Matt Langer: this could have been like ten tweets or one blog post so here's to economy i guess -
oh you spent the last 5 minutes reading a wired article instead of playing farmville? mazel tov, kiddo, here, have a 20 minute panel to tell us all about the emancipatory implications of helvetica neue at a conference that establishes exclusivity not with intellectual rigor but with a $7,500 ticket price.
Testify.
Complying with Federal Election Commission regulations can make some committees cranky, but rare is the one that threatens legal action if the FEC doesn’t acknowledge that it’s non-filing is, in fact, a proper filing. Let me introduce you to the American Promise PAC’s “April Quarterly report” (emphasis mine):
April Quarterly Report- No Contributions No Expenditures Cannot file a Form 5 as my FEC number C00513887 does not qualify. This is an official submission of my quarterly reporting requirement,and should be considered as such.The failure to timely acknowledge this report as the true and correctApril Quarterly Report 2/28/2012 - 3/31/2012 required for theAmerican Promise PAC may result in civil money penalties assessedagainst the FEC. Thank you for your cooperation. Sincerely, Gerard Tobin Owen Drumm American Promise PAC
Go big or go home, I guess.
The Morgue Lives!
It is a cramped basement annex, stacked high with metal filing cabinets, full of three-fourths of a million pounds of old newspaper clippings and photos, going back 160 years.
It’s simply called “the morgue.”
To get here, a reporter must leave the shiny glass tower that is the 40th Street headquarters of the New York Times, walk a half-block down the street, and descend three levels below the sidewalk. There, in a nondescript tower, she will emerge from a dirty elevator, walk past a janitor’s closet, then past a giant, rusted pump contraption with running water, and finally reach a pair of metal doors. There are glue traps with belly-up cockroaches in the corner.
This is hard to relate without sounding like bragging, but here goes: Carolyne wanted to see a video of MLK speaking (we were at his memorial last Saturday), so after dinner we watched a clip from his “Mountain Top” speech. I told her that it was the last one before he was assassinated.
Carolyne watches these kinds of historic videos very closely. At the point when King says that’s he’s not fearing any man, she turned to me and asked, in all seriousness, “Did he know he was going to get shot?”
I don’t know what age that question may have dawned on me, but I’m pretty sure I was not in kindergarten. How did we get here?
I’m struggling with how to answer that beyond, “You’re not really supposed to pick up on these things just yet, kiddo.” Part of me erupts in quiet amazement; part of me worries that she’ll want to read and watch and witness things that are very difficult to comprehend on an emotional basis. You want to protect your child, but you also want her to know that life is complex, that people inflict terrible violence on each other, that good people - and joy - can be taken from us.
Of all the things that make up parenting for me, calibrating the emphasis between her joy and her inquiry is one of the hardest to manage. I really wish I knew what goes on in that brain of hers sometimes.
All in a row.
NYT @ SXSW: Getting a decent data connection at SXSW can be a challenge, given... -
Getting a decent data connection at SXSW can be a challenge, given that it attracts what may be the most data-hungry crowd in the world. With a project called Homeless Hotspots, a marketing company is helping out with this, while helping the homeless and promoting itself. Homeless people have…
Hey, it’s another reason that SXSW sounds like the worst of humanity gathered together. This is unbelievably idiotic.
A few minutes ago I was skimming through a large folder of recently archived photographs, looking for images of captured Somali pirates for a NYT story in-works, when I found this one.
It’s of Commander Layne McDowell, banking inside the cockpit of an F/A-18F over Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, made while reporting on a decade of changes in American air-to-ground war. I carry a camera to help my work. I am not a photographer. Make no mistake about that. But I’ve found that a camera is an essential tool for fact-gathering. It is also a form of digital notebook, as it is much more efficient to take photographs of passing scenes and people than to try to describe them solely by relying on longhand in a traditional paper notebook. (I use the old-school notebook, too, of course; together these tools complement one another, safeguard accuracy, and allow me to double-check memories and impressions quickly and with confidence.)
Work habits can lead to all manner of surprises. Often I don’t have time to look carefully at all that ends up on the HD cards or that gets saved to a remote hard drive (remember: photography is not my primary job; it’s a tool supporting my primary job). Then, sometime later, like today, I click on the tiny icons and images I did not know I had made pop up on my screen. This was today’s surprise. We’ll make it THE GUN’s photo of the day.
Now back to looking for those frames of the pirates…. and to more posts, and an edit of the story on-desk.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH
By the author. Earlier this month, inside Vengeance 13, a U.S. Navy strike fighter on patrol over southern Afghanistan.
I spent last weekend back in New York to attend the NYTimes Hack Day. It was a lot of fun.
My project wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as most of the others and with a late start I didn’t get to finish it in time to submit.
Well now its up, courtesy of the 6 hour flight to Seattle. Its called The Last Word.
It takes the Homepage feed, grabs the last paragraph, takes the last line and imposes it next to the photograph. Sometimes its a compelling combination, sometimes not.
The feed is freely available as javascript you can pull into your own little web app via a callback. I have a cron job updating it every 30 minutes. The result is uploaded to a Dropbox.
GIS Analyses of Dr. Snow’s Map
Snow’s map, demonstrating the cholera deaths clustered around the Broad Street well, provided strong evidence in support of his theory that cholera was a water-borne disease. Snow drew Thiessen polygons around the wells, defining straight-line least-distance service areas for each. Each Thiessen polygons is comprised of boundary segments that perpendicularly bisect line segments drawn between the point it contains and adjacent points. A large majority of the cholera deaths fell within the Thiessen polygon surrounding the Broad Street pump, amd a large portion of the remaining deaths were on the Broad Street side of the polygon surrouding the bad-tasting Carnaby Street well.
THE GUN by C.J. Chivers: Alive Day, Joao Silva. -
October 23, 2011 marks the passing of a year since Joao Silva stepped on a landmine in southern Afghanistan, losing both legs and suffering other injuries from which he is still recovering. Please join Joao’s family and friends in wishing him well — and a long, full life, the value of which…
