt for length.
For dress shirts, I have to either buy fitted shirts (~$70) or buy an XL shirt (~$20-50) and have the sides taken in by a tailor (~$15). T-shirts are harder. Paying $15 to tailor a t-shirt seems silly. That could exceed the cost of the shirt itself! And t-shirts don’t have as long of a shelf life as dress shirts, so tailoring seems like a poor investment. I like t-shirts. They’re comfortable, and about the only sane thing to wear in Florida about five months out of the year.
I’ve embarked on an epic quest to solve this problem for me, and for tall or long-torso’d men everywhere.
Pay for alterations
If you’re rolling in dough, you can pay $10-$15 per shirt to have them altered by a professional tailor. Find a shirt that you like for length, and have them take in the sleeves and the body.
Buy a sewing machine
Yes, I totally bought a sewing machine. Taking a t-shirt in isn’t too hard. Lay it down, inside-out, under a t-shirt whose width dimensions you want to emulate. Pin or mark at the overhang. Baste or use a wide straight stitch (and mind your tension). When happy, cut off the excess, leaving about an eighth of an inch. Use an overlock stitch to tidy it up. I think this will by my solution for graphic t-shirts, or t-shirts I get at events, etc. I’ll just get an XXL and take it in.
Search for long t-shirts
For basic t-shirts in solid colors, I found several vendors whose shirts are longer than most, as well as some who sell “long” sizes.
American Apparel — $17.00
I really love the American Apparel “2001” t-shirt. Great fabric, no side seams, longer-than-normal length. Bulk pricing, and a zillion colors. Unfortunately, it’s not quite long enough. If I move too vigorously or lift my arms, I’m in danger of showing skin. this makes me really sad. If they made this shirt two inches longer, it would be my go-to t-shirt. I have a few of these that I wear once in a while, if I’m wearing a higher-waisted jean.
Banana Republic — $19.50
The Pima Cotton Basic Tee from Banana Republic is a great choice that is available in “tall” sizing! The color choices are disappointing (plum, heather, and navy, in addition to black and white), but otherwise I am very happy with this shirt. It is extremely soft, 100% cotton, with a light-to-medium weight. The shirt feels decently well made. At $19.50, it is perhaps a few dollars more expensive than I’d like. The length is pretty much perfect, and it is a slim fit, with perfect length sleeves. I have found that there is some variation in length. Once in a while I’ll get one that is shorter (but still within acceptable range).
LL Bean — $19.95
LL Bean is a great resource for tall, thin men. They made high quality dress shirts, many of which are available in tall sizing, and some which are available in tall/trim-fit sizing (these fit me like a custom-made shirt). LL Bean also makes excellent t-shirts, which are available in tall sizing. Their large/tall t-shirt is great. Excellent quality, perfect length, and a bunch of color choices. The fabric is heavier than Banana Republic’s Pima Cotton shirt, but it also feels sturdier — like it would last through more wash cycles. This is an excellent choice, from an excellent retailer of clothes for tall men.
Duluth Trading Company — $14.50
Duluth Trading Company’s Longtail T-Shirt is actually advertised as a solution to plumber’s crack. The shirt I got in large was indeed very long. But it was also insanely wide. It looked like an XXL, or maybe even an 3XL. The sleeves went past my elbows. What the heck? Additionally, the fabric was very heavy and course — more suitable as a workman’s shirt. Returned it for a refund.
Colossal Clothing — $15.00
UPDATE: Colossal Clothing is now out of business.
Affiliated with American Apparel, this clothing company exclusively makes big and tall clothing. Unfortunately the smallest size they offer in tall is XL. I wrote in the order form comments box that I feared the XLT would be too boxy. When the order arrived, it contained a handwritten note from the CEO saying that they do clothes for Tom Brady, who is 6’4″ and 220 lbs just like me, and XLT fits him perfectly, so that I might be pleasantly surprised by how it fit. That was a nice touch! And truth be told, it wasn’t as wide as I had feared. Roomy, to be sure, but nothing like the Duluth Trading Company one. What it was, however, was crazy long. Like almost four inches longer than the Banana Republic long. It went to my crotch. I liked the shirt — similar fabric and quality to American Apparel, because it is made in their factory — so I took the time to shorten the hem and bring the sides in about an inch. But that solution doesn’t scale. I really wish they offered a large tall size. I made a second order for an XL shirt (not tall). That was actually pretty good. Even their non-tall shirts are taller than most other shirts. Still a bit roomier than I would like, but completely passable. And once again, I got a hand-written note from the CEO on my order form. You can’t beat that for customer service!
UPDATE: TallSlim Tees — $20.00
2016/03/22 — TallSlim Tees reached out to me and sent me one of their shirts last year. I’ve been wearing it for a while and enjoying it quite a bit! They sent me a 50/50 cotton/poly blend shirt. At first I thought it was too stretchy, but as I’ve been hitting the gym more, I grew to appreciate that factor. They also seem to now offer 95/5 shirts. The fit is fantastic. Great length, great width. I feel very comfortable in this shirt (the medium!) I’m definitely ordering more, and will have them in regular rotation.
Conclusion
There are some great options here. TallSlim tees is great for a stretchier, more athletic fit, and is the best shirt for really tall really skinny men. The Banana Republic t-shirt is a good go-to basic cotton shirt for black, grey, and white, and the LL Bean shirt offers a lot of color variety with a thicker, more durable fabric. If your torso isn’t as long as mine, American Apparel is a good option.
On Bing’s use of Google result clicks
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land revealed a few days ago the results of an internal Google “sting” to see if Microsoft’s Bing search engine uses Google search result data as a factor in Bing’s search results.
Short answer: they do, albeit indirectly. Microsoft admitted as much, though they obviously couched it more delicately.
In the case of this “sting,” Google was able to show that if all other factors were isolated, Bing would sometimes copy bogus Google results. Matt Cutts of Google likened this to how map manufacturers sometimes insert fabricated streets onto maps and then monitor the competition to see if they copy these non-existent streets onto their maps.
What’s happening here?
Microsoft is collecting data through the Internet Explorer browser and/or the Bing Toolbar add-on. That data includes the URLs you visit. In order for Microsoft to know which URLs you click on Google, they either need to directly capture clicks, or they need to capture HTTP referrer information along with every URL. Either way, the data they are receiving lets them know what you searched for in Google, and which Google search result you clicked on.
Bing is then using that data as a factor in their algorithm. With all other factors removed, as Google was able to do in its sting, Bing will in some cases use that as the only factor influencing the search results. That’s not direct copy of Google search results data, but it is certainly indirect copying. Microsoft is essentially using IE users as a proxy for this information.
Microsoft doesn’t have to scrape Google’s search results pages (SERPs) and directly copy them. By receiving URL and click/referrer information, they can recreate the results of scraping Google’s SERPs. All they have to do is extract the Google search query (it’s right in the URL), and then group together clicks that come from that Google search result. The most popular one is very statistically likely to be the first result. The second most popular one is very statistically likely to be the second result, and so forth. The popularity of clicks almost always trends inexorably downward as you go down the list of results on a SERPs. This data is used in Bing’s algorithm. We don’t know to what extent it is used, but it was used enough for Google to become suspicious, and in some cases it is weighted so strongly that all other data is discounted.
Why this is lame
My comment on Twitter was the following:
Illegal? Probably not. Unethical? Maybe. Lame? VERY.
Bing uses a ton of factors to craft their search results pages. If all of those factors are saying that there are no results for the current query, there should be no results for the current query. Sometimes “no results” is the most correct result of all.
Instead, Bing seems to be second-guessing itself. Sure, it found no results, but Google did, so they just use that data without even checking it.
So now we get to my point: the most disturbing aspect here isn’t the indirect capturing of data about Google’s search results pages — it is Bing’s lack of confidence in its own data and algorithms. It is tremendously disheartening that the second largest search engine on the web would discount its own data, use its users to obtain data from the competition, and use that competitor data blindly.
I would absolutely expect Bing to be comparing their results to Google, just like I’d absolutely expect Google to be comparing their results to Bing. Microsoft could even use automated capture of user data to do that. Say if the number one result on Google is below the fifth result on Bing, they could flag it for review. Engineers could study the discrepancy, determine which result set is preferable, and tweak their algorithm to obtain a better result next time. But to directly incorporate the competition’s data into their algorithm crosses the line from “comparing results” to “copying answers.” It may not be technically illegal, but it’s certainly worthy of criticism and a certain amount of shaming.
The web needs search engine competition. Google should not be allowed to rest on its laurels. Competing with Google will require genuine innovation, and Bing is undoubtedly doing much innovation. They’ve made great strides. But incorporating Google search result data into their algorithm will retard their progress. The extent to which Bing’s algorithm is influenced by the competition will necessarily relate to difficulty in evolving their own algorithm. Just as there is more to being a student than getting the right answers on a test, there is more to being a search engine than presenting good results. Your process for getting those results speaks to your value to web users and acts as a prediction of your ability to continue providing good results. Bing shouldn’t be trying to be as good as Google. They should aim higher.
You Got Served, Fiddler on the Roof
“Shop Vac” by Jonathan Coulton, Animated
This animation, made by a fan for Jonathan Coulton’s “Shop Vac,” is fantastic:
“Go back and show them the receipt, or you’re going to jail”
I went to Best Buy this evening. I was nearly arrested in the parking lot for refusing to return to the store and show store employees my receipt. Here’s how it went down.
My wife and I bought some movies at our local Best Buy store on the evening of November 26th. In the parking lot, on the way back to our car, a Hillsborough County Sheriff intercepted me, detained me, and said that I had to return to the store and show them my receipt, because it is “store policy.” I politely declined, and said that regardless of their “policy,” the purchases and the receipt were my property, and Best Buy had no authority to demand that I return to the store and let them inspect my property. He replied “they don’t, but I do have the authority.” He continued: “go back and show them the receipt, or you’re going to jail.” Oh how I wish I were making that line up. It feels silly to even type it.
What would the charge be? “Excessive knowledge of the Fourth Amendment?” “Walking in parking lot with intent to mind one’s own business?” Absurd.
I didn’t go to jail. But neither did I return to the store. The officer took the receipt back to the store. Partial victory, I guess. If Sarah weren’t there, I absolutely would have told him to go ahead and arrest me. I really doubt he would have gone through with it. And had he gone through with it, I would have undoubtedly had a strong unlawful arrest lawsuit. I didn’t want to upset Sarah and ruin her evening, so I let him take the receipt. But I didn’t take one step back towards the store. If he was going to threaten to jail me over some stupid store policy with no legal basis, he was going to have to do all the work to jump through the store’s hoops. He brought the receipt back. The only change was that they had highlighted the phrase “Keep your receipt.” That’s rich. I was TRYING to keep it, but this rude officer said he’d arrest me if I did keep it. I asked the officer for his card. He verbally declined to identify himself and walked away. I got a first initial and last name from his uniform, however. Wrote a complaint to Best Buy, conveyed the story to The Consumerist, and am considering filing a complaint with Internal Affairs.
It is absurd for an officer to be threatening to jail someone for refusing to let a third party inspect their property, with no suspicion of wrongdoing. I was in the parking lot, minding my own business. It was an abuse of power for the officer to try to enforce store policies by threatening arrest if I failed to comply.
Remember, unless you explicitly agreed to allow the inspection of your purchases (common examples are Costco or Sam’s Club, where it’s in your membership agreement), you are under no obligation to show anyone a receipt as condition of leaving a store. And certainly not as a condition of getting in your car in the parking lot. If you don’t mind the imposition and the veiled accusation of malfeasance that usually accompanies it, go ahead and consent. If you’d rather proceed with your business, just politely decline. The best thing to do is to say “No, thank you,” and keep walking. I don’t always decline. If they ask me in the store, politely, I often allow it. But I never turn back to a store if they yell after me or if an alarm goes off. At that point, they’ve ceased being polite about our interaction, and I refuse to inconvenience myself at the behest of a boor. If they chase after me like a thief, and demand to inspect my property, it is now an adversarial relationship, and I will not respond with any degree of servility.
I want to make it clear: there was no mention that I might be suspected of shoplifting, and the receipt check seems to have had nothing to do with “loss prevention,” as no attempt was made to cross-reference the items on the receipt with the items I was carrying. No employee spoke to me in the store about checking my receipt. The first I heard of any objection to my egress was after I had left the store.
I understand that theft is a huge problem in retail stores. But I’m not in any way contributing to it. The only “loss” that they’re going to have at my hand, if this isn’t resolved to my satisfaction, is the loss of a customer who has spent over $6,500 at that particular Best Buy store in the last three years. It is not good public relations to treat your customers like criminals and send the police after them to threaten them with arrest for insufficient obsequiousness to the minutia of store policies regarding the use of highlighters by men in yellow polos.
Right to Travel
Something to think about, as the daily parade of TSA abuses continues:
[The right to travel] is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action.
— Shapiro v. Thompson, 1969
More Danny MacAskill
I wish more “extreme sports” focused on the beauty and grace of the achievements, instead of the machismo and the counter-culture. There is art to be had here — don’t bury it.
Vatican on Free Speech
The Vatican, on freedom of expression, condemning the infamous cartoons that dared to show the face of the Islamic prophet Muhammed (ignominy be upon him):
The freedom of thought and expression, confirmed in the Declaration of Human Rights, can not include the right to offend religious feelings of the faithful.
I suspect they’d still burn people at the stake for expressing such illicit ideas if they could get away with it.
Sam Harris on scientific answers to moral questions
Can science find answers to moral questions? The traditional and instinctive answer is no, that science defines facts and that it is about the “is” — not the “ought.” Sam Harris disagrees, and presents an extremely compelling case for an objective, science-based morality. He doesn’t pull any punches, and comes down hard on relativism, multiculturalism, and Sharia. Give it a watch:
US Immigration Policy Bird & Anti-Marriage-Equality Bat
Illustrator Mark Jones, a longtime friend of me and my wife, has just started a fantastic illustrated blog. His first entry recounts how he came to recently move from New York to London and contains this gem:
I think that adequately illustrates (ahem) the ridiculousness and tragedy of the current state of the United States’ immigration and marriage equality policies. Check out the whole thing.
iPad vs Kindle
I get asked this a lot: “should I buy an iPad or should I buy a Kindle?” The TLDR; answer is: no, you should buy both.
When the iPad was announced, I immediately thought “LCD? Well that will be crap for reading.” Actually, it wasn’t half bad… for about ten minutes. The next ten minutes are an odious trudge towards complete ocular misery. By twenty minutes, I develop a throbbing headache, and focusing on the text becomes difficult. I begin reading the same sentence over and over and struggle to shake the idea that if I don’t hurry up and finish the page in a reasonable amount of time the photons it is shooting into my brain might give me cancer. You wouldn’t want to read a whole book on this, unless you could do it five minutes at a time. So what are you to do? Buy both already! You can get the pair for $640 US. If you’re even a “book a month” sort of reader, you’ll use them both enough to justify it.
Don’t fret. They have nearly zero functional overlap. Magazines and news sites on the Kindle? Nah, you want the full color graphics, speed, and interactivity of the iPad. Books on the iPad? Not unless you’re willing to self-trepanate every quarter hour. You’d quickly run out of skull to bore. Beyond that, they have completely different usage attitudes.
With the Kindle, you’re becoming absorbed in a story for an hour or more at a time. You can read in bed, right before you go to sleep, without worrying that it will rile you up. To the contrary, the Kindle relaxes you. You might even take it outside to the pool or to the hammock. Flight attendants will chastise the iPhone-using passenger next to you as the plane descends for landing; but you, the gentle Kindle user, she’ll merely touch on the shoulder and tell you with a smile to make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened.
The iPad wakes you up. BAM! Here’s the news, with pictures and video. TWEET! Here’s the torrential banality of Twitter to distract you from something (or everything) important. TWEET! Here’s the same exclamation used again because you’re paying the insanely addictive Angry Birds game. ZAP! Here’s you firing off an e-mail over your morning coffee.
I’ve never found myself struggling which to pick, much in the same way that nobody is ever torn between having tea and going sky diving. They are different devices, for different purposes. And that’s a good thing in the case of the Kindle. There is something almost drug-like about having a device that can do anything. It’s hard to turn off that ability. With the Kindle, you won’t be thinking about increasing your Fruit Ninja high score, or frantically checking and re-checking your e-mail. You’ll be in the only state that is appropriate when reading a book: completely lost in it.
And the iPad? It lets you live your soul crushing, hyper connected, vanity searching, e-mail enslaved life in any room of the house, instead of being planted in a desk chair in a darkened basement. And it has two other things going for it: it’s easy to set it down and rejoin the world, and sometimes you’ll lose it in a stack of mail for a day and be forced to do something edifying instead.
Update: Jeff Bezos agrees, and says the data bears this out
We’re seeing that many of the people who are buying Kindles also own an LCD tablet. Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies, and web browsing and their Kindles for reading sessions. They report preferring Kindle for reading because it weighs less, eliminates battery anxiety with its month-long battery life, and has the advanced paper-like Pearl e-ink display that reduces eye-strain, doesn’t interfere with sleep patterns at bedtime, and works outside in direct sunlight, an important consideration especially for vacation reading. Kindle’s $139 price point is a key factor — it’s low enough that people don’t have to choose.
Atticus, August, 2010
Atticus seems to get bigger every day. Here he is a week ago in Savannah, GA.
Judge Andrew Napolitano on WikiLeaks
Judge Andrew Napolitano on WikiLeaks and exposing government lies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQsBoYRE-WM
Grotesquely Lucky
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here.
Richard Dawkins
I think about this almost every day. Consequently it irks me that the increasingly clichéd question “what is the meaning of life?” has been epitomized in popular ontology. We are each the winner of the universe’s ultimate lottery, and our response is “It must be a game. Who has some cheat codes?”
Atticus — first months
By popular request, some more photos of Atticus, ranging from 8 weeks old back to his birth day.
Christopher Blizzard: intellectual honesty and HTML5
Christopher Blizzard nails what is wrong with Apple’s “HTML5” demos which use browser sniffing and Safari- and Webkit-specific tech to exclude other browsers with good HTML5 support.
The most important aspect of HTML5 isn’t the new stuff like video and canvas (which Safari and Firefox have both been shipping for years) it’s actually the honest-to-god promise of interoperability.
Indeed. While the new stuff that HTML5 enables is exciting, the most amazing part is that the spec attempts to describe how a parser should implement these features in enough detail that two different browser vendors can follow the spec and end up with a parser that works the same (for the most part) as one created by another team who also followed the spec.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- …
- 21
- Next Page »