Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-09-19
pretty amazed at the campus and facilities while helping out the wife setup her room at the new RFK-CS ‘the most expensive school ever’ #fb # took photos helping the wife ready to teach. great to see the money go into a school for once: RFK Community School http://bit.ly/9yNz2a #fb # recently made amazing smashed [...]
Bookmarks from Saturday June 19th-Friday June 26th
“Riches can be lost, fame can flee, but music — ephemeral as it is, just molecules of air being pushed about — stays with you. It really doesn’t get any better than this.”
link: Renewable Music: No greater pleasure
“You might have thought that with the chief of police and all those command officers present that the operation would have been run more smoothly. If that was indeed your expectation you are not a police officer, certainly not one with the LAPD. Police officers everywhere know, and LAPD officers might know best of all, that the degree of success in any tactical operation is in inverse proportion to the number of command officers present. Seldom has this proven more true than in downtown Los Angeles Thursday evening. I even saw, while running to one trouble spot with my colleagues, an assistant chief who was also running, but in the opposite direction. (It was just as well; he only would have been in the way.)”
link: Pajamas Media » What I Saw at the Lakers Riots
“In my second year I worked as his teaching assistant. CalArts had no grades, but we did have pass, high pass or fail. John’s system was if we went down the roster and could remember the person, we passed them. If we could remember the person and the work, it was a high pass. If we couldn’t remember them, we failed them, but if they came back and argued for another grade, they would pass. It was a brilliant system that could never work today.”
link: John Baldessari’s former students share memories – latimes.com
“I don’t want to be like Henry Moore,” he said, “just making big monuments for public spaces, like the one beside the Met on the piazza over there. Yet I’m currently involved in a piece I didn’t want to do, for a major American orchestra I have a long history with. I wanted to write a string quartet, but this orchestra is having its centenary and they really pleaded. Eventually I had to give in.”
“I have yet to eat at the Kogi truck or any of the “new” catering trucks. I will not dare turn my back on my beloved loncheras, so I haven’t had the opportunity to taste their food, a fusion of Asian and Mexican, enter The Red Hot Kitchen. I never thought that eating a tofu burrito would be so delicious. And the salsa ? Mathematical.”
link: LA Eastside » Red Hot Kitchen
“The main problem is that most of the places in 90042 that are good to watch the deportes, are not the places that are open this early morning. (Oh, the days when Mr. T’s Bowl opened at 6AM and the drinks were correctly priced.) That being said, there are a couple of good places to catch the games with people here.”
Highland Park World Cup Fever « 90042
“One particularly interesting suggestion is to have journals publish lists of rejected papers along with the accepted research. This would act as a sort of public punishment and might encourage scientists to submit their research to appropriate journals on the first try. Another method to decrease the science community’s focus on metrics would be to allow tenure candidates to submit just their top few papers for evaluation. One commentator notes that, unlike in most fields, science output is not directly proportional to effort. Instead of ranking scientists purely on their publication records, credit should be given for all sorts of activities that don’t necessarily come across in traditional metrics. Establishing publicly available datasets, serving on committees, and developing new experimental set-ups should all be taken into account in hiring and tenure decisions. More journals should follow the leads of PLoS ONE and The Journal of Negative Results and begin publishing negative or inconclusive findings.”
link:School Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause – NYTimes.com
“Locke High represents both the opportunities and challenges of the Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort, financed largely by the economic stimulus bill, to overhaul thousands of the nation’s failing schools.The school has become a mecca for reformers, partly because the Department of Education Web site hails it as an exemplary turnaround effort.But progress is coming at considerable cost: an estimated $15 million over the planned four-year turnaround, largely financed by private foundations. That is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that the Department of Education has set as a cap for any single school. Skeptics say the Locke experience may be too costly to replicate.”“When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, ‘You’re insane,’ ” said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. “But when you look closely, you see it’s not crazy.”
Quality, not quantity: ending science’s “academic prostitution”
“Then I read it and responded,” said Mrs. Holzer. “Although it had no plot line. That worried me a little. I see now it should have worried me more. Basically ‘Dude’ was everyman. Everyman who loses his innocence and fights to regain it. But ‘Dude’ was also Gerry Ragni’s own life. His memories. Temptations. His fears. His struggle to create. He’s one of 10 children from a poor Italian family in Pittsburgh, you know. When he was 5 years old, he began painting crazy beautiful pictures all over the walls of his family’s house and his parents couldn’t stop him. Even then he believed he was a genius. That belief has made him tireless.“
“The Dude” New York Times Review 10-22-72
Bookmarks from Saturday June 13th-Friday June 18th 2010
The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries | A Hamburger Today
this looks awesome. DIY + nerd science!
It’s Complicated David Souter finally tells Americans to grow up.
“Souter’s speech thus represents much more than an ode to a changing Constitution or a forceful admission that something that sounds suspiciously like “empathy” means that “judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own.” Souter’s words even transcend his own high-minded call to “keep the constitutional promises the nation has made.” What Souter asked Americans to do in his Harvard speech is to live with ambiguity. To, in his words, acknowledge that there is a “basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise,” while recognizing, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ formulation, that “certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny.” He is telling us to stop dreaming of oracular judges with perfect answers to simple constitutional questions. He is telling us, in other words, to grow up.”
Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors
“interestingly, they also find students whose professor had higher student evaluations typically did worse in subsequent courses. They attribute this to the “teaching to the test” that they think may go on in classes where professors have high student evaluations. Secondly, they find that students who took Calculus I from professors with lower student evaluations did better on subsequent courses. ”
The Civil War as Revenge of the Nerds – Personal – The Atlantic
“There’s a way of looking at the ugliness after Reconstruction–the rise of the Lost Cause, the Klan, the lynchings–as a tragic search for Southern white male identity. First the old slave patrols go. Then the Confederate Army is subdued and humiliated. Then blacks began to dominate “manly” athletic pursuits. Then Martin Luther King exposes the immorality of the Southern system. Reeling from “each successive volley, the Southern racist–and really any white racist–is left with a question: If the Southern white man is proven inferior physically, mentally, and even morally, than what is he?
HEY STOUFFERS! F$$K YOU IN YOUR F$$KING TOASTED A$$HOLE.
via . « Grocery Eats groceryeats.com post very NSFW (but very funny)
Almost All Is Vanity – PostClassic
“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist. I and my 400 closest friends don’t fit any of these markets.”
“Success Is Just Another Form of Failure” – PostClassic
“The artists, on the other hand, are at a permanent disadvantage. The most creative of them cannot present their work with the kind of empirical verifiability that translates as prestige going up the ladder – except by winning awards administrated by other universities. And those who aim for and achieve any kind of popular or commercial success virtually negate the explicit aims of the institution.”
Bookmarks for May 31st through June 4th 2010
tried a tumblr blog to post bookmarks, but it ended up being too much work and i finally have a workflow that makes my posting of my weekly bookmarks much quicker. i’m a pretty voracious reader and for whatever reasons (partially b/c i’m always looking for libretto sources and maybe to not face my own soul crushing existence) i like to share what i find interesting each week. i also realize that on some OCD weeks i can probably bookmark more than anybody could read so i’m going to try and pare this down to around ten each friday.
“To be clear: the $5 million is not needed to square a deficit. Homeboy did not spend itself into a $5 million a hole. It has been struggling for nearly a year to make up for the loss of grants and big ticket donations that vanished into the abyss of the collapsing economy. This slowdown of the funding stream was combined with the burgeoning need for Homeboy’s services, a need that the same economic meltdown engendered. The organization patched together operating cash for as long as it could. Then one day it couldn’t any more. That day was, officially, last Thursday.”
WitnessLA.com » Blog Archive » Fr. Greg Boyle, Homeboy…and the ‘No Matter What-ness’ Factor
“The flavor of Centina’s lechon is subtle, with the freshness of the pico de gallo playing off the rich chunks of pork. Eyeing a container of Centina’s merciless habanero salsa, which in the past I had often ignored because most of the dishes at Chichen Itza are already so well spiced, I decided to give it a little shake into my torta. The flavors fused together as if suddenly I was tasting a new breed of spicy pig.”
link: Like Day and Night: Lechon at Chichen Itza and Havana Mania – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink
Amazing Archival Footage Of A Soviet Nuke Plugging A Leaking Gas Well
when i die this is how i want to go out. great 2nd line performance tribute to brandon franklin
YouTube – Tribute to TBC’s Brandon Franklin: A Closer Walk With Thee & I’ll Fly Away
::: A chronology of computer music 1906 – 2009 :::
“Google Analytics is now letting users opt out of having your information, including your IP address, sent to Google’s central servers if you install a browser plug-in for IE 7 or 8, Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox. Google Analytics program manager Amy Chang described the new tool as a way to “provide even more choice and transparency for both website owners and users.”
link: Google Offers Choice to Opt Out of Web Analytics | Threat Level | Wired.com
“Economists teach us that institutions exist to lower transaction costs. Yes, they’re prone to all manner of pathology; longtime readers may have seen me refer to some. But if you’re looking for a place that combines geographic propinquity of teachers and students, the availability of financial aid, lab and studio facilities, philanthropic support, tax support, and some level of quality control, you’re looking for…a college. You could try to cobble together something on your own, of course, and some of that is to the good. But to assume that turning loose tens of millions of high school grads to email random and now unpaid professors for “incredibly generous” emails that will prepare them for the twenty-first century is just silly. It does not work like that. It will not, and it cannot.”
link: Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on DIY U
Top 10 Asian Noodle Bowls For Under $7 – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink
“There would be only one ballot, open to all candidates and voters. The top two vote-getters, regardless of party, would advance to the general election, similar to the way local officials are elected in California. No party primaries. No party nominations. But candidates could list their party affiliations
The goal is to force candidates to appeal to a wider range of voters than just the ideologues in their own party. Hopefully some pragmatic moderates would be elected, particularly to the Legislature, which is now polarized by partisanship. At the least, primary voters would be given a wider selection of candidates.
Power would be taken from the party pooh-bahs and given to the public. That’s one reason they fear it.
Politicians also complain that in some heavily Democratic or Republican districts, they might be required to run against a fellow party member in November, meaning real competition. That may be inconvenient for them. But it’s a better deal for voters, providing them with a more meaningful choice of candidates.
The only reason to vote “no” on Prop. 14 is if you’re satisfied with what has been happening in Sacramento. If you’d like to shake things up and try something different, vote “yes.”
link: Capitol Journal: A voters’ guide to California’s 5 ballot measures – latimes.com
To Live and Eat in Highland Park
NELA yorkblvd points out that 5 NELA resturaunts made jonathan gold‘s/LA weekly’s 99 Things to Eat in LA Before You Die list. not to be a hater, but the list gets smaller if you remove that highland park adjacent tourist trap for the westsiders and the our own hipster vietnamese restaurant with incredibly poor service and a $9 veggie pho (i’m not bitter). so i will leave you with three selections that both mr gold and i can agree.
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Huarache de Cabeza
A huarache, the definitive unit of Mexico City street food, is a flattish, concave trough of masa shaped like a size-12 sandal, pan-fried or deep-fried, then smeared with beans, sprinkled with meat and layered with lettuce, grated cheese and cream. Part of the fun is eating the thing — a huarache is too brawny to attack with a flimsy plastic fork, and you will either burn your fingers or wait for your lunch to cool into corn-flavored cement. Emily Post provides no guidelines for eating a huarache. You can have a huarache topped with almost anything, from the black corn fungus called huitlacoche to standard-issue steak, but I like it best with cabeza — rich, gelatinous meat pulled from a cow’s head and cooked down into an ultraconcentrated essence of beef. El Huarache Azteca #1, 5225 York Blvd., Highland Park. (323) 478-9572.
El Atacor #11’s Potato Tacos
You will encounter many schools of thought when it comes to these tacos, some of which call for coarsely mashed spuds, others for herbs, and still others for a wallop of chorizo. But all pale before El Atacor #11’s tacos de papa: thin corn tortillas folded around gooey spoonfuls of puree and fried to an indelicate, shattering crunch. The barely seasoned potatoes ooze out of the tacos with the deliberate grace of molten lava. The glorious stink of hot grease and toasted corn subsumes any subtle, earthy hint of potato, and guacamole-drenched tacos de papasevaporate so quickly from the table that you understand why they come 10 to an order. El Atacor #11, 2622 N. Figueroa St., L.A. (323) 441-8477.
Eibis Restaurant’s Arabes: (via york blvd)
I wrote a pretty sophomoric post a few months ago about hunting down an Arabes truck in East LA, comparing it to Ahab’s White Whale from Moby Dick. The irony of course is that I drive within two blocks of Eibis Restaurant , which specializes in Poblano food, every day. As a prerequisite for writing a food post I have to sprinkle a little knowledge on the dish at hand: Allegedly, Arabes trace their origins to Lebanese immigrants to central Mexico who brought spices from their homelands and applied them to pork, instead of the beef and lamb that was more common in Lebanon. (For two other examples of successful Lebanese-Mexican fusion, see Salma Hayek, and Carlos Slim.) At Eibis, the pork is roasted on a veritcal spit on the street (so as to maximize the exposure to exhaust emissions), filled with some salsa, and rolled into pan arabe, essentially a slightly thick flour tortilla, that has been warmed in corn oil. One word of warning: I don’t think anyone at this restaurant speaks English beyond “hello”. If you don’t speak Spanish, bring a friend, or prepare a script in advance.
Eibis Restaurant 231 North Avenue 50 (323) 999-0109
links for 2010-04-06
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my music for controllers gets released on the blacksquare netlabel
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“Latinos are half of the population of L.A. but they still see us as an uncomfortable appendage, as if we were a tumor that grows on and invades half the body; it is occupying the space but it is not the body itself.”
Kevin Roderick: Daniel Hernandez, the former Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly staff writer now working for the LAT bureau in Mexico City, is not a fan of The Entryway.
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“schliz writes “Like in World of Warcraft, students of Indiana University’s game design classes start as Level 1 avatars with 0 XP, and progress by completing quests solo, as guilds, or in ‘pick up groups.’ Course coordinator Lee Sheldon says students are responding with ‘far greater enthusiasm,’ and many specifics of game design could also be directly applied to the workforce. These included: clearly defining goals for workers; providing incremental rewards; and balancing effort and reward.”"
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“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
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“Hindsight is always 1080p.
One #hashtag does not a trending topic make.
Too many hosts spoil the podcast.
That’s a hard act to unfollow…. and more” -
“Decades before last month’s tragic earthquake, Haiti was in the news because of an upheaval of an entirely different kind. The republic had been occupied by American troops for 19 years. But after a series of bloody massacres and insurrections, the U.S. Marines were withdrawn in 1934. Two years later, an American named Alan Lomax landed in Haiti not with weapons but with a portable recording device. He’d been commissioned by the Library of Congress to document Haiti’s ethnomusic traditions.”
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Exploring the work of the filmmaker who defined the term “eccentric genius.”
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“Huarache de Cabeza
A huarache, the definitive unit of Mexico City street food, is a flattish, concave trough of masa shaped like a size-12 sandal, pan-fried or deep-fried, then smeared with beans, sprinkled with meat and layered with lettuce, grated cheese and cream. Part of the fun is eating the thing — a huarache is too brawny to attack with a flimsy plastic fork, and you will either burn your fingers or wait for your lunch to cool into corn-flavored cement. Emily Post provides no guidelines for eating a huarache. You can have a huarache topped with almost anything, from the black corn fungus called huitlacoche to standard-issue steak, but I like it best with cabeza — rich, gelatinous meat pulled from a cow’s head and cooked down into an ultraconcentrated essence of beef. El Huarache Azteca #1, 5225 York Blvd., Highland Park.”
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great blog by reporters telling the “story about the story”
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the place to go for authentic fish tacos!
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“The school board turns over most of the 30 campuses targeted for reform to instructors.
In an unlikely victory, groups of teachers, rather than outside operators, will run the vast majority of 30 campuses under a controversial school reform effort, the Los Angeles Board of Education decided Tuesday.” -
interesting that this comes out the week i get a mirror-less m43 camera this. i am the zeitgeist!
“Mirrorless, interchangeable-lens cameras could change the game for the DSLR, which has been the fastest growing sector of the camera market.”
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“when i was a kid we had to write on both sides of the paper, i guess i learned not to throw things out from there”
“i really don’t think an image should be owned, how can you own words?” -
” have a particular interest in a style of tuning called just-intonation, where the notes of an instrument are tuned to pure harmonic intervals, which can be expressed mathematically as whole number fractions (2/1, 3/2, 4/3, etc…). Contemporary western musicians are almost completely ignorant of just-intonation, despite its supreme simplicity. Lou Harrison says it well: “It seems to me that children – when they come to fractions in their study of mathematics – ought to be allowed to tune these relationships; &, too, that they certainly might well learn the ratios for at least the two commonest modes of their own culture.”
links for 2010-04-05
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“A year-old music blog. (Wow, time flies.) Dallas based, but needs a transfer to Montreal, stat. First to scoop “Creep” by Radiohead. OK, scratch that: like I said, they’ve only been doing this a year. But if Radiohead ever records a second track named “Creep,” they will definitely scoop that one.
No affiliation with the prog-rock band Muse, especially after The Resistance. Contributors are co-workers Patrick and Fred, the lives of whom are otherwise so packed to the gills that you should have no doubt that The Muse encroaches on their work day. They only really agree on Deftones; Fred otherwise describes Patrick’s musical interests as “strum strum hippie yodel.” Just as Patrick describes Fred’s as “terrible.” Yet somehow the two reach a daily armistice; the written, ever-evolving text of which is known regionally as The Muse in Music.” -
“These are signs seen primarily at Tea Party Protests.
They all feature “creative” spelling or grammar.
This new dialect of the English language shall be known as “Teabonics.”
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“Though it looks kinda boring and unspectacular, this is easily the best example of the dish I’ve had to date. Never mind that the rice and beans were perfect, which in itself is an odd occurrence. The tortitas were the right balance of nopales, tortas, and chile sauce. Even though it was a quite mild sauce in terms of spiciness, it was rich with flavor, the kind you just want to spoon up and drink. Plus these tortas were soft and pliable, though they kept their form. Too many as of late have been quite hard and tough to eat. Not at Lencho’s.”
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“Three weeks ago the hard drive in my MacBook Pro went bad. So far as I can tell, I didn’t lose a single byte of data. Here’s how:”
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“A tribute to the slowness of anxiety, by Instructor of Music at California State University, Fullerton Paul Bailey. His introduction speaks of his distress over the current economic downturn, but the music itself is absolutely timeless.”
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“See, Dr. Drew never met Corey Haim, the police haven’t determined what substance (if any) killed him, but Dr. Drew is pretty certain he knows what killed this total stranger—that’s how great of a doctor he is. He can diagnose and determine cause of death just by hearing someone’s name! He’s basically Miss Cleo but with a medical degree so people (wrongfully) take him seriously”
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“So why don’t I charge? A large part of it is that composing is something I do because I want to, and because I really am passionate about it. Call it a “hobby” or whatever, but it’s what I enjoy doing, and once you start monetizing that, I think it becomes more of a job than something you do as an escape. Don’t get me wrong-I like my day job, I like being a physician, etc. But you can like your job and still get paid for it. For me (and I stress, this is just what works for me), charging for my music is not something I’m interested in. I’d feel like a prostitute. We don’t parent for money, right? I also don’t compose for money. QED.”
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“Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.”
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“I was pretty confident that ‘In C’ was going to have a life, even in the beginning,” he says. “It was a pretty startlingly original idea in its time, and it just came to me. It developed out of a lot of interests that I had at the time. Being able to get this piece written on a piece of paper and still have such a vast potential, I think, is an unusual accomplishment. I saw that, but I didn’t realize how pervasive the influence of that piece would be over the years.”
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very reasonable take on educational reform by the union rep of deb’s middle school
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“Black settlers from what is now Sonora, Mexico, helped establish the first settlement in 1781. The labor of Tongva Indians helped raise the plaza’s church in the 1820s. The histories of L.A.’s Latino barrios and Chinatown also begin at the plaza, which was the site of one of the great crimes of Los Angeles history, the Chinese Massacre of 1871.
In 1909 the City Council banned free speech in public areas except for the plaza — which became a gathering spot for anarchists and radicals of various stripes, including the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon. Chinese nationalists founded a military academy there in 1903 to train men to fight the Manchu dynasty.”
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“Having 80.8% of the alphabet available is significantly below the 99.9% full letter uptime reliability we strive for. Since identifying the root case of this issue, we’ve started bringing vowels back to Gmail, so you should see them back in your account within the next few hours if you don’t already. In the meantime, while you may still see this issue in Gmail’s web interface, both IMAP and POP access are functioning normally. We’ll post an update as soon as things are fully resolved and, again, we’re v3ry s0rry”
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“Minimalism taken to a new level.
Unfortunately for Eastman, he did not live long enough, and these works have been resurrected with great effort.” -
“THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. YOU THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE EVERY SCENE IS DRAMATIC”
