August 2008 Archives

As I clock out for the Labor Day weekend and recover from the ChaCha article, probably the most exhausting project I’ve put together for Geek Out New York (except the one I’m working on now), I feel like spreading a little love to friends.

First: Johnny Dale is a model GONY reader, always passing along tips when they strike him and boosting my ego at opportune moments. He is writing a book and publishing it on—get this—the Internet! I know what you’re saying, “I’ve read free online literature before,” but this is different from the erotic Blackadder fan fiction you’re used to. Johnny’s The Darling Budds is a real book with characters and plot and wit and suspense and whatnot. I’m not caught up through all the chapters, but I love it so far. Read it, and tell your literate friends.

Johnny Dale also has the worst top Google result I have ever seen.

Next: Ryan Middleton is another nerdy friend of GONY with interesting creative pursuits. He moonlights as the “human pushover” on East Village Radio’s “Blue & Fish in the Morning, New York’s only nighttime shock-jock morning show. Ryan barely got a mention in a recent New York magazine profile of the show’s capable hosts, Rory Albanese and Jimmy Donn¹ (i.e., Blue Tornado and The Tropical Fish), but his integral role as verbal punching bag should not go unnoticed. He’s a funny guy in his own right. The show’s podcast is kind of creaky and barely work-y, but there’s some listening material in there for your Labor Day travel. Episodes air via the EVR website Thursdays at 9:00 p.m.

I've started reading Gizmodo again after its extended absence from my RSS list (not out of ill will, just boredom). A substantial chunk of the site has evolved into a melange of Lego idolatry, Star Wars references, and unceasing repetition of the phrase “pew pew!” which I gather is supposed to be cute. I may be getting too old for this s***.

Amid the chaff, though, is Matt Buchanan’s superb feature “Giz Explains.” Each week, Buchanan selects a technology topic and writes a readable, pithy primer about it for Gizmodo readers. It’s a simple idea, yet Buchanan pulls it off so well that I’m always left impressed. The clever thing about the pieces is that they are accessible to a novice audience but still useful for the experts. I’m familiar with the various battery types—lithium ion, lithium polymer, nickel metal hydride, etc.—but it sure is nice to have all the wisdom on battery tech in one place.

Buchanan’s Illustrated Guide to Every Stupid Cable You Need was a tour de force, and his rundown of words we use to describe tiny laptops was a needed dose of terminological sanity.

Gadget blogs have a tendency to go native and drown themselves in a sea of acronyms and meaningless marketing-speak. I doff my hat to Buchanan for writing about gadgetry in plain English.

Who invented sunflower-seed butter? What is the capital of Brazil? Is there a P. F. Chang’s in La Jolla?¹

For brief moments over the past month, I cared intensely about the answer to each of these questions. And then, after firing off a pithy text message, I didn’t. My fingers twitched and sweat beads formed on my forehead, like I was a game-show contestant poised to win the $25,000 jackpot if only I could find some delicious P. F. Chang’s Chinese food in the greater San Diego area.

The low-stakes truth is that I was a “guide” for ChaCha, the human-powered search engine, and I was being paid 20 cents a pop to obsess over questions that wouldn’t have occurred to me otherwise.

ChaCha works on a concept so simple and dreamy that it belongs more to the 1999 boom era than the jaded Web 2.0 epoch. A ChaCha user texts a question to 242242 (which spells CHACHA on a phone keypad) or calls it in to (800) 2-CHACHA.² A ChaCha “Guide” on the other end then searches the Internet and texts back a suitable answer, usually within three minutes. It’s Google, de-automated.

In a world accustomed to the terse language and instant gratification of a Google search, who would bother posing their questions to a slow, fallible human being? And what would they ask? Do people treat the fleshy search engine differently from the soulless, computerized version? I signed up as a ChaCha guide to find out—and to get me some of that sweet $0.20-a-query scratch!

whats the most popular color

One of the basic tenets of improv comedy is that “No” is not an acceptable response. In an improv scene, you’re supposed to imbue yourself with the spirit of “Yes” or, even better, “Yes and….” Always accept what your scene partner gives you and add something to it. “No” stops a scene; “Yes, and” makes it more exciting. Talk to a longtime improv comic about their craft—or get within 20 feet of them, really—and they’re likely to tell you how the spirit of “Yes, and” informs not only their art but also their lives. ChaCha operates on the same principle.

Becoming a ChaCha guide is a bit more difficult than typing in your email and choosing a password, but not by much. ChaCha puts a scholarly face on its guides, boasting that they are “brainiacs” and “smarty-pants” who navigate that shadowy realm the kids call “cyberspace.” Smarty-pants. Uh-huh. As you might imagine, the only item you really need on your résumé to become a ChaCha Guide is some mid-level Google-fu.

Nonetheless, before being allowed to bear the ChaCha standard, you must prove yourself in a series of trials. Trial the first: an informational video. The ludicrously named Esther Friend, VP of Guides, narrates a welcome video filled with vapid PR tidbits. It’s the type of video that media-relations interns burn to CD and stuff in a media packet, never to be viewed again. I let it play—fearful that the ChaCha masters could tell if I clicked “next page” before the video was over—and made myself a sandwich.

Fans of Saved by the Bell already know what came after the boring informational video that I ignored: a test on the boring informational video that I ignored. I had visions of failing and being relegated to the transcription group—this is where ChaCha puts recruits who are capable of working a mouse and keyboard but can’t manage much else. The transcribers type up messages left on the ChaCha 800 number and then pass the requests along to the “real” guides. These serfs of the ChaCha universe only get a nickel per query, and their job is really boring. Nobody wants to be a transcriber.

I had no reason to worry. The tests were common sense, for the most part. Don’t insult the customer. Don’t answer abusive questions. Put a professional face forward. Et cetera.

There were, however, some non-intuitive nuggets to come out of the training process. For instance, “I don’t know” is never an acceptable answer. “Mission #1: Give the InfoSeeker the answer to his/her question,” demands a Search University training document.³ It sounds like a simple, noble aim, until you get a question like this:

who is delilah snuffwouter

I made up the name “Delilah Snuffwouter” for this piece, but the name I actually was asked to research by this ChaCha user was no less strange or obscure. It generated no hits on any search engine. I frantically leafed through dozens of “Search University” PDFs for guidance. “Answers taking longer than 3 minutes risk leaving customers unsatisfied,” they scolded. I had to punt:

Delilah Snuffwouter appears to be a very private person — there are no results for her on any search of the net!

A little too cute, right? I was desperate.

Each response has to be accompanied by a source-citation URL that the user can follow for more information. My citation for this query was a blank Google results page. It was a bullshitty way of saying “I don’t know.” A couple of days later, I got an email from ChaCha QC, the guide gestapo. “After a Quality Control review,” said the form letter, “one or more of your recent responses were found to be outside the guidelines for source citation.”

There is a ChaCha-approved trick for handling Delilah Snuffwouters—the essence is that you have to make your bullshit slightly more elaborate—but guides have to contend with countless other, more vexing unanswerables:

what is the most popular color

best basketball player

Are choir people nerdy?

I learned by looking at other guides’ answers and browsing the internal ChaCha forums that if you can’t provide the answer, any good-faith answer will do. I don’t know what the most popular color is, but here’s a little tidbit about the most popular color among U.S. automobile buyers. Choir people come from all walks of life, but here’s some advice about dealing with cliques. And so on. There was a moment of serendipity when I realized that it was, in fact, quite energizing to accept that whatever question was asked, I would provide an answer. The job became easier. That’s the “yes” part.

The “and…” came when I added what ChaCha calls “magic.” That’s their precious catch-all for bits of personality you might add in if you have space left after your answer. (Since the reply goes by SMS, you’re limited to 160 characters in theory, but you get less space in practice because the message also has to include your source link). ChaCha encourages you to include a closer like “Have a great day!” or “Thanks for using ChaCha!”

There’s rarely room for such verbosity, so I followed the lead of other guides and adopted shorter sign-offs like the nonsensical “ChaCha on!” or, for sports requests, “Go team!” I got more creative on occasion, capping my response to a search for nearby Italian restaurants with “Try the linguine!”

At first, I hesitated to dabble in this supposedly magical small talk. I figured that the people-powered aspect could not capture the imagination of users like ChaCha marketing hoped it might. ChaCha may be a human search engine, but it’s still a search engine. People are looking for information, right? Well, yes. And…

r u really a person

In the 1957 office comedy Desk Set, Katharine Hepburn heads the research department at a TV network where efficiency expert Spencer Tracy is overseeing the installation of EMERAC, a marvelous new computer. EMERAC appears destined to replace Hepburn and her team of librarians, who research esoteric questions like “What are the names of Santa’s reindeer?” and “How much does the earth weigh?” for the network’s productions. The climax of the movie is a frenzied showdown between the sprightly librarians and the mainframe. Spoiler alert: The humans win.

Either the 51-year-old Desk Set was remarkably prescient or search engine frustrations are not so modern as popular conception would have it. EMERAC’s seams start to show when it gets a question about the Watusi tribe. The machine churns and spits out an irrelevant review of the film King Solomon’s Mines because it contains the keyword “Watusi.”

Because of such pitfalls inherent in keyword searches, the grail of “natural language search” pops up from time to time. Any number of startups have laid claim to the technology, and most have faded away.

AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com) strongly implied during their early years that they could parse natural language search. AskJeeves.com publicity encouraged users to type in full sentences, the way you would pose a question to a fellow human. This was some clever obfuscation. The truth was that AskJeeves.com’s language-parsing was low-tech (or high-tech, depending on your point of view): they had a team of editors compiling result sets for the most common questions. If your question hadn’t been covered by an editor yet, AskJeeves.com reverted to, surprise, a standard keyword search.

The latest hope for natural-language search is Powerset, a startup that Microsoft purchased in early July. “Powerset’s goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language,” according to the company’s about page. For the time being, Powerset is limiting their search to Wikipedia, reasoning that some playtime in this limited but diverse sandbox will allow them to hone the technology for the greater web.

The Powerset homepage invites you to try some pre-selected natural language queries and watch the site find “articles related to the meaning of your query.” One of the provided examples (as of this writing) is “where do hurricanes hardly ever happen.” When I click on it, Powerset churns and spits out an irrelevant article about the film My Fair Lady because it contains the phrase “hurricanes hardly ever happen.”⁴

Don’t blame me; I wasn’t trying to fool the machine. They told me to ask it that!

As it was in the mid-20th Century, a person remains the best natural-language search engine. I found that many ChaCha users, though, were unwilling to accept this reality. Having seen gimmicks like AIM chatbots and AskJeeves, customers were hesitant to believe that a company would invest in notoriously unreliable human technology. There has to be a clever script behind the curtain, they reasoned. Hence tire-kicking questions like:

r u really a person

The skeptics didn’t surprise me. The believers, the people who accepted that they were corresponding with another person, they were the ones that threw me, as they posed questions I didn’t expect. My greatest stroke of naïveté as a fledgling guide was to envision myself as the ultimate natural-language search engine. I was going to be the chipper, professional front end to a vast store of useful information, the Desk Set Katharine Hepburn, model 2.0.

Of course, I wasn’t a search engine or a librarian. Those models were meaningless here. With ChaCha, there’s a human on the other end, you have complete anonymity, and you can ask any question you want. And I expected people to ask about state capitals.

Should I leave my bf coz he smk pot

Some of them did ask about state capitals, of course. Most did not. Many users asked about sex, this being the Internet and all. The Search University primer on “Prank, Joke & Sexual Queries (PJS)” was one of the first bits of required reading, and it proved handy as I fielded a litany of “How do u get a girl to do anal sex,” “what is a spinchter,” and so on. The PJS were annoying, but most were easy to answer, so I fired off a reserved, professional reply and moved on.⁵

The puerile stuff was obviously part of the job. People like to type naughty words into computers, and none of it offended my delicate sensibilities. Then this came up on my ChaCha console:

Should I leave my bf coz he smk pot

Was this another prank? Could’ve been. And it could have been a query with heart, with genuine concern. I veered to the latter interpretation, eager to help. Was I qualified to advise her on this topic? As “Savage Love” columnist Dan Savage has observed, the only qualification one needs to give advice is being asked for it. So, no, I wasn’t qualified, but yes, I was.

I was thrilled to encounter a moment of genuine human contact amid the crassness. For an instant, a sterile information exchange became warm and personal. Then I remembered the clock. I had two minutes and change to enlighten my friend, within a 160-character limit, on her delicate social quandary. I found a relationship advice site to act as a decoy “source,” typed up my advice to her (talk to him about it, not me), and said goodbye forever. ChaCha forbids asking follow-up questions, and even if she sent another message, one of the other thousands of guides would receive it. Conversations are impossible.

I came to resent this tyrannical brevity. Many guides find the PJS the most annoying aspect of the ChaCha experience; I found the meaningful queries more exasperating.

Is mine the one true church?

Gosh, I don’t know what your church is, or how I would answer that, it’s an interesting question, but I’m running out of space, so: mayb?

What are good things to do with a two month old baby?

How do I tell her I like her

Why is ann being such a bitch

Touched yet frustrated, I fell into a habit of unconsciously assigning a backstory to these tantalizing glimpses of scandal flashing across my console. Sometimes it was pretty easy. The user asking questions like “When the mineral feldspar reacts with carbonic acid, what is formed?” doesn’t recognize that cheating on one’s geology homework degrades one’s moral fiber.

“How do I get rid of hiccups?”—I conjectured that this person had a case of the hiccups.

Many questions, though, lent themselves to a more engaging sort of daydream. When a user asked me how long cocaine stays in your system, I imagined the star quarterback making a dumb one-time mistake at a party. He had to pass a drug test before the big game, and he needed my shakily researched wisdom to save the day!

My working theory became that people are just looking for a friend. They’re lonely and reaching out for companionship, however fleeting. Suddenly, even the jackass-y sex queries seemed reasonable. “How many times a day do you masterbate,” asked one fellow. Perhaps he has an addiction problem and wants to compare himself against a societal benchmark, I reasoned. Because who would joke about a topic like masturbation? Not my customers!

“What is cunniligis?” asked another user, who I presumed to be a clumsy first-time lover preparing for that special night. Trying to please your partner, I mused, is such a sweet thought.

A few days after I stopped answering queries regularly, I thought back on all my lavish narratives and wondered whether people were trying to feel companionship so much as I was trying to feel useful.

how much do they pay u?

The ChaCha Guide software has a View Recent Activity feature that’s good for some voyeuristic thrills. The idea is that you look back on user’s searches to provide them a seamless experience. When they text “Tell me more,” you can look in their history to find out what the heck they want to know more about.

I liked the recent activity window because I got to see how other guides answered questions. Observing other guides is a great way to pick up tips, learn ChaCha style, blah blah blah.

I used it to find bad answers and laugh at them, solidifying my self-image as the greatest guy sitting at a computer typing stuff into a search engine IN THE WORLD. Not the healthiest exercise, I concede.

Recent activity logs revealed that there were two camps of ChaCha guides. Most made a good-faith effort to provide users with an informative answer. The rest, like the worst overseas call-center jockeys, only wanted to get rid of their customers as fast as possible, pocket their 20 cents, and move on to the next.

Given that there was little financial motivation for being a model ChaCha employee, I was surprised at how few guides fell into the latter, speed-racer category. I estimate that more than 90% of the answers I saw were excellent. Still, crummy “I don’t know” answers or sloppy cut-and-paste jobs were not so rare. When I started researching this piece, I expected the lack of a reward system for quality work would top my list of criticisms. Then, a few weeks ago, ChaCha addressed the problem—in the worst way imaginable.

“Introducing Pay-For-Performance!” cried the latest hip-hip-hooray missive to the ChaCha guide mailing list. ChaCha is now basing compensation on guide performance! Yay! “Top Guides” who complete more than 300 high-quality searches per week will get paid 20 cents per search, same as before! Yay. Everybody else will only get 10 cents per search! Yay…?

Esther Friend fired up her Handycam to record a breathtakingly unconvincing recitation of corporate B.S., which was subsequently posted to her Guide Blog. I’ve put a copy up on YouTube, but I’ll post a transcript if it gets yanked:

Watch her eyes go dead as she tells guides a select few of them will have the “opportunity” to get paid the same amount they were already getting paid. It really is a strange video; the blank backdrop and her seeming state of duress give the impression that she was hurried into a back room and told to read the words the angry man held up in front of the camera.

As ChaCha launched an all-out effort to insult the intelligence of its employees, the internal forums went ablaze with rage, concentrated in one mega-thread, “$0.10 to ANYONE not making top guide list,” which as of this writing contains more than 11,000 replies. The forums provide insight into the demographics of the ChaCha guide team: a lot of stay-at-home moms, students, part-timers. Tickers from The Ticker Factory are popular as signatures on the forum. Here’s an example:

Paying down a cell-phone bill is a common goal. I also saw “son’s college fund,” “Re-cert for my paramedic license,” and simply “Makin tha monayyy.”

The initial post-“opportunity” anger concentrated on the shock of the pay cut, but as the thread evolved, the frustrating opacity of the evaluation process became topic A.

A guide may only become a “Top Guide” and get that primo $0.20/search rate if they complete a certain number of queries and achieve a 95% “quality” rating. Trouble is, the quality rating is a black box administered by QC, the aforementioned ChaCha secret service—emphasis on the “secret.” Guides can’t check their quality rating, and the criteria for a quality response are undefined. Aside from the occasional email from QC, the only way a guide knows how much she’ll be paid that week is when the weekly Top Guide lists are released on the Official Guide Blog. Under the new system, if you work hard, you receive $0.20 per search, unless you don’t.

It’s a bum deal. As one forumgoer remarked to a guide who defended the new system (he was in a small minority), if you are willing to have your paycheck cut in half on an arbitrary basis, “I’m sure there are plenty of companies that would LOVE to have you.”

It’s folly to take the pulse of a community by way of a message-board threads. Yet it is hard to overlook the message sent by 11,000 mostly furious and often eloquent replies.

ChaCha made some tweaks to the program to placate its employees, but the changes were of little substance and the system remained very confusing. Since everything makes more sense when a cartoon character explains it, Friend added a “Guiding With Gus!” comic to her Guide Blog. I thought I understood the new framework pretty well until I went guiding with Gus. Now I’m lost again.

Click the image for a larger, legible version.

Even if “Guiding With Gus” weren’t such an eye-searing bar-chart of madness, the ChaCha guides, despite their vocal love of the company, would remain unsatisfied. They know the “how.” They’re asking about the “why.” ChaCha guides are trained to believe a good question deserves a good answer. And right now, ChaCha’s future is nothing but questions.

Vintage jewelry open today near 2 line NYC?

Pay-For-Performance was a Trojan horse, although that’s an insult to the Greeks. At least they managed to fool some of the Trojans. No objective observers, including the ChaCha guides, see the new payment plan as much more than a desperate attempt to cut costs.

A couple of dimes per query is a pittance from a guide’s point of view, but it is a lavish expenditure on the corporate level. ChaCha recently emailed its guides after a busy July Sunday to boast that the service had answered 300,000 queries in a 24-hour period. That’s $60,000 in freelance staff costs for a single day, a hefty amount for a young Internet startup.

Since I’m not a wealthy venture capitalist with an urge to invest, ChaCha isn’t going to let me look at their books. The company’s publicly available financial dossier is a bread-crumb trail—some venture capital here, some “1:1 Mobile Marketing Solutions for leading brands and creative agencies to implement strategic, integrated and targeted mobile marketing campaigns” there.

Text “How does ChaCha make money?” to ChaCha, and if the guide is following marching orders, he will reply with this boilerplate: “ChaCha earns revenue from advertising on its website and through its strategic partnerships.” That’s the extent of the candor you’ll get from the company.

One prevailing theory is that ChaCha will someday charge for searches. Because changing a free Internet service to a pay service always works out great. Another is that they'll add advertising. If a user clicks through to the source website cited in a response, the company inserts a text ad, but even ChaCha admits that less than 10% of users do click through. And there are indications that the company is primping itself for purchase by one of the wireless carriers: This April's CTIA wireless show, for instance, saw ChaCha cozying up to AT&T.

The inability of outside observers to understand the company’s financial plan is hardly a guarantee of eventual insolvency. The Pay-For-Performance debacle seems like a red flag, yet it might shake out nicely for the company. After the frenzy calms, it’s possible that the ChaCha guide crew will settle into two camps: busy, well-trained guides who answer the bulk of the queries and casual, adequate guides who help out during high-volume periods at the dime rate. Still, it’s hard to shake that 1999 vibe.

More disturbing than ChaCha’s tea leaves of fiscal ruin, though, are the industry wonks who delight in reading them. “I Love to Hate This Startup,” boasted TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington in March. Farther off the deep end, gossip site Valleywag took it to a bizarre class-warfare place, ranting, “ChaCha’s new mobile service targets the idle rich: People, like [ChaCha co-founder Scott] Jones, who are used to making other people perform menial tasks.”

It’s all of a piece with the cancerous misanthropy that pervades technology journalism.⁶ Everyone seems to agree that natural-language search is a worthwhile pursuit, but rather than put wiling humans to work, we want to see a company expend a quixotic tide of cash trying to teach computers English. It’s Desk Set all over again, except this time everyone’s rooting for the machine.

ChaCha gives us natural language search right now, and you know what? It’s as awesome as we all hoped. On my wife’s birthday, I outsourced the bulk of the planning to ChaCha. Our only plan was to begin the day at the Brooklyn Museum, where the Takashi Murakami exhibit was about to close. From then on, I decided, the day would take place according to Anna’s whims with an assist for ChaCha. At the museum, Anna noticed that an old ring I got her when we were in college was chipping. Maybe we could look for a “replacement” on the way back?

Vintage jewelry open today near 2 line NYC?

ChaCha found a shop just a few blocks from the subway. How about dessert?

High-rated bakery near the jewelry store

Anna got a slice of cheesecake; I had red velvet (AKA “chocolate with gobs of red food coloring”). And so on. We had a fantastic day, and ChaCha did all the legwork. Granted, I could have researched the day’s activities myself on my smartphone, but I wanted to spend time with my wife instead of tapping out Google searches and squinting at touchscreen maps all day. ChaCha made this possible, and it was liberating. Those “idle rich” sure know how to have fun!

When it works—as it does most of the time—ChaCha fulfills one of the unspoken promises of the Internet. You ask a question, the collective information stores on the Web are put to use, and you receive an intelligent answer. Keyword-based engines already do this for much of the information on the net. ChaCha widens the scope of quickly available information. It occupies some of the functional gap between the simple logic of keyword search and the slower, in-depth Q&A of, say, Ask MetaFilter.

We ought to celebrate such an accomplishment, so while I suspect ChaCha won’t last, I hope that it does. Despite the flaws of this particular implementation or management team, the concept is worthwhile. Let programmers keep chasing dreams of fluent computers and magical search algorithms. For the time being, people are still awfully good at answering other people’s questions. Why not let them?

“Avoid getting wet!”¹

Geek Out

Investigate explosive diarrhea. Lest you accuse Geek Out New York of sensationalism, let it be known that there is a strong medical reason for that slug line (also, it was funny). Lower intestinal distress is the major symptom of cholera, which unhumorously claimed scores of thousands of lives in the nineteenth century. The New York Historical Society’s “Plague in Gotham! Cholera in Nineteenth-Century New York” exhibit, ending August 31, presents artifacts from an age when cholera threatened the evolution of urban areas worldwide. While most of us are at least familiar with cholera as one of many quaint ways to die in Oregon Trail, it’s a disease worth exploring further.

My attention was drawn to cholera after finishing Steven Johnson’s book The Ghost Map, which chronicles the 1854 London outbreak as the dawn of modern ideas about public health. (Snap review: Fascinating, but don’t bother with the filler-y last chapter.) I was stunned to learn that, as the poster above shows, there were myriad prevention/treatment techniques for cholera, yet the most effective treatment (the only effective treatment, really) was to drink plenty of clean water. Seems simple now, but it took decades to figure this out.

Geek In

Enjoy a nice, tall Cold War. Regular readers know I have something of a fetish for the Cold War. The crazy geopolitical permutations, the technological one-upmanship, the larger-than-life politicians—it all gets my pulse racing. It’s easy to take pleasure in the definitive global conflict of the 20th Century when you only had to live through the tail end of it.

For buffs and novices alike, I highly recommend Michael Dobbs’ One Minute to Midnight, a thorough hour-by-hour retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This has to be the definitive book on the crisis, which is extraordinary since no two-week period has caused as much ink to be spilled by historians as this showdown between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Dobbs not only adds new detail gleaned from careful research, he also corrects many longstanding misconceptions, including the famous “eyeball to eyeball” moment off the coast of Cuba, which, as Dobbs explains, never actually happened. That’s not to imply that the drama isn’t intense. Dobbs manages to juggle the complexity of the affair while telling a gripping story. I’m almost finished with the book, yet I hesitate to polish it off because, unlike everyone who was actually there, I don’t want the crisis to end.

I’ve seen a lot of post-apocalyptic imagery this year lately. It would be easy to chalk this up to, say, global warming, and theorize that humanity is confronting its own mortality, but people have always found a reason to imagine themselves being wiped from the face of the earth: nukes, plague, rapture, etc. (Daily Show writer Rob Kutner recently wrote a book about the many ways we might bite the dust.)

I think the reason I’m seeing so many people-free skylines now is more about Photoshop than fatalism. The biggest spark for the trend was I Am Legend, whose one-sheet depicted Will Smith alone in New York City, without even an intact Brooklyn Bridge to keep him company.

Given the prominence of the span in the I Am Legend promotions, it’s no surprise that the coattail-riding History Channel showcased a crappily ‘shopped Brooklyn Bridge for their Life After People miniseries.

Movie Poster Addict pointed out that foreign posters for I Am Legend didn’t necessarily show the iconic Brooklyn Bridge tableau. The poster from Spain evoked New York’s ruin by depicting cars tossed all over the road. I guess in the movie, before everybody dies, they hold a big demolition derby in the streets. Sort of a last hurrah, you know, for the kids.

Scientific American also evacuated New York last year to illustrate their feature “An Earth Without People,” in which they interviewed the author of bestseller The World Without Us. (A lot of media outlets have found a lot of catchy euphemisms for “everybody’s dead.”) This depiction of an overgrown St. Patrick’s Cathedral is novel enough…

…but SA did themselves no favor with their other Photochop, “Crazy Flooded Subway Rat Fun-Time!”

The images of an empty Manhattan probably look bleak to those who don’t live here. To many frazzled New Yorkers, they look like utopia. In the “Luck of the Fryrish” episode of Futurama (the best half-hour of the series), Philip J. Fry tours the underground ruins of Old New York.

Giddy at the deserted metropolis, Fry allows himself to live the dream: jaywalking with reckless abandon.

By my reckoning, no city has been depicted human-free as much as New York. The Omega Man, a previous film adaptation of the I Am Legend novel starring Charlton Heston, takes place in Los Angeles. As you can see in this trailer for the Heston movie, Los Angeles without people has an overall aesthetic of “unentertaining.”

Up against the wall, you mother.

To my surprise, I could only find one image of a post-apocalyptic London, a sign of its decline in global influence. If Adobe CS3 had been around for the turn of the 20th Century, things would be different.

The sharpest-looking no-people city is definitely Tokyo, thanks to the work of one dedicated Photoshopper who goes by tokyogenso. The artist made a few stunning apoc-o-scapes, all of which you can see at Pink Tentacle. The best is the Shibuya progression, which starts at present-day…

…and then…

…and then…

…and then:

Gorgeous. But enough doom and gloom. Maybe instead of imaging the world without humans, we should imagine it with monkeys. Surprise, Tokyo wins again!

(Video also via Pink Tentacle.)

“There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend. Those who have a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig!”¹

Geek Out

Dig it. After perusing the ads for booze, trade school, and dental surgery, many subway riders have wondered, “How do they dig the tunnels for these things?” The modern-day answer is, “With huge, awesome machines.” The city uses tunnel boring machines like the one pictured above to dig tunnels for the East Side Access project, only the second NYC project to use TBM tech. Every day at 2:00 p.m. until the end of August, the MTA Museum in Brooklyn heights (map) screens a film of the TBM doing its dirty work. And now for the joke you’ve all been waiting for: I”m sure you’ll find the film incredibly boring!!!!!²

Rock on, mathematically speaking. The music scene is not my strong suit, but my better half insisted that Battles, a rising star on the math-rock scene, would appeal to my readers. I listened to a few tracks and concluded that she was right. The “math” label apparently stems from the band’s layering of complex tempos in unorthodox (at least for rock) meters, a task that presumably involves some long division, and slide rules may also come into play. This is what Bach would be listening to if he were a raver in 2008. Battles will appear at the Central Park SummerStage Saturday afternoon from 3 to 7.

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Rock on, Mega Manically speaking. If you’ve ever played video games and you’re not excited for the release of Rockman 9/Mega Man 9, you do not have a soul. It’s the first all-new 8-bit Mega Man since Mega Man 6 came out 15 years ago. One can only hope this sparks a trend of game creators returning to the classic 8-bit canvas instead of relying on re-releases of their old stuff.

Number 9 goes up for sale as Wiiware in September, which means you don’t have much time to revisit numbers 1-8 and brush up on your Dr. Wily-fighting skills. If you don’t already have them, I recommend the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for PlayStation 2 as a quick way to collect the earlier entries in the series. (It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.) No time to play them all? Go with Mega Man 2, widely accepted as the best in the series, with good reason. Mega Man 9 producer Hironobu Takeshita told Gamasutra that the game is intended as a follow-up to Mega Man 2 in spirit.

Andrew Mager, “Rejaw launches, but seems a little Twittery”:

If Twitter is a busted old ’66 El Camino, then Rejaw is a Toyota Prius. The new kid on the block claims to be better, but it’s more fun to ride around with your friends in a classic car with the windows down and the [brakes] squeaking.

Wow, this is going to be easy.

It’s the favorite device of technology journalists: the car analogy. Computers are too goshdarn hard and complicated, so when writers need to explain a concept to their dullard readers, they use cars, knowing that even Joe Lunchpail can understand the basic workings of a simple automobile.

The car analogy would be the perfect literary crutch, except for the fact that computers are not that much like cars. So car anologies are not only condescending, they are usually wrong-headed as well.

As a public service, Geek Out New York will compile car analogies in technology journalism on the following schedule: whenever I see them.

The inaugural Car Analogy Watch comes courtesy of an otherwise decent piece “The Death of Planned Obsolescence” by Slate’s Farhad Manjoo.

[B]ecause music players, cell phones, cameras, GPS navigators, video game consoles, and nearly everything else now runs on Internet-updatable software, our gadgets’ functions are no longer static. […]

To appreciate how amazing this is, imagine if the same rules held sway in the car industry. Five years after you bought it, you could take your beater to the shop, and after a quick patch it’d be blessed with electronic stability control, a more fuel-efficient engine, and a radio that received satellite broadcasts.

Gadgets receive free feature upgrades: I don’t get it.

Cars receive free feature upgrades: I get it!

I get the feeling that when NBC purchased the broadcast rights to the Olympics, they got a whole bunch of beach volleyball on sale, and now they have to get rid of it all before it goes bad. Bitching about the TV coverage may be the most tiresome sport of the Olympics, but forgive me because beach volleyball places a close second.

Beach volleyball is a fine game; it’s just that there is so much of it.¹ The words “Misty May” are on the verge of losing all meaning; if there’s any detail of May’s life that has not been conveyed to me in a soft-focus human interest piece, it must be terribly obscure.

Whenever I’m stuck watching the 17th preliminary qualifying provisional warm-up practice round of any sport (but especially beach volleyball), my mind turns to one thing: This is time that would be better spent on table tennis.

The intensity of table tennis competition in the Olympics—indeed, its mere presence—is among the Games’ most charming quirks. A sport mainly restricted to rec rooms in the Western Hemisphere gets to give out medals just the same as the one given to the fastest man in the world. And table tennis offers more than novelty; it’s exciting to watch on its own merits. The pros do borderline-magical things with that plastic ball. I want to see more of it.

Sure, there is the official NBC Olympics site, where you can watch footage of all the Beijing events. It’s a great resource (despite using the cruddy Silverlight plug-in), yet it would be nice to have some commentary from a former player who could illuminate the game. Most of the analysis on the NBC site comes from AP reports, which offer little beyond raw scores and gems of insight like this:

When the Chinese bounced back to take the third game, the audience waved their arms and Chinese flags.

Notwithstanding the paucity of information, I’ve sifted through the table tennis action so far to find a few highlights. I can’t embed video from the copyright-frantic NBC mothership, so links will have to suffice.

Men’s Team Group C, Brazil vs. South Korea: The 2008 Olympics eliminated the doubles event and replaced it with a hybrid “team” event. It’s a best-of-five-matches format, and the third match in each contest is a doubles match. The rest are singles. The change may have inflamed passions in the table-tennis world. I’m indifferent. Doubles is cool but crowded.

The first two matches of this contest are the most exciting. In the first, Brazilian Thiago Monteiro keeps the Korean Ryu Seung Min off balance and manages to entertain dreams of the upset. Not long after, the Korean team stops toying with its opponents and destroys them in a flurry of velocity and topspin.

Watch for the moment in the Monteiro-Ryu match when the two competitors take a break from the action to look for their ball. (Really!)

You may wonder why some players hold their paddle like a tennis racket and others hold it like a pen. Buried in the NBC site is a nice explanation of the different grips from American table-tennis Olympian David Zhuang. (Look in the upper-right corner of the linked article text.)

Women’s Team Group A, China vs. Croatia: This is a one-sided contest, but it gives you a taste of the Chinese crowd’s passion for the sport. The venue is mostly empty for these early round-robin showdowns, but they still manage to make a lot of noise as the Chinese women embarrass the Croatian players, whose circumspect coach doesn’t have any answers for his charges. Croatian Tamara Boros likes to throw in an ultra-high serve, which is always fun to watch even if it doesn’t do her much good.

The contest was marred by tragedy when a member of the Chinese delegation was struck by a stray NBC Olympics logo.

Women’s Team Group B, Singapore vs. United States of America: Here’s one for the patriotic viewer, although you might not enjoy the result. Hopefully, NBC will post a replay soon of the Group B Netherlands vs. United States contest, where the U. S. of A. fared a little bitter.

Pro player Larry Bavly offers running commentary in a text box below the video on this one. That feature is defunct on most of the footage, but it’s a treat here.

Men’s Team Group C, Sweden vs. South Korea: I confess, I didn’t finish watching this match. I did, however, enjoy the video feed’s extensive look at the pre-game preparation rituals. Above you see an official wiping the table clean.

Then he gets out a ruler and measures the net. Yup, six inches high, just like it was yesterday, and the day before that. This is not what the guy had in mind when he said he wanted to work in professional sports when he grew up.

“You can’t live on amusement. It is the froth on water, an inch deep and then the mud.”¹

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Amuse yourself. Head to the Cyclone Exhibition Center under the roller coaster of the same name at Coney Island for the Astroland Archives: Back to the Future exhibit. The display of photos and memorabilia commemorates a time when the word “Astroland” really meant something: a future of glass-bubbles gondolas, shiny jumpsuits, and hot dogs—hot dogs in space! As you browse the exhibit, you’ll surely wonder why they tore down awesome stuff like the Mercury Capsule Skyride and the Diving Bells. I guess the future turned out to be less amusing than we’d imagined.

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Make your own Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to see The Dark Knight, but it was sold out, so we saw WALL-E instead. I’m happy we did, as (flamebait alert!) I ultimately liked WALL-E much better than Dark Knight, which I thought was just fine—aside from the Joker, pretty boring, actually.

But back to WALL-E. The film had a smart message, but some negative nancies have argued that it’s a touch hypocritical to make a movie about the human race drowning in junk and then promote it with a slew of plastic junk. Not a bad point. If the cognitive dissonance makes you uncomfortable, there’s a great Instructable on making your own EVE robot. The likeness of the pattern is spot-on.

This is a touch off topic, but the oceans are a pet cause of mine, and I’m always pleasantly surprised by the New York Times’ reporting on fish issues. Yesterday they published a story about tropical fish being gathered off the Long Island coast, a phenomenon I’d never heard of before.

Anybody who went to college in a cold climate knows the shorts-in-January type. He’s the guy that insists on wearing sandals and board shorts in the dead of winter because the 20-below wind chill “doesn’t bother him.” It’s typically a freshman, as by his second year, shorts-in-January guy will substitute warm sanity for the misguided rebellion of frostbitten calves.

As the Times reports, there are shorts-in-January fish, as well, although they’re not such willing participants in the deal. The Atlantic Gulf Stream carries some newborn tropicals—e.g., butterflyfish and angelfish—from their home off the Florida coast to northeastern shores. While their hippie college counterpart only has to endure the chill and the laughs of his peers, shorts-in-January fish suffer a somewhat crueler fate when winter comes: They die.

Except for a lucky few who are “rescued” for exhibit at places like the New England Aquarium. (A nice spot, by the way, if you hit it at an off-peak time when there aren’t field-trip hellians running around and screaming “WHERE’S NEMO? NEMO! NEMO? NEMO!!!”¹) More aquariums in the area are realizing that this is a cheap way to catch tropical fish (no need to ship them up from the South) and it has less of an ecological impact, to boot.

This encouraging paragraph appears near the end of the piece:

[New England Aquarium senior aquarist Brian] Nelson, a self-described “coral reef geek,” is experimenting with medicines to treat fish infections to improve their odds for survival. In an aquarium, Gulf Stream fish could live for up to 20 years, depending on the species and how well they adjust to the tank.

The current state of aquarium medicine is an embarrassing mishmash of tinctures and tonics; we’re still relying on the equivalent of castor oil when it comes to curing sick fish. Very few veterinarians are trained in fish medicine, so amateur aquarists are forced to rely on message-board wisdom and commonly resort to dumping antibiotics into infected tanks, which is a bad idea in any number of ways. Godspeed, “coral reef geek” Brian Nelson.

The Center for Book Arts, a small non-profit organization that fosters the art of book-making, is celebrating books that act like games, and vice versa, at their 28 W. 27th St. headquarters tomorrow evening. One of the CBA’s summer exhibits is “Fun & Games (and Such…),” and as you might guess from the title, the curators have a pretty loose take on what qualifies as a game.

Fuzzy definition notwithstanding, it looks like tomorrow’s Gaming Night, which kicks off at 6:30 p.m., is a worthwhile way to spend your evening (and the $10 admission fee).

Former Brooklynite Sally Tosti will talk about the construction of her Coney Island puzzle box, pictured above. As the folks at Make magazine would say, it’s a good candidate for a DIY “remake.”

Also, artist Barbara Rosenthal will play her decades-old You & I Card Game with the audience. I first came across You & I while I was researching games’ narrative theory in college. You & I is a word game in a non-traditional sense, essentially treating language itself as a game with a set of unspoken rules you make up as you go along. Before I get too hippy-dippy and the word “game” loses its last shred of meaning, suffice it to say that You & I is worth checking out, and playing it with the creator is probably a good introduction.

A discussion of game theory, a presentation from Purgatory Pie Press, and a couple of live performances round out the night.

(As a side note, after poking through the CBA website, it seems the overwhelming majority of their patrons are women. I guess that makes sense, as I can see that book-making could fall under the “crafty type” umbrella, but still, I’m surprised. I would have figured it as a gender-neutral hobby.)

“If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?”¹

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Rise up. The charmingly named Aeroballoon is in Central Park through most of August, and what better way to beat the heat than by getting 300 feet closer to the sun? From that vantage you can really shake your fist at Sol, let it feel your rage.

The Central Park Observancy has brought the “adventurous tethered balloon ride”² to Central Park’s Cherry Hill to celebrate the park’s 150th anniversary. Unless you have rich friends on CPW, it’s the cheapest way to get a 30-story view of the park. I’m mainly enticed by the idea of telling the fellows down at the speakeasy that I went for a ride on the “aero-balloon” today! What a marvellous contraption!

For some ballooners, though, 30 stories is a trifle. Gizmodo brings news of seven Lego Mindstorms robots that ascended to 30 kilometers above the Earth’s surface—about 330 times higher than the Aeroballoon—taking pictures on the way up (and down). You probably can’t get together your own weather balloon and engineering team on such short notice; you can still snap some amazing shots with a more old-fashioned device, the kite. Charles Benton’s Kite Aerial Photography is a good place to start for help with supplies, techniques, etc. This isn’t exactly something you can try in midtown Manhattan, but don’t lie, you’re getting out of the city this weekend, anyway.

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Wield the blade. Sure, Soulcalibur IV is the latest blockbuster game release this week. If you’re going to hit your local game store, considering leafing through the trade-in bins for an old copy of Soul Blade for the PlayStation. For whatever reason, Soul Blade (née Soul Edge), the predecessor to the Soulcalibur series, never gets its due—probably because the majority of players were introduced to the series on the Dreamcast, where Soulcalibur ruled supreme. Soul Blade has many of series’ familiar characters, and it holds up well.

The summers of 2000 and 2001 were rife with afternoons spent battling my cousin in the Soul Blade arena. I always figured we were pretty evenly matched, until one night when I did something to piss him off (we don’t remember exactly what). My cousin took a drag off his cigarette, pounded a few Double Stuf Oreos, and spent the next hour destroying me in 30 consecutive matches. At the end, I was in tears. They were not tears of sadness. Rather, they were borne of awe and admiration. Hope you inspire such respect in your opponents this weekend.