For a while I wondered why NYTimes.com shows a list of the "most e-mailed" articles as its measure of Most Popular, rather than simply most viewed. It does seem to work pretty well, but surely leaves out the voices of a large number of readers who never e-mail articles.

The other day the answer occurred to me: the "most viewed" list would probably read like the tabloid version of the Times. After all, look at the stories featured on Buzzfeed, which aims to identify the most popular trends and measures their popularity (outwardly at least) by number of clicks. It's pretty much a collection of the trashiest, dumbest stuff on the internet. Well...this is the internet, that's probably an exaggeration. But it's certainly toward that end of the spectrum. Jason Kottke serves as their design advisor, and the feed of four stories on the front page of kottke.org is, to me, an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise great site. There's a fine line between the wisdom of crowds and the mob mentality.

I thought something was odd on Flickr when I noticed that my sets and photostream were now referred to as containing so many items rather than photos. And it certainly seemed like something was up when a group page said the group accepted "photos and videos." Now it turns out they've added video to the site.

It must have been a bit painful design-wise to change every instance of "photo" on the site to "photo and video" or "item" ("photostream" at least has not become "itemstream"). But I must say the way they are handling it, with a 90-second limit in duration, really seems right to me. The types of videos I've been taking with my camera are just what they have in mind: in some cases, scenes for which motion or sound is intrinsic to capturing the idea. In others, as they put it, slices of life. I already have some in my mind that I will definitely be uploading.

Nice use of the word "frangible" in this otherwise disturbing Times article about deadly equestrian accidents:

The current debate over safety comes nine years after another rash of deaths shook the eventing community. In 1999, five British riders died in a matter of months and calls flooded in to make cross-country courses safer.

In response, British organizers developed frangible pins that can be inserted into certain fences to allow the rail to drop when a horse hits it. Although the pins have been available since 2001 and have been shown to be effective in helping to prevent rotational falls, they are used in only 4 percent of obstacles in Britain, where they are mandatory on certain fences. They are even scarcer in the United States.

Frangible means that when deformed it breaks into fragments--sort of the opposite of shatterproof. I never knew this word before but I like it a lot. It's as if they took fragile and tangible and mashed them up.

But I wonder if the article is leaving out some detail. I have a vague memory of watching an equestrian event on television and seeing rails easily knocked away when the horse didn't clear the jump. It seems like it would be terribly dangerous if they were firmly anchored to the fence. The simplest solution seems like having the rails rest in grooves cut into the sides of the fence. But perhaps that is the commonplace and the frangible pins are a further improvement. Going further, why not make the whole rail out of some cheap, flimsy and fragile material, so that it just gets obliterated when hit? I don't know what material would be optimal, but there must be something.

Bonus question: how do they make the "breakaway" bottles used for slapstick?

According to the Times's article on Googlegängers,

In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word “lane,” not “street.”

How about that? No wonder I always find myself wandering drunk along Jay St. at 3am, with no idea how I got there. I assume they shy away from occupational examples given that surnames used to come from occupations, but I was still amused at this sentence in a story today about pilots:

Thus, Mr. [Jason] Captain, who looks forward to being called Captain Captain, turned down a job at American Eagle Airlines, the regional division of American Airlines.

The main thrust of the article is about the habit of using Google to keep track of people with your name who have a web presence, and competing with them for search engine rankings. I've been doing quite poorly at the latter; the first results for my name that actually refer to me are on page 6. A developer of educational software and an art director take up many of the results ahead of me. Then again, I've done little on the web that emphasizes my own name, rather than a username or a band name, and I continue to belong to zero social networking sites.

I generally avoid the political here, but a recent Times article (what can I say, they're giving me a log of blog fuel lately) about the Olympic protests is too rich with irony and questionable reasoning.

The [Olympic] committee members who gathered at a hotel in central Beijing offered harsh words for demonstrators who used the relay to publicize issues ranging from Tibetan religious freedom to environmental concerns. Gunilla Lindberg, a vice president of the committee, likened some of the more aggressive protesters to terrorists and said they had emboldened committee members to keep the relay going.

“We will never give into violence,” Ms. Lindberg said. “These are not the friendly demonstrators for a free Tibet, but professional demonstrators, the ones who show up at G-8 conferences to be seen and fight.”

Gotta love the choice of the word embolden there (on the reporter's part). Secondly, "We will never give into violence"--unless it's happening in China, and they don't even let any journalists into the region where it's happening, in which case we will essentially give in by ignoring it. Thirdly, "professional demonstrators." Who's paying them, the Big Tibet lobby? Fourthly, they "show up...to be seen and fight." How dare they! Okay, I need to stop now.

Denis Oswald, a committee member from Switzerland...added that those who disrupt the relay “do not respect the freedom of people who want to enjoy it.”

Whoa, way to turn it around on them Denis! Except that I think the point is that the protesters see the Olympics and the relay as implicitly condoning China's oppressive regime. The argument is about whether or not that is the case, not whether it's okay to protest anything that some might find enjoyable (the event wouldn't be happening if no one supported it). It is, maybe, a difficult question how exactly to treat undemocratic countries these days, but these people are hardly advancing the discourse.

Yeah, this entry is really late, even later than the Spain entries, which were quite late, but it still has to be written. Just allow yourself to be taken back to the heady days of August 2007. We'd just returned from Spain and, settling in at work, I fired up Gothamist and saw an announcement that the Rentals would be playing at the Nokia Theatre that night. Whoa, the Rentals?! As Scott later said, I didn't even know the Rentals were still a band, let alone playing shows. The project by Matt Sharp of Weezer was one of the few remaining bands that I loved in my youth but had never seen live. In fact I had hardly ever heard of them ever playing any shows, though Scott had seen Sharp play a hazy solo show when he was doing country stuff.

But wow, did I want to see them. The Rentals' first album, Return of the Rentals (1995), was a wonderful pop confection. The lyrics were nothing profound or strongly emotional, but the melodies and vocal harmonies were brilliant, and in my opinion the pervasive use of the Moog was pretty creative; it was a nice change in timbre from the usual distorted guitar.

The second album, 1999's Seven More Minutes, was a document of Sharp's time in Barcelona. The music is a bit stranger and more powerful. The lyrics are musings on ambiguous relationships and taking it easy, and odes to a life in Spain that couldn't last very long. There are a lot of guest spots: Damon Albarn of Blur, Donna Matthews of Elastica, and the album often sounds like a party, though it was recorded in London over the course of two years, with different people dropping by now and then to contribute. The record is for me a perfect evocation of the idealized Europe, and it means a lot to me even though I've never experienced it at all the way he did.

So my thoughts after reading about the show, in rapid succession, were... damnit! Why do I always hear about the shows the very day they're happening? And then...could tickets still be available? What the hell is the Nokia Theatre?

Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who had forgotten The Rentals were even a band, and tickets were still available at the box office after work. I had gotten in touch with Scott, and he had agreed to come along. The Nokia Theatre turned out to be a somewhat bizarre proposition: a spotless venue underneath Times Square, featuring spacious carpeted hallways and colored lighting, cell phones in display cases, and a concession stand with brownies and sandwiches. It felt more like a movie theater than a place to see a rock show, but I have to admit some things about it were a clear improvement. We could sit down on the ground without being trampled or getting filthy. And the floor in the concert room was split-leveled, so that we could stand pretty far back from the stage and still have a great view. We spent the opening band's set sitting down looking at photos on my laptop, and when it was time for The Rentals, it almost felt like cheating to be seeing them without having suffered on any long lines or stood in a sweaty, violent crowd for hours.

When they came out, the only member I recognized other than Sharp was Rachel Haden, but that was to be expected after so long. The band was tight, and the sound was extremely clean, almost too clean in that it put the performances under a microscope. But it was great to be able to hear vocals so clearly with a band that uses them so well. The set was well chosen, and included the majority of both albums and a couple of new songs. Matt Sharp was animated but geeky as ever, frequently making big enthusiastic gestures or pretending he was being blown backward. Some other highlights for me:

• Finally understanding the lyrics to the song "Barcelona" (I had never bothered to look them up)


• Petra Haden's cameo and vocals on "Friends of P." She was hit by a car in 2000 and suffered debilitating injuries and a coma. I had no idea it was that long ago already, but it was still good to see her in good health.


• They played "I Just Threw out the Love of My Dreams", which was originally released as a Weezer b-side to "The Good Life" but was sung by Rachel Haden and has a strong Rentals sound to it.

The ending of the show was bizarre as well. As they started to play a second song during the encore, an employee of the venue ran onto the stage, angrily shouting "No!" and started disconnecting the instruments from the amplifiers. At one point he rubbed his fingers together, giving the sign for money. Matt Sharp shrugged and said "there's nothing we can do," and the band trudged offstage. We speculated that the issue was overtime pay for the venue's employees, but it was only 11pm, and given that I've never seen this happen before in a dozen years of attending shows, it seemed unnecessary. Perhaps this was the inevitable crack in the Nokia Theatre's sterile veneer, but it couldn't ruin a great time that I would never have imagined happening twelve hours earlier.

The story of the Austrian woman kept prisoner for 24 years, along with the children she had as a result of rape by her father, has the makings of a Michael Haneke film. Hard to believe that the man's wife remained ignorant for all that time while living right upstairs.