Big Contrarian is a weblog by a designer and developer in Chicago. There’s an RSS feed available, if you’re into that type of thing.

Giving a child a laptop won’t necessarily improve their education. It could do quite the opposite:

It turns out that kids in households lucky enough to get computer vouchers spent a lot less time watching TV—but that’s where the good news ends. “Vouchered” kids also spent less time doing homework, got lower grades, and reported lower educational aspirations than the “unvouchered” kids.

As counter-intuitive as it may be, given how we’ve spent the last decade being lectured on how technology engenders learning, Malamud and Pop-Eleches’ research seems correct. While a laptop provides access to a wealth of information, that access is only valuable if the child is either pre-disposed to reaching out for it or is in an environment where he’s forced to. And most kids would rather be on MySpace than Wikipedia.

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A wealthy family hires an architect to renovate their apartment. The architect decides to build an elaborate scavenger hunt mystery into the apartment, without mentioning it to the client:

One day last fall, more than a year after they moved in, Mr. Klinsky received a letter in the mail containing a poem that began:

We’ve taken liberties with Yeats

to lead you through a tale

that tells of most inspired fates

in hopes to lift the veil.

What followed was an intricate series of puzzles and challenges that sounds so convulted I’m betting the guy’s behind Myst are working on their own adaptation:

… the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels …

Be sure to check out the slideshow. The sheer detail and beauty of the puzzles is breathtaking.

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Rasmus Fleischer, Swedish historian and founder of the massively illegal file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, makes so many fantastic points about the dangers of the escalating online copyright war that I fear quoting just one. So I’ll use the same one Reason did:

The real dispute, once again, is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don’t believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties.

I go back and forth on whether file-sharing should be tolerated, banned or just stigmatized. As a believer in, and supporter of the arts, I want to see artists compensated for their work and to flourish. As a developer, I know that there’s little way to guarantee that without fairly heinous consequences, just as Fleischer points out.

I don’t think the answer lay at either pole of the debate though. I do think the answer will inevitably be a technological, not legal one. I have no idea what that answer will look like of course. If I did, I’d be rich enough to live my dream: paying Lou Reed to provide a live, improvised and constant soundtrack to my life.

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David Gentleman created amazing covers for the complete New Penguin Shakespeare back in the 1960s.

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Agreed.

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Buy me this pillow.

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Fantastically simple premise for a blog, Blank is like blank. Example:

Shopping at Ikea is like returning to therapy:
It feels like the right thing to to do, but then you get there and realize you aren’t adequately emotionally prepared.

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Larry makes a fantastic point about the jingoistic sentiment that “programmers from country blah suck”:

It’s not the nationality of incompetence that’s depressing me, nor is it necessarily the scope of the incompetence embodied in a single person, it’s how common it is that I encounter people who have no respect for this activity that I love.

Many so-called developers know very little about development. Their country of origin is irrelevant. Folks think that if they can google-up a code solution, they’re engineers. Which is a bit like thinking that if you can google up a great quote, you’re a writer. It’s fantastically sad how many folks I know write code for a living and haven’t the foggiest fucking clue what real engineering is. And a vast majority of them are American.

As a follow-up, watch these videos of a successful programmer who traveled to India to try to get his outsourced job back.

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Ever the vigilant bitch-slapper, Warren Buffet points out that trying to “beat the market” does very little good in the aggregate and that your broker is a bit of a douche for convincing you otherwise:

A record portion of the earnings that would go in their entirety to owners— if they all just stayed in their rocking chairs— is now going to a swelling army of Helpers. Particularly expensive is the recent pandemic of profit arrangements under which Helpers receive large portions of the winnings when they are smart or lucky, and leave family members with all of the losses— and large fixed fees to boot— when the Helpers are dumb or unlucky (or occasionally crooked).

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Seems “Snow Leopard”, Apple’s sixth version of OS X, is going to be light on user-facing features and heavy on fundamental technologies, like solving the massive cluster-fuck that is developing for a multi-core machine:

“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”

If you’re not a developer (and thank god if you aren’t), this might be a bit much for you, but the gist of it is that future computers are going to have more chips instead of just faster ones. And it makes life hard on the geeks.

Imagine if tomorrow, the most senior, most experienced member of your company quit, and instead of hiring a new one, your company hired 8 interns to replace him. Your task is to delegate work to these 8 fools, while managing to get the old guy’s work done faster. It’s a management nightmare. That’s multi-core development. Handing out lots of small tasks to lots of less than great workers, keeping everyone in sync, and making sure no one is doing extra work. Hell, if you’ve ever had to manage one intern with actual work to do, you should be able to sympathize with our plight.

A few things make this important. It’s a clear signal Apple is going to be moving towards consumer-level products with more than just two cores (the geek and rich-designer targeted Mac Pro and the closet-targeted Xserve are the only shipping Apple product with more than that). And I’m betting it won’t be just be iMacs.

The reason Apple isn’t currently tossing quad-core processors into iMacs is probably double-fold. First, price. A quad-core processor is expensive. Second, value. Right now, very few applications are optimized to use anything above two cores. Hell, you could probably count the number on one hand. Since application’s aren’t gaining any performance benefit from having another six cores to play with, the common case is to just give each running application one core in it’s entirety. Your email is using one core, your web browser another. This helps with multi-tasking, but it is does nothing for most users who have a handful of applications running at once.

However, if Apple can abstract away, or otherwise solve the delegation problem, more applications will play well in a multi-core environment, actually getting faster at their tasks. And that means multi-core chips are of actual value to your email and web surfing mother.

And as the price of those quad-octo-core chips comes down, we’ll start seeing them creep into cheaper machines. And user’s will actually notice the difference.

Trust me, it’s exciting stuff.

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Places American’s can’t, but should, go. I’ve wanted to visit Iran for the last two years, and the description of the process is so abbreviated, it’s comical:

Visas are hard to come by, as Americans wishing to travel to the theocratic state must have a sponsoring Iranian travel company that first gets approval with the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This hurdle makes independent travel essentially impossible, and the wait for a visa can take months.

What sticks out most is that three of the places are off limits less-so because of real restrictions, and more so because any American would most likely either be kidnapped or murdered.

No mention on how Canadians would fare.

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Seems this very well done interface by Pentagram for Wells Fargo’s ATMs was done in WPF:

Expression Interactive Designer and its Visual Studio counterpart increase collaboration between design and development so the process is not only faster, but also less expensive.

I’d love to sit down with those developers and get their honest opinion on the WPF/XAML workflow. I know what you say for case studies, and I’m betting Microsoft threw some cash at Wells Fargo to subsidize the project (I hear they do that), but maybe I walked away from WPF with a completely different take on the technology than others.

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My three part (well, one part divided into three part) series on XAML is up on the Kizmo blog. Part I, Part II, Part 3.

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Could Pi be wrong?

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Seems fewer and fewer developers are jumping aboard the Vista development bandwagon:

“You can’t write an enterprise app like a demo. It’d be all soft and weak under the hood,” he said. “We’d never put all that stuff in because it couldn’t support 100 concurrent users.”

The article goes back and forth on the “it’s too soon to tell” and “it’s doomed! Doomed I tells ya!” tip. Personally, I’m sticking to the latter.

WPF/XAML remains less-than great technology. The amount of work needed to make it great is high, and in the mean time more and more developers are migrating business applications (Microsoft’s development bread-and-butter) to web applications. Without serious improvements in the developer tools and the framework itself, it’s doomed to die a slow death.

Now if Apple would just get off their ass and bring back the YellowBox…

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Seems the Sci-Fi Network, whose existence comforts me but whose programming induces seizures, has broadened their definition of science-fiction to attract a larger audience. Here’s the key bit:

“It’s not just aliens, spaceships and the future,” said Dave Howe, who was promoted to president of Sci Fi from general manager in January. “It’s about asking that simple question, ‘What if?’”

I’m sorry, but aside from non-fiction, what types of fiction don’t fall under the broad vision of some one thinking “What if?”. If the question “What if a voice asked you to build a baseball field?” can be considered science-fiction, than why not “What if six friends hung-out at a coffee shop instead of in their apartments like normal people?”

Most folks don’t watch the Sci-Fi channel because the vast majority of content on it was, or is, bad. There is nothing audience limiting about the genre itself. For fuck’s sake some of the most successful films in the last decade were very strictly science-fiction. Replaying Field of Dreams is going to attract a larger audience not just because it appeals to more people, but because it’s a better film than Giant Mantis Fights Marines, Again.

There are few things more ridiculous than creatively-bankrupt networks attempting to “expand their audience” by replaying popular shit outside of their niche. Just change your name to TNT and get the fuck on with it.

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Takeshi Miyakawma has designed a brilliant chest of draws based on fractal ratios.

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Brendan O’Neill tears into the celebrity culture of adopting Africa as a personal glory quest:

There is something creepily colonialist in Madonna’s attitude to Africa. First we had the White Man’s Burden -– now we have the White Madonna’s Burden. More and more celebrities are treating Africa as a wide-eyed child that needs a Hollywood hug -– or as a wicked devil that needs a Hollywood hammering.

I agree that it’s eerie, and often feels more than slightly ego-driven when celebrities go on relations parades to bring attention to Africa’s numerous plights. But I guess I’m OK with douche-baggery if it does some good.

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What I learned in one week with Google’s AppEngine:

Working in AppEngine was great in some ways, and limiting in others. On the upside, uploading an app has never been easier; you type a command on your development machine, a new version is deployed, and an admin console allows you to roll back to previous versions if you broke something.

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A letter by Albert Einstein on God fetched $404,000 at auction. The letter is a shot across the bow to any one who ever claims Einstein believed in God:

Einstein consistently characterized the idea of a personal God who answers prayers as naive, and life after death as wishful thinking. But his continual references to God … has led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.

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Aimee and Jeff Harris are donating all of their possessions to charity and becoming organic homesteaders in Vermont. The Times frames this as part of the larger movement towards simplicity:

“The idea in the movement was ‘everything you own owns you,’ ” said Dr. Grigsby, who sees roots of the philosophy in the lives of the Puritans.

I’m all for simplicity, but it seems this movement is more egotistical than productive, and that the extremes of it are filled with the same crazies you find in other feel-good movements. The more you read the article, the more red flags about the Harris’ you find:

[Aimee Harris] said they had no tolerance for idleness or drugs. “Any state that can be induced by drugs, the mind and body are already capable of,” she said.

Clearly she needs a better dealer.

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Philippe Sands, Professor of International Law at University College London and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Colon Powell have a lively discussion regarding the Bush administration’s torture policy. It’s long, but oh so very good.

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Oh, hell fucking yeah:

GridFox is a Firefox extension that overlays a grid on any website. If you can open it in Firefox, you can put a grid on top of it. It’s easy to customize, allowing you to create the exact grid you designed your layout around.

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Grand Theft Auto, already an addictive and distracting presence in my house, contains not only hours of relentless violence, humor and countless foreign accents, but a novel and lucrative mechanism for selling music:

It’s been well established how TV shows, ads and videogames are growing areas of music discovery and promotion. But until “GTA IV,” there’s been no construct that allows for the immediate identification and purchase of those songs from videogames. “GTA IV” has added that “buy” button, and record labels welcome the innovation.

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Chef Grant Achatz, owner of the remarkable Alinea in Chicago, was diagnosed with tongue cancer last year. He’s in remission and slowly regaining his palette. The exchange of Achatz learning on his sous-chefs is bittersweet:

“How’s it taste?” Achatz asked the three chefs.

“Not there yet, Chef,” one said.

Achatz put his nose deep in the bowl. “More drops,” he said. He stood back again, his concentration intense.

One sous-chef added more lavender, while another took out a spoon and swiped a bit off the top of the mixture.

“Do you taste it yet?” Achatz asked him. He danced around his staff.

“Not really,” one answered.

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BusinessWeek looks inside eBay’s quest for Craigslist:

The following month, Buckmaster sent an e-mail to Whitman, who retired as CEO on Mar. 31, saying that Craigslist was “no longer comfortable having eBay as a shareholder,” and wanted to either repurchase eBay’s shares or have eBay sell them off. That’s when Whitman said eBay wanted to buy the rest of Craigslist, making it clear eBay had no intention of selling its shares.

The game is afoot.

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How to properly cook bacon in a pan. Also, how to properly dice an onion, a topic which has caused many battles between me and my special-lady friend.

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SkinnyCorp used to, or may still have, a welcome mat which read:

You wish you worked here.

One of their lucky-bastard employees Joe built a 12x12 mini-ramp in his office. You’re thinking that the mat was right, aren’t you?

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A VI implementation written entirely in JavaScript. Impressive.

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Megan McArdle has a fantastic bit about the previously mentioned uselessness of Clinton’s “elitist-angering” gas-tax holiday:

Like about a zillion economists and most other people who were not whacked upside the head with a stupid stick, I think it’s worse-than-useless pandering. There’s not so much a debate as a bunch of economists saying “this is bad policy” and two campaigns sticking their fingers in their ears, saying “lalalalalalalalalal I can’t HEAR you!”

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Smashing Magazine celebrates pixel art.

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Everyone knows some douche-monkey who exaggerates the truth, but a new study says perhaps it’s not quite lying. It might be a form of self-improvement:

“Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”

Ladies and gentleman, I would like to announce that I am a billionaire.

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Author James Kunstler, he of peak oil fame, Y2K fear-mongering and an utterly myopic rant at TED, makes an odd point in this BusinessWeek article that the end of cheap oil will destroy suburbia and Wal-Mart:

Our gigantic metroplex cities will prove to be inconsistent with the energy diet of our future. I think our smaller cities and towns will be reactivated. We are going to be a far less affluent society.

Well hello Ms. Negative Nancy. Ignoring the fact Kunstler has yet to be right about anything at all, and the fact he’s mostly an icon for urban-leftie-re-res who see suburbs as some form of plague, Kunstler might have a point if he didn’t take it too far. First, gas is still relatively cheap in the US. Second, our last big oil scare, back in the 1970s, didn’t seem to have any effect on suburban sprawl. Obviously, high fuel costs are going to cause shifts in the way we live, but there are plenty of more-likely scenarios than Wal-Mart closing down and mankind moving to centralized, small towns.

Like, oh, an increase in telecommuting, better mass transit, and a magic genie that creates oil from the tears of suburban emos.

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Not sure where I stand on this, but it’s obvious that the ethics behind attorney-client privilege occasionally conflicts with general morals:

The obligation to keep a client’s secrets is so important, they say, that it survives death and may not be violated even to cure a grave injustice — for example, the imprisonment for 26 years of another man, in Illinois, who was freed just last month.

Alright. Given. The attorney-client privilege is so fundamental to our legal system that waiving it has to be stigmatized. But there’s a weird logic here:

“I prefer to draw the line at the life-and-death situation,” said Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra. “That situation is sufficiently rare that is doesn’t present a systemic threat. If that is extended to incarceration in general, it would end the sense of security clients have in speaking candidly with their lawyers.”

Incarceration is, in many ways, a life-and-death situation. And I don’t mean the violent nature of prison. When in prison, your entire livelihood and ability to actively pursue life is hindered to such a great extent that it should probably quality as a life-and-death situation. If a lawyer has privileged knowledge that can save a life, including from incarceration, exceptions should be allowed at the lawyer’s discretion.

Read the full article to get a sense of the issue with some perspective from the different sides.

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A clever advert for some type of paper-holding device that’s been done before, but remains pretty great to watch. (via Textism)

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Apparently the best way to seal the deal isn’t through empathy, but by thinking about the deal through the other person’s perspective.

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A nice run-down of the differences between Obama and Clinton’s approach to the economy.

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A list of the 100 best comic series, or multiple issue runs within a series, according to the Comics Should Be Good community. Not a bad list.

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